From Keir Starmer's position on immigration to an old non-stick pan: Edith Pritchett's week in Venn diagrams
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Telegraph
20 minutes ago
- Telegraph
We should help Gaza's children, but that doesn't mean resettling them in the UK
How do we calculate the price of momentous decisions? History and literature tells us it's often with great difficulty, and a considerable lack of foresight. At the beginning of the Victorian detective novel, The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins quotes from Robinson Crusoe, 'now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost'. This is so often the case with the decisions our political leaders make. Over two decades on, our country is still suffering the aftershocks of the disastrous wars Tony Blair entangled us in. I don't remember Blair warning that his liberal interventionist misadventures would lead to hotels being taken over by migrants decades later. He simply didn't think through the consequences of his actions. In The Moonstone, bemused Victorians find marauding men searching to recover an Indian gem that had been stolen decades earlier and brought to the UK in a colonial escapade. The separateness of the Empire is momentarily shattered, its derring-do suddenly rendered altogether darker, and threatening to life back home. There's a warning in this to our leaders, who fail to understand the implications of their decisions abroad on the country back home. Indeed, as the Government rushes to announce an unprecedented scheme to fly hundreds of children from Gaza to the UK for treatment, it seems we are heading again to repeat the mistakes of the past. Like all of us, but particularly as a father of three daughters, I am horrified by the suffering of the children in Gaza. They are pawns of Hamas's human shield strategy, the victims of an extremist ideology, trapped in a living hell of endless death, destruction and hunger. Our instincts urges us to help – and we should. But should that help take the form of a new immigration scheme for hundreds of Gazans to come to the UK? Absolutely not. Actions have consequences, even if not always immediately apparent. But as in The Moonstone, they catch up with you in the end. Keir Starmer is grandstanding, writing a blank cheque that other people will have to pay. Experience tells us the Gazan children and their families will claim asylum when they arrive and almost certainly stay for the rest of their lives. Do you really think Yvette Cooper will send them back to Gaza? Once they have official status, they will then bring more family members under schemes which are, naturally, underpinned by rights derived from the ECHR. And it won't be one or two family members: a court just accepted that an Afghan could bring 22 relatives with them to the UK, twisting the definition of family beyond recognition. It means we're almost certainly looking at several thousand Gazans arriving permanently – far beyond 300 staying temporarily as the Government has advertised. Would that be sensible? The position of Gaza's Arab neighbours tells us everything we need to know. On a ministerial trip just weeks before October 7, the Egyptian Defence Minister explained to me their herculean efforts to root out radical Islamists from the Sinai. His message was that under no circumstances would Egypt risk taking in people from Gaza, because 'they are the most radicalised population on earth.' Privately, the same would be said by many in the Jordanian government, also from bitter experience dating to Black September and before. Likewise with the Saudis, who notably have refused to put their own boots on the ground in Gaza. The truth is that Gaza's Arab neighbours are prepared to offer humanitarian support, but consider the idea of inviting Gazans into the country at any scale a risk only a fool would take. And what of the experience of other well-meaning European countries? In 1992 Denmark gave refuge to a group of 321 stateless Palestinians from Lebanon. By 2019, 64 per cent of those who had obtained citizenship had also obtained criminal records. 71 had been in jail. 34 per cent of their children, though still very young, had obtained criminal records. A large proportion were on benefits. Layered on top of this is the bigger risk of Islamist extremism, after decades of Hamas and UNRWA-funded schools pouring hatred into the minds of younger Gazans. It's hard to know the true feelings of Gazans towards this barbaric death cult, but surveys of the broader Palestinian population suggest that a majority support Hamas's activities. Our government is already failing abysmally in its response to Islamist extremism, anti-Semitism and the flagrantly anti-British sentiment we've seen on our streets – it would be reckless to risk making it worse. So, when the first proposal to bring Gazans to this country was put to then Home Secretary Suella Braverman and I in the autumn of 2023, we rejected it flat out. And when MPs asked us to waive biometric security checks to expedite the flight of some Gazans with a pre-existing right to enter the UK, we refused. Those demands are now back. To cave to the naive demands of backbench Labour MPs shows that Starmer is willing to put the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party over the safety of the British people. Of course we should help Gazan children – demanding more aid and medical supplies reach them immediately. But there are countless people in dire positions around the world. What of the Christians being persecuted in Syria, that we don't hear a peep from Lammy about?
Reuters
20 minutes ago
- Reuters
US, EU, and Ukrainian officials to meet in UK on Saturday ahead of Trump-Putin meeting
LONDON, Aug 9 (Reuters) - British foreign minister David Lammy and U.S. Vice President JD Vance will meet Ukrainian and European allies in Britain on Saturday to discuss President Donald Trump's push for peace in Ukraine, a spokesperson for Downing Street said. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ahead of the security meeting, the spokesperson said. Starmer and Zelenskyy discussed Trump's proposals for ending the war in Ukraine ahead of talks with his Russian counterpart on August 15 in Alaska. "The Prime Minister spoke to President Zelenskyy of Ukraine this morning. They looked ahead to the meeting of National Security Advisers from Europe, Ukraine and the United States taking place today, hosted by the UK Foreign Secretary and US Vice President," the spokesperson said. "They agreed this would be a vital forum to discuss progress towards securing a just and lasting peace."
The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘She's the one that matters': the growing influence of Melania on Donald Trump
When Melania Trump arrives in Britain for her husband's second state visit next month, it will not just be the photographic pack straining every lens for clues as to her opaque mood or signs of froideur in their marriage. It will also be British officials. Six months into his second term as US president, a period in which Donald Trump has pirouetted on just about every big international issue, mandarins in Whitehall have realised they need to focus less time on trying to tame him, and more on looking at his wife. Trump's recent golfing visit to the UK underlined the feeling that the first lady is the single biggest influence on her husband – and intend to adapt accordingly. They believe Melania was behind Trump's recent volte-face declaring Palestinians in Gaza were starving; and the president acknowledged it was his wife who had said Vladimir Putin may not have been sincere about wanting a peace deal in Ukraine. It is not just what the president says about the first lady in public, but the deferential reference to her views in private, according to sources who have spoken to the Guardian. One said: 'Starmer has earned Trump's respect and will tell him in the right way if he disagrees. But she is the one that matters.' For Whitehall officials to reach such a conclusion about Melania's influence requires quite a reassessment. The first lady has made a virtue of refusing to divulge the secrets of her political partnership. The more he talks, the less she tends to say. Her banality-packed, bestselling memoir, Melania, revealed, according to one critic, 'an extremely superficial, politically disengaged human being, the last kind of person who you would think of as a political wife'. Moreover, the first lady often vanishes from view, mainly to New York to be closer to her son. The disclosure in late May that she may have spent less than a fortnight in the White House since her husband's second inauguration did not reveal a woman desperate to be 'in the room where it happens'. There has been no repetition of her solo visit to Africa in 2018, a visit preceded by a reception on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in which she spoke of her pride in the work of the USAID programme tackling disease and hunger among children. USAID has now been dismantled. Earlier this year, Melania gave a glimpse of the role she now plays. In an interview with the chatshow Fox & Friends, she spoke about her life and the hardships she had endured when she first came to the US. And then she spoke of her life now. 'Maybe some people, they see me as just a wife of the president, but I'm standing on my own two feet, independent. I have my own thoughts. I have my own 'yes' and 'no'. I don't always agree [with] what my husband is saying or doing, and that's OK.' She continued: 'I give him my advice, and sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn't, and that's OK.' She clearly clashed with him over Covid and, according to her memoir, over abortion – the first lady has defended abortion rights. The bulk of her formal work has been linked to helping orphans or children at risk of online exploitation. But it has had little cut-through. In February 2025, a US poll listed Melania as the 10th emost influential person in the Trump administration behind even Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi. At the time of the poll, the now jettisoned Elon Musk was seen as the figure the president most heeded. Since that fallout, Trump says he trusts no one. All of which has made the work of diplomats, who spend their lives trying to work out who in the president's inner circle they need to cultivate, all the harder. The British ambassador Lord Mandelson, who has to track Trump's unpredictable and last-minute decision-making, has said: 'I've never been in a town or a political system that is so dominated by one individual. Usually, you're entering an ecosystem rather than the world of one personality.' A European diplomat added: 'Working out who and what influences him, and the relative value of flattery or firmness, has become every diplomat's preoccupation.' And yet the answer to reading the president, British officials have come to conclude, was under their nose. Trump himself has encouraged this thinking. They note he once described his wife as his best pollster, and in his second term he has been increasingly open that his wife affects his thinking – possibly a helpful admission for a leader trailing in the polls especially among independent women alienated by Trump's machismo deal-making and coarseness. By projecting Melania, the president gets a chance to appeal to different voters. The first lady also provides him with an excuse, if needed, to change course, as may have happened when in 2018 Melania publicly criticised as 'heartbreaking and unacceptable' the administration policy of migrant children being separated from their parents. She claimed she had been 'blindsided', a phrase that revealed an assumption she would be consulted. Children were also in her thinking on Gaza, according to Trump. He explained: 'Melania thinks it is terrible. She sees the same pictures that you see and we all see. Everybody, unless they are pretty cold-hearted or worse than that, nuts, [thinks] there's nothing you can say other than it's terrible when you see the kids.' In thinking this, the first lady was not alone: 72% of female voters, according to a YouGov/Economist poll, think there is a hunger crisis in Gaza. On 27 July, when Israel insisted starvation was not occurring in Gaza or is manufactured by Hamas propagandists, Trump then pushed back, saying the pictures could not be faked. This would have been music to the ears of the British, who have been urging the president to give the issue his attention. But the follow-through has been weak. Trump claimed the US had provided $60m (£45m) in food aid to Gaza, a claim that has been debunked in the US media. He vaguely hinted at restructuring the food centres run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund, the much-criticised replacement for the UN-administered food programme. Yet a fortnight later, despite the continuing deaths, Trump's ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, insisted on Tuesday that GHF was fundamentally working, while Fox News was given a tour of a GHF distribution centre to show food was reaching Palestinians. Trump said it was up to Israel if it wished to occupy Gaza permanently. Trump has also credited the first lady's scepticism with sharpening his partial rethink about Putin. At a meeting with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, on 15 July he said: 'I go home. I tell the first lady: 'I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.' She said: 'Oh really? Another city was just hit.'' Later the same day at another White House event, he said: 'I'd get home, I'd say: 'First lady, I had the most wonderful talk with Vladimir. I think we're finished.' And then I'll turn on the television, or she'll say to me one time: 'Wow, that's strange because they just bombed a nursing home.'' Melania's observations led him to muse: 'I don't want to say he is an assassin, but he is a tough guy, it's been proven over the years.' Asked if the first lady was an influence on his thinking, Trump said: 'Melania is very smart. She's very neutral. She's very neutral, in a sense she's sort of like me. She'd like to see people stop dying.' In saying she is neutral, and wants the killing in Ukraine to stop, Trump may be gently realigning these views with the latest version of his own. At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 28 February 2022, Melania ended a long silence on X, sending her prayers to the people of Ukraine and conspicuously not to those of Russia. In February 2022, when her husband called Putin's invasion of Ukraine 'genius', Melania tweeted: 'It is heartbreaking and horrific to see innocent people suffering. My thoughts and prayers are with the Ukrainian people. Please, if you can, donate to help them @ICRC.' In that appeal she apportioned no explicit blame for the conflict, and Trump insisted his wife had liked Putin when they had met briefly at a summit in 2017, but it is a stretch to describe Melania as neutral on Ukraine. The relatively wealthy daughter of a textile worker and a car trader, Melania, with her older sister Ines Knauss, was educated in the communist-run capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. But Slovenia in the 80s was always seen as the most liberal part of Tito's Yugoslavia, and the first lady has said she always felt more connected to Austria and Italy than to the communist bloc. If her father was a member of the Communist party, self-advancement not ideology was the motive. The assessment that Melania is important to Trump's decision-making is double-edged. It provides faint hope that the humanitarian perspective still holds some sway in the White House. But the theory is also frustrating as it is difficult to know how engaged she is. It is symptomatic of a wider problem faced by many western countries. With the US state department hollowed out by cuts, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, having decamped to the White House in a temporary posting as national security adviser, western diplomacy, traditionally structured around relations with the state department, is struggling to adapt to Trump's free-wheeling style where power is centred on the president, his instincts and informal conversations, including those with his wife. Political monitoring teams are being revamped into near 24-hour operations to try to adapt to Trump's continuous statements, often dropping policy clues into impromptu press conferences, doorsteps and on social media. It is ironic that it will be the royal family who will test the theory that Melania could become Britain's secret ally at court.
