When Nigel met the Pope
Nigel Farage met the late Pope Francis with half a dozen other party leaders at a sitting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014 when he was Ukip leader. 'They were all terribly excited, because they imagined the Pope was going to be very pro-EU,' he told me on GB News. 'And they were very annoyed because the Pope spent longer talking to me, than he spent talking to anybody. And we had a really quite a good laugh and exchange of views. He then got up and gave a speech in the Parliament where he said: 'Why do you move every month? Why have you got all these big buildings? Why do you all pay yourself so much money?' It was wonderful.'
Always look on the bright side of life
Sir Michael Palin is just back from Venezuela, and has a new book coming out on his travels there. He recalled this week an earlier visit to the South American country when he and a camera crew were detained for hours by armed officers. 'They had automatic weapons and black outfits and they looked very, very nasty indeed,' he told the Camden New Journal. Eventually accompanied to a nearby restaurant by their guards, the mood lightened considerably when they looked him up on YouTube. 'Then they found Monty Python and we knew we were going to be safe,' he cheerfully adds. 'At the end we all had photos taken together.'
Taking the biscuit
Sad news reaches me about the Bath Oliver, a biscuit invented by 18th century Bath physician William Oliver to treat gout. Production was suspended during the Covid pandemic but brought back after protests led by Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. However, Bath Oliver maker Pladis has now quietly axed the biscuit. A spokesman tells me: 'While we know for some people this was a much-loved biscuit, [but] we took the decision to focus our efforts on our other savoury crackers and foods.' A disappointed Rees-Mogg tells me: 'There is no finer biscuit with which to eat Somerset cheddar cheese. This is an act of cultural vandalism by one of those silly companies with a silly name.'
Healey's cowboy
Visitors to John Healey's office in the Ministry of Defence should look out for a glitzy piece of Americana on his desk. Where else would the Defence Secretary display a solid bronze cowboy statue given to him by Pete Hegseth, his US counterpart, last month, according to Government's disclosures. It had better have pride of place like the bust of Churchill in Donald Trump's Oval Office.
No satisfaction, but I try
Chris Jagger has been remembering how his elder brother Mick sent him an early copy of the Rolling Stones hit Satisfaction which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. 'Keith Richards had woken up in the night, reached for a trusty acoustic guitar and phrased the riff into a cassette recorder, and then returned to the Land of Nod,' he says in today's Oldie magazine. 'In the morning, or probably afternoon, he came to and saw the cassette tape was at the end of the spool. So he rewound it and, to his surprise, the riff was on there, followed by 40 minutes of snoring. As Allen Ginsberg once said: 'Be a good secretary to your own consciousness'.'
Crying fit
'Royal town crier' Tony Appleton – who has met Elizabeth Taylor, Mohammed Ali and Margaret Thatcher and often announces royal births outside St Mary's Hospital in London – heralded St George's Day at a special reception in Speaker's House in the House of Commons this week. He was dressed in his red uniform, which weighs over a stone, tricorn hat and ostrich feathers. The 89-year-old told me he stays fit by swimming 50 lengths a day in his local pool as well as pedalling 30 minutes a day on an exercise bicycle. He recently lost a stone and a half following a Slimming World diet by giving up cake and biscuits. Who needs Ozempic?
Jeremy's tattoo
BBC presenter Jeremy Vine now has a tattoo, aged 60. He says: 'My daughter Anna wanted a tattoo for her 18th birthday from the Smiths song Still Ill. So she's got the words, 'For there are brighter sides to life' on her arm. On mine, is the other half of the lyric 'And I should know, because I've seen them.' Vine tells me he is not planning any more. I can remember over a decade ago when David Dimbleby, then 75, had a scorpion inked on his shoulder. How old is too old to get a 'debut' tattoo?
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NBC News
2 hours ago
- NBC News
Spanish-language misinformation on Los Angeles protests pushes a familiar theme
A surge of false or misleading posts, photographs and videos about the Los Angeles protests have been circulating on social media, with many of those shared among Latinos — mostly in Spanish — tying the protesters to socialist or communist governments. One post on X with over 600,000 views claims that in the U.S., immigration protest groups have links to 'the Venezuelan mafia,' the Communist Party of Cuba, and the Morena Party, the left-wing ruling party of Mexico. But the post doesn't specify any groups and doesn't give evidence of this. The narrative echoes similar falsehoods that circulated during the 2020 George Floyd protests and the 2024 pro-Palestinian student protests on university campuses. Parts of Los Angeles and other cities across the country have seen protests against immigration raids as President Donald Trump's administration enforces a hard-line immigration policy. Dramatic scenes where cars, including Waymo taxis, were set on fire and protesters confronted law enforcement by throwing objects at them have filled social media feeds. While some far-left groups have encouraged and even glorified violence in the protests, the onslaught of posts, mostly in Spanish, appears to be an attempt to link protests against immigrant raids to leftist Latin American governments, and the posts show support for President Donald Trump and his policies. 'Though there is always inaccurate information swirling around, there has certainly been a spike since the Los Angeles protests took off,' said Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, president of We Are Más, which focuses on social impact consulting. 'In the past we would find false or inaccurate information more hidden in platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp. Now it's more in the open and more easily found on social media and online publications.' The falsehoods revive prior conspiracies that the protests are a planned provocation from leftist governments and not a spontaneous response to the immigration raids. On his platform, Truth Social, Trump has baselessly claimed protesters are 'Paid Insurrectionists!' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have been targets of some of the misinformation that seeks to link them to communism. A fake picture of Bass with Cuba's late leader Fidel Castro, with his arm around her has circulated on social media. The original picture showed Castro with the late activist and former South African President Nelson Mandela. Bass does have some connections to Cuba; she traveled to the country with the Venceremos Brigade in the 1970s to do volunteer construction work and later went there as a member of Congress. She received criticism in 2020 for calling Castro's death ' a great loss, ' but the fake picture is a step further to link her directly with Fidel Castro. 'What we're seeing in Spanish is different from what we're seeing in English,' said Pérez-Verdía. In Spanish, she added, the false information is mainly focused on elected officials, like Newsom and Bass. 'They talk about the extreme left, communism — actors, whether domestic or foreign, are changing the messaging based on the community they are targeting,' said Pérez-Verdía. In some cases, false information has made its way to the federal government. Some conservative and pro-Russian social media accounts have circulated a video of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum from before the protests, claiming she encouraged them, according to Newsguard, a fact-checking website. The move was 'portrayed as foreign interference in domestic U.S. politics,' Newsguard reported. During an oval office briefing Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Sheinbaum of encouraging 'violent protests.' Sheinbaum responded on X, saying it's 'absolutely false' and included a video of herself from the day before saying she does not agree with violent actions as a form of protest. She also accused the opposition party of falsely saying she incited the protests. In some cases, videos and photos that include a hammer and sickle, are taken out of context to make it seem the protests are a communist movement. One post with tens of thousands of views claims that the protests are 'URBAN COMMUNIST TERRORISM.' One Spanish-language post from an account with over 1 million followers glorifies violence against 'progressive anti-ICE protestors.' Situations like these create fertile ground for disinformation to spread. Fake accounts in Spanish are more prevalent than they are in English, according to Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University and co-director of its Media Forensic Hub. Social media platforms are more likely to identify and shut down accounts in English than in other languages. Linvill said that another reason accounts in Spanish are more common than in English is that the use of marketing companies utilizing fake accounts — on behalf of political organizations or politicians — has spiked in the last few years. The spread of false information 'is absolutely having an effect on driving partisanship, conspiratorial thinking, distrust for expertise and the lack of a sort of shared reality,' said Linvill. 'A shared reality is important for us to build compromise and govern nations together. And I think it is absolutely having an effect on that.' 'The degree to which motivated actors [bad actors], are responsible, versus the fundamental nature of social media to create a giant game of telephone that virtually generates the spread of false information, it's hard to say,' Linvill said.
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Rachel Reeves has bet all our money on Wes Streeting saving the NHS
The thinking behind Rachel Reeves's spending plans for the next three years was revealed in her statement on Wednesday. It is crude and probably correct. Of the government's three priorities, there is only one that ministers can control so she will throw money at that one. The voters care about the cost of living, immigration and the NHS. There is not much the governmen t can do about the first. It has to talk about growth and hope for the best. We are at the mercy of Donald Trump, various wars and the bond markets. Nor do ministers think, in their heart of hearts, that there is much they can do about the Channel crossings. They have to talk about falling legal immigration, a trend they inherited from the Conservatives, while getting cross with the French for not doing enough to stop the small boats – but not so cross that the gendarmes shrug and fold their arms. That leaves the NHS. The chancellor has put all her chips on the blue and white oblong on the casino table. The health service received the most generous settlement on Wednesday, planned to grow by three per cent more than inflation over this parliament. There are those – and Nigel Farage is one of them – who will mutter 'bottomless pit' and 'good money after bad'. Those of us who are a bit more sophisticated will mention the NHS productivity crisis. Before the spending review, for example, I pointed to figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing huge increases in the numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS over the past five years, and small increases in the number of patients seen. But I also cited evidence that NHS productivity was improving after the one-off shock of the pandemic and now there is more hopeful news to share. Reports are beginning to emerge about what is in the 10-year plan for the NHS to be published by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, next month. It sounds like a good and ambitious plan to shift incentives so that patients are kept out of hospitals and needless in-person appointments are abolished. Speaking to The Times, Streeting said: 'Much of what's done in a hospital today will be done on the high street, over the phone, or through the app in a decade's time.' It might seem a bit slow. He has been in government for nearly a year and is only now coming up with a plan? Government is slow – Keir Starmer has taken to asking repeatedly, 'Why not today?' – but it is important to get big changes right, and Streeting has thrown himself at a lot of the less visible work in his first 11 months, including abolishing the NHS England bureaucracy and taking the NHS back under the direct control of his department. He has learned the lessons from the last time Labour saved the NHS under Tony Blair, including bringing back some of the key people who did it: Alan Milburn, Blair's health secretary, and Michael Barber, the head of his delivery unit. The blueprint is all there in a new book, The Art of Delivery by Michelle Clement, my colleague at King's College London. It is based on Barber's diaries and is the fullest account of how the public services were turned around in Blair's second term as prime minister. The book makes clear what ought to be obvious, which is that it takes time for the combination of more money and reform to start to change measurable outputs, and even longer before the general public notices an improvement. Nor is improvement a steady upward gradient, because there are policy mistakes and personality clashes along the way. One of Barber's greatest strengths was his ability to manage relationships put under strain by politicians' impatience for delivery. When one permanent secretary ranted at him for giving his department a traffic-light rating in a note to Blair without consulting him, Barber said: 'This has always happened. I'm just telling you.' Now it is happening again. The good civil servants and NHS managers will realise that it helps them to have objective performance indicators and stretching targets if the whole service is starting to move in the right direction. Barber had to persevere for two years before the indicators started to shift, but in the NHS the momentum of change gathered pace thereafter. By 2004, Barber told the cabinet that an episode of EastEnders showed Ian Beale complaining that 'people spend at least five hours in A&E', to which Jane, his wife, responded, 'It's a lot better nowadays.' Barber began to talk confidently about how the changes in just three years were becoming 'irreversible' – a claim that was mocked by the parsimony and incompetence of the Tory years, which managed to reverse the Labour gains eventually. The point is that the NHS can be changed in a single parliament. The challenges are different now, and so are the technologies. But the principles are the same: more money accompanied by devolution of power to successful managers and aligning staff incentives with the interests of patients. Time is already running out for this government, and the stakes are high. Most cabinet ministers understand that. One of them was quoted anonymously by The Times today. If it wasn't Streeting himself, it was someone who thinks just like him: 'The truth is there are a lot of people whose lives have been shit for a long time. They rolled the dice with Brexit, they rolled the dice with Boris and then they rolled the dice again with us. They need to see results otherwise they will roll the dice again with Reform.' Time is running out, but Streeting is one of the few cabinet ministers to have made good use of it so far.
The Herald Scotland
3 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
Briton stranded in Jerusalem during Iran attacks says city ‘like a ghost town'
But what was meant to be a six-day trip turned into a crisis when air raid sirens woke him in the early hours of Friday when his flight home was cancelled following Israeli strikes on Iran and a barrage of retaliatory missiles. 'It feels very eerie, very strange – like a ghost town,' the grandfather-of-four said. 'Before, it was a hive of activity – cars everywhere, everyone having a good time. 'Now everything is shut down, just a few old people shuffling about. 'It feels a lot like the Covid lockdowns.' The retired accountant, who travelled with his Hungarian friend Miki Mogyorossy, 49, from London, said the pair were enjoying the warm weather and had visited key religious sites including the Sea of Galilee and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Projectiles break up in the night sky over Jerusalem during an Iranian missile attack on Friday (Mahmoud Illean/AP) 'We were only supposed to be here six days to see the sights,' Mr Eden said. 'At the time when I booked it there was no hint at all that this was going to start. 'The conflict with Iran has been on the table for 20 years – if you worry about it all the time you would never come here.' But in the early hours of Friday, he was jolted awake by an emergency alert – written in Hebrew – on his phone. 'I didn't understand any of it, but once we spoke to some Israelis they told us it was a warning,' he said. 'The sirens were going off outside – we all rushed out of our rooms but were quickly told to get back to bed. 'We gathered in the stairwell because there was no basement and stayed there for 10 or 15 minutes. 'Then we had another notification saying we could go back to bed.' A phone alert from Israel's home front command, warning of incoming rocket and missile fire (Handout/PA) By the morning, he said, 'everything was shut down – shops and offices all closed, restaurants all closed'. Mr Eden and Mr Mogyorossy managed to find one restaurant open after scouring the city. But as they were walking back to their hotel they saw a barrage of missiles coming across the sky. 'I was standing by a wall – the best place I could find – with a bit of an overhang. 'If any of those missiles had landed, there would have been a huge explosion.' A second phone alert from Israel's home front command, this time in English, warned of incoming rocket and missile fire. The notification gave just 90 seconds for the pair to reach shelter. He said he did not believe any of the strikes landed in Jerusalem, but described the sky lighting up with interceptors from the Iron Dome defence system. Mr Eden was visiting religious sites in Jerusalem (Ohad Zwigenberg/AP) Footage taken by Mr Eden shows Iron Dome rockets taking out Iranian missiles overhead. 'I was shocked by the amount of missiles going over,' he said. 'Most people were in safe spaces. I didn't hear any explosions, just a lot of banging from the Iron Dome missiles.' Despite the intensity of the situation, Mr Eden said he remained relatively calm – but fears he will run out of medication. 'At my age I have to take medication and I only have two weeks' supply,' he said. 'Now my flight's been cancelled. At any time there could be another strike.' Mr Eden has been in contact with the British embassy but said he felt let down by the response. 'I've spoken to the Foreign Office – I've texted the embassy, given them my details,' he said. 'There is that sort of feeling that we've been abandoned – why has nobody rang me? 'I would like people to know I'm here. Just say 'we're on the case – give us three to five days, we'll come back'. If that was given, it would be good.' He added: 'The nervous energy takes its toll on you. I was enjoying myself, but now I want to go home.' 'A friend said to me, 'You should have listened to me – why did you go?' But this threat's been around for 20 years.' Despite the shutdown – he has still managed to find a restaurant that is serving a pint of Guinness. 'Somehow I've managed to find a pint of Guinness which I didn't think would be so easy,' he said. 'So it's not all that bad.'
