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      No Labour wrongdoing in Kamala Harris campaign row, says ex-Tory minister

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      Labour did nothing wrong when party officials campaigned for Kamala Harris in the US election, a former Conservative minister has argued, after Downing Street faced fury from Donald Trump about the move.Robert Buckland, who has also campaigned for Harris due to his distaste for Trump, said it appeared that Labour activists who knocked on doors had volunteered and covered their own expenses, which would not be a breach of US laws on overseas involvement in elections.Trump’s campaign filed a legal complaint alleging that apparent efforts by Labour’s head of operations to organise volunteers amounted to “illegal foreign national contributions”, and hit out at what it called Keir Starmer’s “far-left” party.After Starmer said he believed the row would not affect his relationship with Trump, Labour officials insisted that the party had no role in organising or funding staff who joined US campaigning efforts, and that such volunteering was by no means unusual.The Trump legal letter, sent to the US Federal Election Commission in Washington, also complained about what it called “strategic meetings” at August’s Democratic national convention in Chicago between Harris’s team and Morgan McSweeney, now the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s communications director.Labour officials said that the pair were at the event only as observers. The party paid for McSweeney to attend, and Doyle’s costs were covered by the Progressive Policy Institute thinktank.Buckland, a former justice secretary, who stepped down as an MP at the general election, said a since deleted LinkedIn post by Labour’s head of operations offering to arrange housing for 100 current and former party officials campaigning for the Democrats in swing states was “unfortunate”.However, he told the Guardian he did not see any sign of wrongdoing. “It doesn’t look like it to me,” he said. “If these individuals are going under their own steam, paying for their own flights and doing their own thing, and their accommodation is either they’re staying with friends or they’re paying for it, there’s not a problem. But they’ve played into the Trump-Vance campaign hands, and that press release was the sort of politicking that you’re going to see this close to an election.”Starmer, speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, said such volunteering had happened at “pretty much every [US] election”. He said: “They’re doing it in their spare time, they’re doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there.”Asked if it risked jeopardising his relationship with Trump if he becomes president again, Starmer said: “No. I spent time in New York with President Trump, had dinner with him, and my purpose in doing that was to make sure that between the two of us we established a good relationship, which we did.”There was some muted criticism of the government from the Conservatives, although Oliver Dowden, the party’s deputy leader, did not raise it with Angela Rayner when she filled in for the absent Starmer at prime minister’s questions.John Lamont, the shadow Scotland secretary, told BBC Radio 4 that Labour had created a “diplomatic car crash” that risked undermining relations with Trump.Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, told GB News that the LinkedIn post seemed to show a “very clear breach of American electoral law” and he did not believe the Labour staffers had covered their own costs.Farage attended the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July. His entry in the MPs’ register of interests says the near £33,000 costs for him and a staffer were paid for by a Thai-based British businessman, Christopher Harborne. Farage listed the purpose of the trip as “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton [his constituency] on the world stage”.The former prime minister Liz Truss also attended the event, although by then she was no longer an MP.One Labour MP, Ruth Cadbury, used a holiday in September to campaign for Harris in New Hampshire, while no sitting Conservatives are known to have volunteered in the same way. Almost none have publicly endorsed Trump.Buckland said this did not surprise him, calling Trump “not a Republican”. He said: “I think most Conservatives would identify themselves with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower and George HW Bush, and even George W Bush, not this character.” More

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      Ex-Tory minister defends Labour in Trump row and says he has also campaigned for Democrats – as it happened

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      Labour is not the only party with members who have been out in the US actively campaigning to stop Donald Trump being elected. Robert Buckland, the Conservative former justice secretary, has been campaigning for Democrats in the US too.In an interview with Radio 4’s PM programme, Buckland said that Trump was “not fit for office” and that he thought the Trump campaign’s complaint about Labour was just “a bit of electioneering” rather than a serious allegation about a breach of the rules.Buckland said that he was in the US in September as part of a Havard fellowship, but while he was there he decided to visit friends in Connecticut who were standing as Democracts in various state, congressional and senate elections. “So I went out on the stump to see what it was all about and do a bit of campaigning.”Explaining why he was opposed to Trump, he said:
      I’m free to say what I like. I’m a member of the public now, and I’m not in a government …
      I feel that the record of Donald Trump in the presidency is an affront to those who believe in traditional Republicanism. His behavior around 6 January [the attack on Capitol in 2021] makes it clear to me he’s not somebody who believes in the rule of law either and is not fit for office.
      Asked about the complaint about Labour activists, Buckland said: “I do think that this is a bit of electioneering.” He said the LinkedIn message by a Labour staff encouraging people to volunteer “might have given a false impression there was an organised visit here being funded, which I don’t think is the case at all”.But Buckland did accept that the perception that there was an organised Labour operation going on was “damaging”.

      Kemi Badenoch, favourite in the Tory leadership contest, has said that she is a “net zero sceptic” and suggested that an adaption strategy might be a better solution to the climate crisis than just focusing on cutting carbon emissions. (See 3.58pm.)
      Ben Wallace, the Conservative former defence secretary, has criticised the Trinity House Agreement, the defence pact agreed with Germany. (See 5.06pm.) He posted these on social media.
      If the new UK/ German “Trinity House” agreement is to mean anything then Germany would have agreed with UK requests to send Taurus to Ukraine AND they would lift any export veto on potential Typhoon sales to Turkey – a Nato member. Otherwise it is pretty hollow 1/2

      and made up of stuff we are already doing or had started. This has more to do with “SPD is our sister party” than real military mutual benefit. It does however confirm that Kier Starmer is the UK’s own Olaf Scholz ! -2/2
      Labour is not the only party with members who have been out in the US actively campaigning to stop Donald Trump being elected. Robert Buckland, the Conservative former justice secretary, has been campaigning for Democrats in the US too.In an interview with Radio 4’s PM programme, Buckland said that Trump was “not fit for office” and that he thought the Trump campaign’s complaint about Labour was just “a bit of electioneering” rather than a serious allegation about a breach of the rules.Buckland said that he was in the US in September as part of a Havard fellowship, but while he was there he decided to visit friends in Connecticut who were standing as Democracts in various state, congressional and senate elections. “So I went out on the stump to see what it was all about and do a bit of campaigning.”Explaining why he was opposed to Trump, he said:
      I’m free to say what I like. I’m a member of the public now, and I’m not in a government …
      I feel that the record of Donald Trump in the presidency is an affront to those who believe in traditional Republicanism. His behavior around 6 January [the attack on Capitol in 2021] makes it clear to me he’s not somebody who believes in the rule of law either and is not fit for office.
      Asked about the complaint about Labour activists, Buckland said: “I do think that this is a bit of electioneering.” He said the LinkedIn message by a Labour staff encouraging people to volunteer “might have given a false impression there was an organised visit here being funded, which I don’t think is the case at all”.But Buckland did accept that the perception that there was an organised Labour operation going on was “damaging”.The UK and Germany failed to respond to the threat posed by Vladimir Putin for too long, Berlin’s defence minister said as the two countries signed a new co-operation agreement. As PA Media reports, the deal is a way of strengthening European security at a time when the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House could see US military resources diverted away from the Nato alliance.Speaking at a press conference alongside John Healey, the defence secretary, the German defence minister Boris Pistorius said the allies had failed to respond to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and were now being forced to catch up in the wake of the full-scale war in Ukraine.
      I always stress that the Baltics and Scandinavian countries, they woke up (in) 2014 to the annexation of the Crimea.
      We woke up, too: Germany, Britain, France and other countries in Europe; but what we did was we pushed the snooze button and turned around.
      All the other countries stayed awake, and they did what was necessary to do. And so we lost almost eight years and have now to speed up.
      Healey said European nations needed to take “more responsibility for the heavy lifting and the leadership within the Nato alliance”.Commenting on the deal, known as the UK-Germany Trinity House Agreement, the said:
      The Trinity House Agreement is a milestone moment in our relationship with Germany and a major strengthening of Europe’s security.
      It secures unprecedented levels of new cooperation with the German Armed Forces and industry, bringing benefits to our shared security and prosperity, protecting our shared values and boosting our defence industrial bases.
      As PA reports, under the deal, , German submarine-hunting planes will operate from RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and arms giant Rheinmetall is set to open a factory producing artillery gun barrels using British steel. Defence AI firm Helsing will also make a £350 million investment in the UK.The two countries will also collaborated on developing long-range, strike weapons that can travel further than the UK’s existing Storm Shadow missiles, and on new land-based and aerial drones.The text of the agreement is here and the joint communique is here.Kemi Badenoch has said lots of commentators “do not understand downward social mobility”.She made the comment in her interview with Nick Robinson for his Political Thinking podcast, when she was asked about her claim that she was working class when she came to the UK as a teenager and had a job in McDonald’s while she was also attending school.Badenoch was mocked for the claim when she first made it because she had a middle-class upbringing in Nigeria, where her father was a doctor and her mother a professor of physiology. But at the Tory conference she doubled down, saying that it was not working at McDonald’s that made her working class, but that because she was working class at that stage in her life she ended up doing that job. (Badenoch implied it was like a main job, and that she was so poor she had to work; another account, in a biography of Badenoch published by Lord Ashcroft, says it was a part-time job, and that Badenoch did not need to work because her food and rent were being paid for.)Badenoch told Robinson that the controversy generated by her remarks showed how some journalists did not understand downward social mobility. She explained:
      A lot of people in the commentariat classes do not understand downward social mobility, and they think that where you are is what you are and that’s that, and people don’t move between them.
      But my understanding of class as it is today is that it is different from what it was during Downton Abbey. People actually do move in between them and, given the level of migration that we’ve had into the country, the old class system doesn’t work and people like me don’t fit into it.
      How many people have you met who are doctors in their country who are driving cabs here, for example, what class are they?
      And if you are trying to shoehorn people into an outdated class system, you’re going to run into trouble.
      Describing her situation now, Badenoch, who is married to a banker, said that she would describe herself as “comfortable”, but added: “I wouldn’t say we’re rich.”Kemi Badenoch, the favourite in the Conservative leadership contest, may wait up to two years before coming up with detailed policies, it has been reported. In his Daily Mail interview with her, Jason Groves writes:
      If she wins … Mrs Badenoch plans to spend up to two years ‘renewing’ the party before coming forward with a detailed policy platform.
      In her Political Thinking podcast interview, Badenoch said she would use policy commissions to decide where the party will go next.
      I have said that we are going to set up just like David Cameron did, and just like Margaret Thatcher did, policy commissions where we’re going to pick each of these issues through. We’re going to have an internal debate within the party and then we’re going to come to a conclusion and unite behind it.
      She also said that she would not force shadow cabinet ministers to agree with her on policy from the start. She said:
      What I’m not doing is what my opponent [Robert Jenrick] has done and said, ‘I have these ideas and people are going to need to sign up to them if they’re in this, if they go into the shadow cabinet.’ I don’t think that you can get a party together that way.
      Politics is not like other businesses. It is something that requires consensus. You can’t sack the people who are there. They’re still going to be there. So you need to bring people together.
      Badenoch herself first got properly involved with the Conservative party contributing to a policy commission on globalisation and global poverty, chaired by Peter Lilley.Kemi Badenoch, the favourite in the Tory leadership contest, has repeatedly been accused of avoiding the media by her opponent, Robert Jenrick. But in the last 24 hours or so she has done two biggish interviews – with Nick Robinson, for his BBC Political Thinking podcast, and with Jason Groves, political editor of the Daily Mail.In the interviews Badenoch said that she is a “net zero sceptic” and suggested that an adaption strategy might be a better solution to the climate crisis than just focusing on cutting carbon emissions.In the write-up of his interview, Groves also said Badenoch “does not completely rule out revisiting the 2050 net target [the UK government’s legal pledge to get net carbons emissions down to zero by 2050]”, but Groves did not include a direct quote from Badenoch on this.Speaking to Robinson, Badenoch said she was a net zero sceptic, but not a climate change sceptic. She said she accepted there was a problem to be addressed, but that she was not convinced net zero was the solution.
      What I’m saying is that climate change is a serious issue that needs work. But what strategy should we pick? We could pick an adaptation strategy, that this is going to happen. How do we build lives that will work within that?
      We’ve chosen the strategy, which is to reduce carbon emissions. There is no guarantee that that will work. I want to see something, if we are going down that path, something that has other benefits. So energy security.
      Badenoch said that, for her, the question was: “Is net zero a solution or is it a slogan?” She implied she thought it was more of the latter.
      If you have a target and you can’t meet it, it’s not real. Just putting something in law doesn’t make it real.
      And she also said that her experience of growing up in Nigeria, when there were regular power cuts even though the country was energy rich, helped to explain why she was a net zero sceptic.
      I am a net zero sceptic … because I grew up somewhere where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently, despite being an oil producing country, there was often petrol scarcity. That is when a system is broken and I see us making similar decisions here. Let’s do something because it looks good, before we figured out how to do it, let’s make an announcement and I don’t want us doing that.
      I will post more lines from Badenoch’s interviews shortly.The Department for Work and Pensions has published a document explaining how it will go about drawing up a child poverty strategy. The plan will shape the work of its child poverty taskforce.According to the document, the work will focus on four themes.
      1) Increasing incomes: Examining how government and business can work together to support parents into secure employment, and support progression in the labour market, building on our plans to Make Work Pay and to Get Britain Working. This will include childcare as a key enabler of parental employment. We will consider how social security reforms could support people into work and help alleviate poverty.
      2) Reducing essential costs: Working with business and organisations to understand and tackle the key cost drivers for low-income families (such as housing, energy, food). Looking at where these costs are a barrier to education and employment (like childcare and transport), including addressing the poverty premium and where increased costs of disability exacerbates poverty.
      3) Increasing financial resilience: Working with a range of stakeholders, including financial institutions, charities, and consumer representatives to find solutions to problem debt and enabling families to build savings …
      4) Better local support, focussed especially on children’s early years: Our society, through our local institutions and our local communities, is at the heart of tackling the impacts of poverty.
      The document also gives some details of how employers, unions, thinktanks and other experts will be consulted by the taskforce over the coming months.In their legal complaint about Labour activists campaigning for the Democrats, Donald Trump’s lawyers quote newspaper reports saying Morgan McSweeney, who is now Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s communications chief, went to the Democrats’ convention to advise Kamala Harris’s team.As Steven Swinford from the Times reports, Labour says McSweeney and Doyle were not there as advisers.
      Labour denies Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and Matthew Doyle, his director of communications, advised the Harris campaign team when they attended the DNC convention in August
      They confirm that McSweeney’s costs were paid for by the Labour Party and that Doyle’s costs were met by the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democrat thinktank.
      Donald Trump’s six-page filing directly accuses them of trying to ‘exercise direction and control over elements of Harris’s campaign’, in breach of US federal law
      John Lamont, shadow Scottish secretary, told Radio 4’s the World at One that the Trump team complaint about Labour activists campaigning in the US was “a diplomatic car crash” for the government. He said:
      It’s a diplomatic car crash by this Labour government. There’s now somebody who could potentially be the next president of the United States who’s lodged an official complaint with the American authorities about the Labour party, the Labour government, and their involvement in their election …
      If Donald Trump were to win for the election in a few weeks, how on earth is the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, going to rebuild that relationship with one of the most important countries in the world, not least from a diplomatic perspective, but also from a trading perspective.
      The culture minister Chris Bryant, who was being interviewed alongside Lamont, responded:
      What a load of hyperbole and exaggeration. I think the Conservative party in opposition is going to have to learn how to not sound so shrill.
      Bryant said that there was nothing unusual about activists volunteering in foreign election campaigns. And he said in this case people were going to the America in their own time, at their own expense, without Labour funding.He said the story was “a massive fuss about nothing”. Pointing out that Liz Truss went to the Republican convention to support Donald Trump, he told Lamont the Tories were guilty of “arrant hypocrisy”.Lamont said there was no complaint about Truss going to the Republican convention, but that in this case there was a complaint about the party in government.Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has told MPs that the identities of armed police officers charged after opening fire at suspects are likely to stay secret in future unless they are convicted. Vikram Dodd has the story.Daniel Knowles, an Economist correspondent in the US, agrees with the Alastair Campbell analysis. (See 1.35pm.) He has posted these on Bluesky.
      Sorry but nobody in America gives a shit about a few Labour activists door-knocking or whatever. The Trump complaint is entirely cynical, and one of dozens of random speculative press releases I was sent yesterday. I’m not surprised British media is as ever just fucking delighted for a local angle

      The story here isn’t “is door knocking actually an illegal contribution,”, etc. The legitimate UK angle to cover is, “Donald Trump will pick massive fights with the British government over nothing if it wins him a nice headline.” Which we know, from his conduct in office

      This is the same Donald Trump who is currently doing private diplomacy with Benjamin Netanyahu and (he didn’t deny when asked by Bloomberg last week) Vladimir Putin. He also isn’t being transparent at all about who is buying & what money he getting from his random commercial licensing deals atm
      Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications chief who now co-hosts the Rest is Politics podcast, told Radio 4’s the World at One that the Trump allegations about the Labour party were just an attempt to distract attention from other campaign stories, like Trump’s former chief of staff calling him a fascist. It was a “non-story”, Campbell told the programme:
      I think it’s one of the biggest non-stories of this campaign. And I’ll tell you why. Because the one thing I will give to the Trump campaign, they are very good at divert and distract, and the media tend to fall for their diversions and distractions all the time.
      We have just had a situation where the former chief of staff, who worked with Donald Trump more than any other chief of staff, has warned the American people that if they vote for Trump, they’re electing a fascist. Now is that more or less significant?
      Is this situation more or less significant than the Russian interference that we had last time around? Is it more or less significant than the Musk millions that are being poured into this?
      What Angela Rayner said [at PMQs – see 12.17pm] is right. Since time immemorial, people on the right have gone to America to support Republican candidates. People on the left and the centre-left have gone to support Democrats. There is no evidence whatsoever of the Labour party using resources or money [to campaign for the Democrats].
      Campbell was referring to John Kelly, a former general who was Trump’s chief of staff between 2017 and 2019.Kelly made his comments in an interview with the New York Times. Asked if Trump was a fascist, Kelly told the paper:
      Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy …
      So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America …
      Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure … He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.
      Kelly also told the New York Times he had heard Trump praise Hitler. Kelly said:
      [Trump] commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’
      As Chris Stein reports on this blog’s US equivalent, the Trump campaign are dismissing Kelly’s comments.John Healey, the defence secretary, has said the Labour government is determined to have a good relationship with the next US administration, whichever party is in power.Speaking at a press conference this morning, he defended the right of activists to volunteer in the US election, and argued that having Labour people campaigning for Kamala Harris should not affect relations with a possible Donald Trump administration.Healey said:
      Any individual Labour supporters that are over in the US, being part of the Democratic election campaign, are there as individuals. They’re there at their own time. They’re there at their own expense, and if they’ve got accommodation out there that will be also provided by volunteers. This happens in every election. It’s commonplace.
      It is very different to the determination and the way the government will work with whoever the American people elect next month as their president.
      And just as the UK and the US have a special, deep relationship, and have had for decades, that’s a relationship that has withstood the political ups and downs on both sides of the Atlantic, and we’re determined to make that work in the future.
      In an interview this morning Healey suggested that the Republican legal complaint was just an election gimmick. (See 10.33am.) Asked if it was still his view that the Republicans were just “creating controversy”, Healey replied:
      This is in the middle of an election campaign. That’s the way that politics works. You’ve been around almost as long as I have. These are volunteers doing their bit, gaining a bit of experience out there, but doing so as individuals.
      It is nice to see politicians from opposing parties being nice about each other for a change, but maybe Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden were taking the bonhomie just a little too far. John Crace, who as the Guardian’s sketch writer is paid to take the mick, sounds a bit discombulated by it all.
      This PMQs between Angela Rayner and Oliver Dowden was almost tender
      And Tom Harwood from GB News was pitched into ‘get a room’ mode watching.
      This flirting is getting out of hand.
      They were set off by this exchange in particular.Dowden, a diehard monarchist (even by Conservative party standards), ended his questions sucking up to the king, but he started with the budget, and the charge that raising employers’ national insurance (something Rachel Reeves has not ruled out) would clobber small business owners. On another day, he might have made some progress with this. But Dowden is expecting to be out of the shadow cabinet by the end of next week, and Rayner’s not chancellor or PM, and somehow it felt that he was not really trying. And, even if he had been, Rayner’s opening joke about Dowden’s pushing for an early election – “if his own side hasn’t offered him a peerage, I certainly will” – was so good it would have knocked him off course anyway.Otherwise, it was all rather unremarkable. The best question came from the SNP’s Stephen Flynn. (See 12.17pm.) And the worst questions? Hard to say, but it was not just King Charles getting the sycophancy treatment, and the number of ‘Isn’t the government brilliant?’ questions asked by Labour MPs seemed a bit higher than usual. It is hard to know if that is just an impression, or whether No 10 is tightening up on message discipline under the new Morgan McSweeney regime.John Hayes (Con) says onshore windfarms are a threat to farmland in his Lincolnshire constituency. He says energy security should not compromise food security.Rayner says the government is committed to energy security.Kim Johnson (Lab) asks about a hospice threatened with closure in her constituency. Does Rayner agree they should get statutory funding, not just charity funding?Rayner says the government is aware of the importance of hospices. She promises a ministerial meeting on this.Rachel Blake (Lab) asks if Rayner agrees that the renters’ rights bill will transform opportunities for renters.Rayner does agree with that. More

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      Western leaders’ silence about Israel’s atrocities gives free rein to Netanyahu | Letters

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      Owen Jones speaks for many of us (What atrocity would Israel have to commit for our leaders to break their silence?, 3 October). Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and other western leaders have responded to Israel’s actions by repeatedly stating that they stand with Israel and its right to defend itself. They have been quick to vociferously condemn those who threaten or attack Israel, but silent on the atrocities Israel inflicts on tens of thousands of innocent civilians in neighbouring countries. Benjamin Netanyahu has interpreted this silence as permission to pursue his strategy without effective censure or sanction.Therefore the question remains of whether these political leaders are complicit in the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, the creation of millions of refugees and the destruction of towns and cities. Like many others, I yearn to see brave political leadership willing to speak out and challenge Israel’s right to act without adherence to fundamental humanitarian rights and principles of international law. Without such a voice being heard, there will be no end to this humanitarian tragedy.Peter RiddleWirksworth, Derbyshire More

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      Kris Kristofferson’s brave anti-war song | Brief letters

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      One important song appears to have been overlooked in the eulogies for Kris Kristofferson (Obituary, 30 September). Don’t Let the Bastards (Get You Down) is a brave song for a country singer with a military background in the Reagan era. It remains very relevant today: the opening line is “They’re killing babies in the name of freedom.”Peter TaylorTynemouth, Tyne and Wear Steve Vanstone’s nomination of Bob Dylan as a great songwriter but a bad singer (Letters, 3 October) brings to mind another candidate for the greatest songwriter: Franz Schubert. Maria Wagner, who often heard Schubert sing in her family’s home in Vienna, said she had heard all the famous Schubert singers, “but no one sang as Schubert did, and that without a voice”.Susan TomesEdinburgh My family would just like to reassure Bob Dylan that, contrary to Steve Vanstone’s claim, they have heard us both and Bob is definitely not the worst singer of all time.Andrew KeanRainham, London Is the greatest songwriter debate a boys’ club? Joni Mitchell has not only written wonderful lyrics, her melodies are better and her arrangements more imaginative. And as for her voice…Orlando GooddenWhatley, Somerset The seafaring Anglo-Saxons would not have given a hoot where in Europe the oak for their boats came from, so why should the reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo burial ship be made of English wood (‘They must be somewhere’: appeal for British oak to recreate Sutton Hoo ship, 4 October)?Bill Britnell Shrewsbury, Shropshire More

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      Whether it’s Trump or Harris in office, Starmer will need an incredible US ambassador. Here’s my vote | Martin Kettle

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      The widening of the Middle East war has a multiplicity of woeful causes and grim consequences. Many have the potential to become even more intractable in the weeks to come. Fresh human suffering in Israel, Lebanon and beyond is only the start of it. Donald Trump is wrong to claim we are on the brink of a third world war. But these events have global implications. Remember what happened after 9/11.The latest bombings and missile attacks mark a historic failure for politics and diplomacy. This is not the first such failure in the Middle East. But wishing that diplomacy could prevail will not make it happen, and even fragile ceasefires are a long way off right now. As angry populations rally behind the respective combatants the prospects for desperately needed political solutions are almost negligible. You can’t stop a war if those on all sides are determined to fight.On the global scale, the implications for Britain and for Keir Starmer’s government come a long way down the list of the escalation’s most important consequences. In domestic terms, however, they still matter very much indeed. The Gaza war has already made a powerful impact on British politics. Israel’s latest conflict with Iran and its proxies is likely to do the same. The shadow of the Iraq war is a lasting one, more than 20 years on.Yet Britain is not some touchline observer of events in the Middle East. British listening stations in Cyprus monitor the Middle East 24/7. British jets, based in Cyprus, fly over Syria and Iraq almost daily. Those same British jets flew missions to help protect Israel in April, and did so again this week in response to Iran’s missile attacks. Like it or not, Britain also has a history in the region.All of which underscores the high seriousness of the strategic choices that Starmer faces in foreign policy. Like all European nations, Britain now exists in an unstable world shaped by Chinese power, the threat from Russia, US political uncertainty and climate change. It has expelled itself from the European Union. Starmer was in Brussels today to try to make the best of these volatile realities.No one should kid themselves that this is not a difficult hand to play. The difficulty lies behind the escapist and trivialising foreign policy solutions in which Boris Johnson and Liz Truss took refuge, in office and afterwards. Starmer’s seriousness offers a quite different response to theirs but it brings another sort of danger. It puts him at risk of not challenging some inherited orthodoxies of British foreign policy at a newly unstable time for which they are no longer adequate. Dean Acheson’s 1962 comment that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role still echoes.Starmer himself has little background in foreign policy. He gets day-to-day advice from his national security adviser, Tim Barrow, and his foreign policy adviser, Ailsa Terry. It is hard to say from the outside if they are the ideal team for the biggest foreign policy call he faces as prime minister. That call is not, though, over the Middle East war, or the defence of Ukraine. It is not even over the relationship with the EU. It is over the relationship with the US.British foreign policy always seeks to hug America close. But a month from now, the US reaches a fork in the road. Trump and Kamala Harris offer radically different approaches to the country’s global role. These differences will shape Washington’s approach to every important global issue – including Ukraine, the Middle East, China, climate, and digital regulation – for the coming four years. They will be reflected, too, in the way the US operates towards international bodies including the United Nations, Nato, the International Monetary Fund and the international criminal court.The outcome will shape British foreign policy too. A Harris victory would permit something like business as usual. But a Trump win would not. Trying to hug Trump close risks being unsuccessful, dangerous and damaging. Even trying to influence him would require a very special skill set, notably the ability to catch Trump’s attention on Fox News. And Harris would be operating in a more volatile world, too, in which constrained US power might not give priority to British and European interests.That is why, for Starmer, there is an umbilical link between the pressures of a massive event such as the Middle East war and an otherwise relatively niche decision, like who should be the next UK ambassador to the US. Seen through the global lens, the imminent appointment of Karen Pierce’s successor in Washington is relatively minor. Seen through the UK lens, however, it is one of the hinges on which the success or failure of Starmer’s government will depend.Unsurprisingly, No 10 has said the Washington job – the special relationship’s most special post – will only be allocated after the US election. But it will be a defining moment all the same. Politicians including David Miliband, Catherine Ashton and Peter Mandelson have been mentioned. So have current ambassadors, including Menna Rawlings (now in Paris) and Barbara Woodward (now at the UN). Whitehall veterans such as Tom Scholar (former head of the Treasury) and Vijay Rangarajan (now head of the Electoral Commission) may be in the frame too.It’s a job that Labour, nowadays full of West Wing wannabes, has always taken especially seriously. Peter Jay, who died last month, was appointed to the ambassador’s luxurious Massachusetts Avenue residence by his Labour prime ministerial father-in-law, James Callaghan, in 1977. “We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there,” were the instructions from New Labour in 1997, when the late Christopher Meyer was despatched to be Tony Blair’s man in Washington.The appointment rests very personally with Starmer. He has surely now learned that the global agenda will also determine Labour’s future, whether Trump or Harris wins. The appointee therefore needs to be someone with the ear of the president but with the ear of the prime minister as well. That’s why, in the end, my prediction is that the job will go to a man who, untypically, did not reply to my inquiries on the subject this week.A generation ago, as Blair’s chief of staff, it was he who gave Meyer those robust instructions. It was also he who played a key role in the hard-won peace process in Northern Ireland. At a time when another peace process is again so urgent, it is hard to think of a stronger candidate than Jonathan Powell.

      Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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      Elon Musk’s Twitter coup has harmed the right. They are now simply ‘too online’ | Paolo Gerbaudo

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      In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock victory in 2016, one common explanation for why the Democrats had not seen it coming was that they had succumbed to the social media echo chamber. The fact that many digital platforms, such as Twitter (now X), tended to be dominated by liberals had lured Democrats into a false sense of security. This, so the explanation went, made them complacent, leading to inconsiderate gestures that alienated sections of the electorate: Hillary Clinton’s infamous jab at Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” was often cited as a prime example.With the internet ever more captive to the caprices of timeline algorithms, the risk of echo chambers is even greater in this election cycle. However, it is now Trump and the broader political right that is – to use the internet lingo – “too online”.The rightwing surge seen in many countries’ recent elections, especially in Europe, has been paralleled (and supported) by a significant rise of the right’s influence online. As documented by much academic research on social media and politics, the leading influencers on platforms such as YouTube, X and the instant messaging platform Telegram are rightwing. On many of these platforms, the conversation has increasingly shifted towards rightwing themes and positions, with rightwing messages tending to circulate more widely.This social media hegemony, which has been in the making for many years and was cemented by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, has now created a right that harbours a similar sense of delusion and complacency to the one that, in the past, has proved so detrimental for progressives.Consider the way vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has brazenly doubled down on his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies”; or widely ridiculed – and dangerous – online hoaxes about cats and dogs being eaten by Haitian immigrants, which appear to have travelled from Facebook to the mouth of the Republican candidate in a matter of days; or Musk’s creepy rebuke concerning Taylor Swift after the pop singer endorsed Kamala Harris, offering to “give her a child”. Such extreme messaging does cater to the Maga (Make America great again) crowd of true believers – but it comes at the electoral cost of potentially alienating large swaths of the moderate voting-age population.As political scientists have long observed, a party’s rank and file is more ideologically extreme than its electorate. If leaders get trapped in the militant core, they can end up developing an unrealistic appraisal of the opinion of their target voters. This is precisely what 24/7 immersion in social media, with their plebiscitary pseudo-democracy of instant reactions and echo chambers, is all too likely to produce.Obsession with social media and its popularity contest can also lead to unwise choice of political personnel. JD Vance was appointed as running mate by Trump on the back of vocal support from Silicon Valley and the fervour of his social media followers. Yet, Vance is viewed favourably by a miserly 36% of the electorate, compared with 48% support for his opponent Tim Walz, according to a recent USA Today poll. Trump himself has been criticised by allies because of his closeness to internet personality Laura Loomer, a self-described “white advocate” who has built a successful career by catering to far-right digital cesspits.A key factor in this radicalisation spiral has been Musk’s transformation of broadly liberal Twitter into the reactionary X. Spending $44bn on the purchase certainly made no economic sense, but it seemed to make much political sense. Taking the reins of a platform widely recognised as a sort of “social media of record”, or official debating chamber of the internet, capable of shaping the news agenda and public perception, offered the opportunity to fiddle with the formation of public opinion – and this is precisely what Musk did in three waysFirst, he has shamelessly granted himself enormous algorithmic privileges, which reportedly boost his messages by a factor of 1,000. He has used this colossal power of amplification by conversing with, and therefore boosting, hard-right extremist accounts, spreading fake news and publishing AI-manufactured images, such as one showing Kamala Harris in communist attire.Second, by reactivating tens of thousands of accounts – including those of Nazis and antisemites – who had been suspended or banned for violating community guidelines, Musk has goaded liberal and left users to leave the platform out of disgust, therefore effectively shifting the balance of the conversation to the right.Third, there have been the effects of his “blue check” scheme, which has fundamentally transformed the dynamics of participation on the platform. Now, in any conversation, the top replies are from people with blue checks, who appear to be overwhelmingly right-leaning, largely because of the way more progressive users have boycotted the service out of their animosity towards Musk.Musk’s “Twitter coup” has offered a new home to those who had retreated to Maga platforms such as Truth Social and Parler. But in so doing it has also led to the creation of a macroscopic reactionary echo chamber, which feeds into the right’s confirmation bias and self-complacency.Ultimately, the reason why rightwing politicians and their billionaire allies invest so much energy and resources into social media is that these platforms can influence people’s opinions in a more organic way than traditional forms of political communication. The irony here is that in attempting to use its money and power to shift the discursive dial, the right might have inadvertently undermined its own prospects.

      Paolo Gerbaudo is a sociologist and the author of The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic More

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      Alarm in UK and US over possible Iran-Russia nuclear deal

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      Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine.During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb.British sources indicated that concerns were aired about Iran’s trade for nuclear technology, part of a deepening alliance between Tehran and Moscow.On Tuesday last week, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, made a similar warning on a visit to London for a summit with his British counterpart, David Lammy, though it received little attention, as the focus then was the US announcement of Iran’s missile supply to Moscow.“For its part, Russia is sharing technology that Iran seeks – this is a two-way street – including on nuclear issues as well as some space information,” Blinken said, accusing the two countries of engaging in destabilising activities that sow “even greater insecurity” around the world.Britain, France and Germany jointly warned last week that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium had “continued to grow significantly, without any credible civilian justification” and that it had accumulated four “significant quantities” that each could be used to make a nuclear bomb.But it is not clear how much technical knowhow Tehran has to build a nuclear weapon at this stage, or how quickly it could do so. Working with experienced Russian specialists or using Russian knowledge would help speed up the manufacturing process, however – though Iran denies that it is trying to make a nuclear bomb.Iran had struck a deal in 2015 to halt making nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief with the US and other western nations – only for the agreement to be abandoned in 2018 by then US president and current Republican nominee Donald Trump.Iran responded by breaching agreed limits on the quantity of enriched uranium it could hold.Western concern that Iran is close to being able to make a nuclear weapon has been circulating for months, contributing to tensions in the Middle East, already at a high pitch because of Israel’s continuing assault on Hamas and Gaza.Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, are supporters of Hamas – and Tehran’s nuclear development is therefore viewed as a direct threat by Jerusalem.Soon after Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Iran began supplying Shahed delta winged drones to Moscow and helped Russia build a factory to make more to bomb targets across Ukraine. In April this year, Iran launched a Russian-style missile and drone attack aimed at Israel, though it was essentially prevented and stopped with the help of the US and UK.Russia and Iran, though not historically allies, have become increasingly united in their opposition to the west, part of a wider “axis of upheaval” that also includes to varying degrees China and North Korea, reflecting a return to an era of state competition reminiscent of the cold war.Last week in London, Blinken said that US intelligence had concluded that the first batch of high-speed Iranian Fath-360 ballistic missiles, with a range of up to 75 miles (120km), had been delivered to Russia.Able to strike already bombarded frontline Ukrainian cities, the missiles prompted a dramatic reassessment in western thinking as well as fresh economic sanctions.Starmer flew to Washington late on Thursday to hold a special foreign policy summit with Biden at the White House on Friday, beginning with a short one on one in the outgoing president’s Oval Office followed by a 70-minute-long meeting with both sides’ top foreign policy teams in the residence’s Blue Room.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThe leaders and their aides discussed the war in Ukraine, the crisis in the Middle East, Iran and the emerging competition with China.Starmer brought along with him Lammy, Downing Street’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, and the UK’s national security adviser, Tim Barrow, , while Biden was accompanied by Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, among others.Prior to the meeting, UK sources indicated that the two countries had agreed in principle to allow Ukraine to fire long-range Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles into Russia for the first time. But Biden appeared to suggest the topic was one of the reasons for the face-to-face, saying to reporters: “We’re going to discuss that now,” as the meeting began.There was no update after the meeting, partly to keep the Kremlin guessing. Any use of the missiles is expected to be part of a wider war plan on the part of Ukraine aimed at using them to target airbases, missile launch sites and other locations used by Russia to bomb Ukraine.Britain needs the White House’s permission to allow Ukraine to use the missiles in Russia because they use components manufactured in the US.Protocol dictated that Biden and Starmer – the only two present without printed-out name cards – did most of the talking, while the other politicians and officials present only spoke when introduced by the president or the prime minister.Lammy was asked by Starmer to update those present on his and Blinken’s trip to Kyiv on Thursday to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.Shortly after the meeting, Starmer said the two sides had had “a wide ranging discussion about strategy”. More

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      A little about Robert Jenrick actually reveals a lot | Brief letters

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      Robert Jenrick’s website modestly sets out his unimpeachable credentials for leadership of party and country. The “About” section begins thus: “Robert has spent most of his life in the Midlands and comes from small town Britain. Born in 1980s Wolverhampton, his father, Bill, was a small businessman from Manchester and his mother, Jenny, was a secretary from Liverpool. They set up their own business fitting fireplaces around their kitchen table.” So Bob’s dad, a little chap just Bob’s age, came from two places and liked to keep the table warm?Stephen BakerTregynon, Powys Aditya Chakrabortty ends his article on the Tory leadership race (Opinion, 12 September) speculating on who’ll be in the final bout to lead Her Majesty’s opposition. I think he needs to keep up with the news.Michael RobinsonBerkhamsted, Herfordshire When I worked for the Blood Transfusion Service in Ireland in the 1970s, Guinness was always available for donors (Letters, 10 September). The most reliable donors were employees of the brewery who, as a perk of their job, got a daily ration of two pint bottles.Catherine O’ReillyLondon I took the ironing on (Letters, 10 September) when my girlfriend – now my wife – did an MA in chemistry when she was 23. She’s now 63 and still appears reluctant to take the task back.Ian Charlton Northallerton, North Yorkshire Donald Trump refers to Kamala Harris as a Marxist (Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate, 11 September). Perhaps he needs a dictionary?Derek McMillanDurrington, West Sussex More