Personally, it has been a challenging year with my lovely rescue black Labrador, Norm, nearly crippling me. As I contemplated the importance of quadriceps being attached to kneecaps during four months of immobility and ongoing physio eight months later, it has at least allowed me to put some things in perspective…

Meet Norm; he would say it’s a dog’s life…

The terrible backdrop of events in the Middle East, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the potential resurrection of Trump (it won’t happen by the way but more of that next year…) make you despair about the drivers of human nature. So, as we relax into the festive season, I have reminded myself of some positive news with a little help from http://www.positive.news. It is worth a read on dark days.

2023 saw some major breakthroughs in health. mRNA technology, crucial in combatting Covid, is now driving advances in treatment for a host of illnesses, including eradicating certain types of cancer. 3D printing and the power of AI will hugely speed up drug discoveries with development times falling from decades to just c 3 years. There is now a clear pathway for ending Aids transmission by 2030, and the approval of a new malaria drug could save thousands of lives annually, many of them children. Finally, there is now real optimism for a new generation of treatments for Alzheimer’s.

On climate change, each COP gathering shows some teeth in combatting global warming, this year even when held in the oil rich United Arab Emirates. An explicit statement about transitioning away from fossil fuels was agreed, and climate reparations became a reality with the launch of a loss and damage fund. Even China’s emissions are forecast to start falling in 2024. Nobody benefits from climate change, even the most competitive of global superpowers.

In Brazil, there has been a huge turnaround in reducing deforestation now the vile President Bolsonaro has gone, and whilst the list of endangered species continued to grow, several species stepped back from extinction. The golden lion tamarin in Brazil, the scimitar-horned oryx in Chad, tigers on the rise in India and Nepal, golden eagles soaring in Scotland and blue whales returning to the waters off Seychelles. Finally, under the auspices of the UN, after 20 years of negotiation, 200 nations signed a legally binding agreement in September to protect 30% of oceans outside national boundaries.

Lastly on basic human rights, as some parts of the world go crazy, notably Russia, barriers were broken down to same-sex partnerships in Nepal, Latvia, Peru and South Korea. More work needed in Africa though…

So, 2023 was not all bad and let’s hope that continues into 2024 with three quarters of the democratic world facing elections. Norm and I will be watching events closely with predictions shared in January. Obviously, the correct ones will come from me and the bad calls from Norm. It’s a dog’s life…

Merry Christmas!

Not a good week for the government. On Monday came the reshuffle. Sunak made the best of a bad job. Bringing back Cameron was a genius if for no other reason it displaced news that he had fired the vile Suella Braverman. Not only had the former Home Secretary disgraced her office, seemingly having no regard for her responsibilities, but she was actually useless in achieving anything. For Sunak, not a great moment. If you sup with the devil, you have to accept the consequences…

Cameron brought back as Foreign Secretary; a bold move but the jury’s out…

The overall switch to moderate conservatism is welcome but it is too little and too late. As Matthew Parris so shrewdly observed in The Times: ‘…in yet another stand-off with yet another lunatic on the party’s right, there’s no accommodating these people. They will come for you. In the end, they will always come for you.’ Braverman’s resignation letter so proves this point. The damage has been done.

As for Cameron, he arrives with baggage. Clearly a heavy weight but success in foreign affairs from his time as PM was distinctly patchy (Libya?). You can subsequently add the Greensill affair. More importantly, a back to the future moment hardly aligns with the earlier message of Sunak being the ‘change candidate’, admittedly always a long shot after 13 years of Tory rule.

Then we move to Rwanda. A more unpleasant policy is hard to imagine. And the fuss over the Court ruling declaring the government’s deportation policy illegal and Sunak’s response undoes any tack to the centre he tried to achieve with the reshuffle. It all feels like the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Sunak is a competent PM, but he has arrived too late to undo the damage of his predecessors and, frankly, looked hollowed out at PMQs on Wednesday. Who could blame him.

Turning to Labour, it was not a brilliant week either. 50 MPs, including eight on the front bench, defied Starmer’s line on the Middle East conflict by demanding a ceasefire from Israel. It stores up potential trouble for the future, but not now.

The voters have made their mind up. It is anyone but the Tories who have continued to self-destruct even under Sunak. A relatively minor Labour spat does not matter. It is game over for a deeply split Conservative Party, which no longer knows what it stands for except a general air of unpleasantness in their public discourse.

Politics is exhausting in the US. Election cycles are non-stop and and then there is Trump… The media are obsessed with him and it is almost as if the more an outlet is hostile to him, the more obsessed it gets. There is wall to wall coverage of Trump on CNN for example, particularly as he is currently starring in a New York courtroom production, and politics here has become a permanent psychodrama. But one senses that voters are tired of it all. Except for hard-core MAGA supporters who have captured the Republican Party, there is a hidden consensus one suspects, that whatever the dissatisfaction with Biden, Trump is unfit to be President.

Earlier in the week a New York Times poll showed Trump ahead of Biden in 5 out of 6 swing states. It got much coverage. But what got less coverage was that if Trump gets convicted, those numbers look very different.

And then there were State election results this week which were a huge victory for the Democrats predominantly driven by a desire to protect abortion rights. The Democrat governor was re-elected in Kentucky, Democrats took control of the General Assembly in Virginia which will block any reform to State abortion laws and, in Ohio, voters passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access. If the Republicans can’t win now, when can they?

Finally, to add insult to injury, ex-Trump, five largely irrelevant candidates, all in their own way, defined by Trump, debated why they should be the Republican presidential nominee. Oh dear. Except perhaps for Nikki Haley, the quality was dire. Trump has drained the Republicans of any talent.

The quality of Republican candidates plummeting under the malign influence of Trump…

Amidst all this noise, it is worth taking a reality check. Whatever voters’ views about Biden and his age, Trump is simply too toxic to be a winner. He is facing multiple legal cases and even if he became President, he can’t pardon himself from a State conviction. Incredibly a Presidency run from jail is a bizarre possibility.

It may be a rash prediction, but one feels Trump won’t even make it to being the Republican nominee (watch Nikki Haley), but if he does he will be defeated by Biden. Why America has to choose from two candidates with a combined age of 160 is a topic for another blog but sanity will prevail if that is the final choice.

After that, what the media fills their air time with in a post-Trump world is anyone’s guess.

The Covid enquiry is unfolding gruesomely. The chaos, lack of strategy, general poison between those who were meant to keep the country safe and disregard for the fate of older people in particular is shocking. But add to that a PM going AWOL in the run-up to the pandemic and then the Downing Street parties during it, and it is a shameful exposure of attitudes and behaviour at the highest levels of public administration.

A horror show at the top of government…

As this week unfolded, it actually got worse. ‘Nicknamed ‘Party Marty’ for organising a bring your own booze gathering in Downing Street, Martin Reynolds, who headed the private office of the Prime Minister, described planning for a Covid type pandemic as ‘grossly deficient’ but couldn’t explain why he didn’t chase down Johnson when he disappeared for 10 days in February, presumably to write his book on Shakespeare. Meanwhile, he appeared confused about why his future WhatsApp messages to senior colleagues were mysteriously set to disappear, failing to provide any valid explanation. Yesterday, in a display of breathtaking narcissism, we heard Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary, now turned celebrity TV wannabee, wanted a final say on who lived or died from Covid if health resources needed to be rationed.

If no crimes have been committed, we should change the law. On show so far has been a shocking dereliction of duty, incompetence, and a failure of anyone in the system to take responsibility for mistakes made. Third-rate politicians, second-rate civil servants, and no responsibility taken either by earlier senior figures such as former health ministers or chief medical officers to explain why we started this pandemic so unprepared.

Sweden, which mostly didn’t lock down has completed its Covid enquiry.

Ours will go on for years until everyone has forgotten its purpose in true British governance style.

We have yet to hear directly from Johnson, Sunak et al, but it hardly matters. You can forgive the British public for believing nobody will be held accountable. They are used to it. No one was held accountable for the crash of 2007/8, which wreaked so much havoc on the economy as a whole and disproportionately on people at the bottom of the economic pile. Mounting cynicism of the governing class in its wake partly led to Brexit.

The only silver lining of this very dark cloud is the fate of Boris Johnson. We have all met people like him. Glib, superficially charismatic, a believer that rules were to be obeyed by “little people,” not themselves, he attained a position he was never suited for. This enquiry has and will continue to finish him politically. For that reason and that reason alone, it is probably just about worth it.

This blog does not plan to write about the tragic events in the Middle East. There are far more expert voices than this one. Although, one is curious to know more about the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who is allegedly a billionaire living not in the Gaza Strip but Doha, Qatar, and why there have been no elections in the Gaza Strip since 2007.

On to three other topics of interest at least to the author:

The good – the election result in Poland

Poland’s opposition parties won enough seats in Sunday’s general election to take power from the Law and Justice (PiS) party which has ruled the country since 2015, confirmed by the National Electoral Commission on Tuesday morning. This is fantastic news. Poland was on a slippery slope to authoritarianism under the PiS, as it eroded the independence of the judiciary and the media. A record turnout of nearly 75% ensured its defeat with women, young people, City dwellers and moderates generally voting in droves. It repels the anti-EU, anti-migration, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric of the PiS. Good riddance to them.

Stunning result for Donald Tusk, likely to be Poland’s next Prime Minister

The bad – India’s Supreme Court rejects same sex marriage

Earlier this week, the Indian Supreme Court rejected the applications of 21 petitioners, including same-sex couples, trans people and associations for freedom to marry. The judges considered that they were not empowered to make such a decision and referred this responsibility to Parliament, as the government had wanted.

The hopes of the LGBTQ+ community were high, as India’s highest court had issued a landmark ruling in 2018 decriminalizing homosexuality. It is unlikely that Prime Minister Modi will initiate more liberal laws on marriage or, indeed, the rights of same-sex couples to adopt children, as he is illiberal himself and has shown hostility to any such initiatives. The judges were split on a number of issues, however, and one hopes a change to India’s laws is only a matter of time.

The ugly – the election for Speaker of the House of Representatives in the US

The position remains vacant since hard-right Republicans ousted their own Kevin McCarthy recently. In pole position to take the role is the vile, pro-Trump Jim Jordan who has tried to bully colleagues into voting for him. He has failed twice, and his prospects are fading. Why does this matter? The House is essentially frozen without a Speaker in the midst of an international crisis and an imminent government shutdown over budgets. The Speaker is also third in-line to the Presidency. One hopes moderate Republicans finally discover their voice and prevail.

That’s it for now. UK politics is somewhat becalmed by consensus on the Middle East although there are some interesting by-elections today which will give further pointers to the likely outcome of a General Election.

Despite being overshadowed by the terrible events in the Middle East, this week’s conference in Liverpool was a successful one for the Labour Party.

A few aspects stood out. The conference was packed, speeches were delivered competently without faux pas, and there was a notable if slightly nervous buzz about imminent power around the corner. Quite a contrast with a gloomy, divided Tory conference completely wrong-footed by the HS2 announcement.

Second, the quality of Labour’s front bench is starting to become evident. Politics is healthier if it is not all about the leader, and Labour is starting to look like a government in waiting. You don’t have to like them to picture Yvette Cooper, Bridget Phillipson, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting et al in Cabinet, equally if not more competent than their Tory counterparts. It is not a bad thing if the Party is more popular than its leader either. Mind you, some grate already such as the patronising, rather erratic David Lammy but you can’t have it all.

Labour positively glittered in contrast to the Tories…

Two speeches particularly stood out. First, Rachel Reeves. Her speech was excellent and certainly cements a view she is a future leader of the Labour Party in waiting. Well-delivered, just about enough new announcements but, most of all, fiscally conservative enough to reassure voters.

Second was Keir Starmer’s speech. Certainly, he was helped by a demonstrator pouring glitter over him. A common criticism that he doesn’t sparkle enough was put to rest. He dealt with the incident well and delivered a strong oration.

Both leading figures talked about eliminating waste, pursuing tax fraud, freeing planning laws to build more homes, strengthening the NHS in a way which didn’t scare the horses.

The Labour Party conference will not be remembered for much due to the backdrop of tragic international events. The difference is that the Tories would probably rather wish their conference wasn’t remembered for much either…