Andrew Gilligan | The Spectator columnists & writers

Sadiq Khan is an Islamophobe. Not just any old Islamophobe, and not just in the woollier parts of the web. According to a group part-funded by the EU called the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), the mayor of London, a practising Muslim, is one of the four ‘politicians and figures of note in the UK who [have] flagrantly displayed the most Islamophobia’ in 2018. Barack Obama is an Islamophobe. Cathy Newman, the Channel 4 News presenter, is an Islamophobe. So are Louise Casey, who led an inquiry into the Rotherham grooming scandal, Michael Wilshaw, the ex-head of Ofsted, and Maajid Nawaz, the Muslim counter-extremism activist. Over the last few years, all have been shortlisted for the coveted ‘Islamophobe of the Year’ trophy at the IHRC’s annual Islamophobia Awards, a real event with a real gala dinner in a real London hotel ballroom.

City slacker

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’ for the taxi trade (allowing black cabs in more bus lanes) or his ‘bold package of measures’ to revive street markets (creating a London Markets Board and an interactive map). One release even panted that Khan had ‘personally scrutinised’ the New Year’s Eve fireworks display ‘to make the acclaimed event the most exciting yet’. Language like this — the bold mayor, the German Democratic Republic, the powerful Commons paperclips committee — is normally taken to mean the exact opposite of what its user intends.

No Khan do

Let’s try a thought experiment, shall we? If a senior adviser to my old boss, Boris Johnson, had celebrated John Smith’s heart attack, mocked Gordon Brown for talking about his dead son and referred to senior members of the Labour party as ‘scum’, how long do you think that person would have kept their job? Thankfully, however, this particular mini-Trump, the former reality TV star Amy Lamé, was appointed (as London’s ‘night czar’) by a Labour mayor, and her -targets were all Tories, so it’s fine. As, apparently, are Lamé’s years of virtue-signalling on social media for higher spending and taxes while arranging to receive her own City Hall salary through a personal company so she can pay as little tax as possible.

How the British bobby turned into Robocop

To the casual glance it looks like a normal police car — same markings, same lights, same faces at the wheel. Only the two small yellow circles, one at each of the top corners of the windscreen, tell you that this is a mobile armoury. It will often be a BMW X5: a SUV’s suspension copes better with the weight of the weapons, the gun safe, the ballistic shields. Inside, the occupants will be wearing Glock 17 pistols and have access to weapons which could include, in ascending order of bullet size and ‘penetrative power’, the Benelli Super 90 shotgun, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, the G36 carbine, the Sig Sauer automatic gas-piston operated rifle, and the G3 sniper and assault rifle. The MP5 is the standard; hollow-point rounds are used to prevent ‘over-penetration’; that is, bullets passing through a target or wall and hitting a bystander.

Robocop returns

A matter of taste

With the moment of truth nearly upon us, the great danger of the London Olympics is not, I think, that they’ll be a failure, just an anticlimax. They won’t be disastrous, just a bit naff. Brits will win medals. The Tube will probably cope. But from the smallest things upwards, the London Games give the overwhelming impression of being run by people with no taste, no imagination, and no idea how to have fun. I still remember Beijing 2008. I was lucky enough to go. The Bird’s Nest stadium stood there, more random and more beautiful than any mere camera lens could show, its outer tendrils waving in white against a blood-red interior. The Water Cube aquatic centre, the colour changes stealing gradually across its tortoiseshell sides, made a hard building into something soft and subtle and permeable.

Why Labour supporters should shun Ken

The single funniest thing about the London mayoral election has been watching the Left trying to excuse tax avoidance. After I revealed that his idol, Ken Livingstone, had saved a fortune by channelling six-figure earnings through a personal company, the Guardian’s Dave Hill pleaded that Ken’s previous condemnations of tax-dodgers ‘had been aimed at extremely rich people — which he isn't,’ so that’s all right, then. The Independent’s Owen Jones frothed that ‘the 1 per cent have an interest in demonising Ken Livingstone.’ But, Owen, Ken is the 1 per cent! What’s been just as notable, though, in the last three months is quite how few of Labour’s finest have been willing to join Dave, Owen and the other cannon-fry in the Livingstone Mechanised Suicide battalion.

The retirement of Rebus

No place for him in Scotland’s new McCop megaforceHere is an intro to get all Scottish Nationalists fuming about London media bias: Alex Salmond is abolishing John Rebus. Well, all right — this recalcitrant Scots detective never actually existed in the first place. And even in fiction, he’s been drawing his generous public-sector pension for some time now. But if Scotland’s First Minister reads crime novels, he will know that many of the successful ones depend as much on place as on character and plot — Conan Doyle’s clattering Victorian London, Morse’s Oxford, and a Rebus Edinburgh that keeps tourist board officials awake at night. In Mr Salmond’s new model Scotland, Rebus would never have been born. His employer, Lothian and Borders Police, constantly mentioned in the novels, is about to be closed down.

Buck up, Boris!

Why isn’t the mayor making mincemeat of Ken?Politicians do love their five-point plans, ten-point plans, 12-point plans, don’t they? Most of the points are usually Polyfilla, the political equivalents of ‘Your call is important to us,’ but at least there’s a nice round number involved. Last week, however, with characteristic originality, Boris Johnson unveiled British politics’ first-ever nine-point plan. Unkind critics sniped that it was a ten-point plan with one point missing. Even for better-disposed observers, such as myself, Boris’s Nine Commandments — intended as the foundation of his re-election campaign — leave something to be desired. Until recently, the Groundhog rematch between Johnson and his defeated 2008 opponent, Ken Livingstone, looked like ending in an equally Groundhog result.

Looting for scoops

TripoliComing pretty much straight from the London riots to the Libyan revolution has made me more contemptuous than ever of Britain’s self-pitying, self-indulgent, social-security-claiming insurrectionaries. For all the fear and death, Tripoli’s uprising has been far more disciplined. Cool young rebels, in their bandanas and Free Libya T-shirts, guard the streets. Barely a shop has been looted, and trainers are still changing hands in the normal way. Only one group of people, in fact, is brazenly disregarding private property and disrespecting the law: western journalists. In the continuing absence of Colonel Gaddafi, there is only one other thing that most hacks want to find: the definitive government document proving that, say, Tony Blair agreed to overlook the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in return for a personal, lifetime supply of uranium yellowcake.

A gold medal for idiocy

The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of itWould you like to compete for Britain at the 2012 Olympics? No, seriously, compete in the real Olympics, march in the athletes’ parade, wear our national colours? Vacancies are still available. Complete beginners most welcome — no experience necessary. You don’t even have to be, well, British. I promise I am not making this up.Among the many inventive ways which London 2012 has devised to waste public money, Team GB Handball is my personal favourite. Three million pounds is being spent to create, from scratch, a British Olympic squad in a sport which virtually nobody in Britain has ever played. And in the Olympic Park, £44 million — enough for a new hospital wing — has gone on a 7,000-seat arena for handball, a sport whose entire British fan base could have been fitted into the nearest convenient school gym.

Lost in Libya

Tripoli‘We have some civilian martyrs for you,’ said the Libyan government minder, with the triumphant look of a Soviet housewife who has just found a bottle of Scotch in the state-controlled supermarket. He pulled aside a blanket to reveal a charred, twisted corpse, blackened arms fixed stiffly upwards, skin seared away to reveal the tendons.It was the kind of thing that stays in the memory — but mainly because that body, and another one next to it, were the first two that any western reporter in Tripoli had seen in weeks. Even they, it turned out, were journalists for Libyan state television — proud purveyor of news headlines such as ‘Upper Volta ambassador says Gaddafi is source of all competent authority’ — who just happened to have been filming on top of the colonel’s leadership bunker at 2.

The true cost of the Olympics

There was something rather un-British about all that grovelling to Fifa last week. That, at least, appears to be the new national consensus after even the combined charms of Prince William, David Cameron and David Beckham failed to land England the World Cup. We are not, we now realise, the kind of people who prostrate themselves to fat foreign sports bureaucrats. The mother of parliaments will never yield its cherished prerogatives to the rococo whims of some grubby Swiss tax-dodgers. Oh, wait a minute...Entirely without the help of Mr Julian Assange, The Spectator today publishes an international sporting equivalent of the WikiLeaks cables. Our document cache is just as long, just as embarrassing to Britain, and just as closely held as the collected thoughts of the American diplomatic corps: it is the complete, contractually binding and previously confidential set of demands made by the 115-member International Olympic Committee (IOC) on poor old London for the 2012 Olympic Games.

The real battle for Labour’s soul

This summer’s election to choose a new deputy regional sales manager of the Co-op, sorry, a new leader of the Labour party, has rather obviously failed to set the nation on fire. But one level below the sundry Eds and assorted Milibands, there’s a much clearer and more interesting battle for Labour’s soul.In the party’s highest-membership region, London, the graphic designers and diversity outreach consultants who make up Labour’s new industrial base are choosing a mayoral candidate to oppose Boris Johnson in 2012. Officially, the odd timing — nominations closed only six weeks after the general election, and almost two years before polling day — is to allow the successful nominee to ‘establish their presence’ with the London electorate.

We need a compact with Muslim Middle England

Andrew Gilligan says the new coalition must reformulate our relationship with moderate Muslims — and marginalise the extremists for goodOne of the unsung heroes of this year’s election campaign was the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, Jim Fitzpatrick. Alone in his party, Mr Fitzpatrick stood up before the election and said something that everyone in east London Labour knew, but no one else had the guts to put on record. To my newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, and Channel 4’s Dispatches, he blew the whistle on the way that, in his words, the Tower Hamlets Labour party had been infiltrated and ‘corrupted’ by a radical Islamist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, rather as the Militant Tendency operated in the 1980s.

The revolution will not be tweeted

Don’t listen to the hype about ‘Web 2.0’ politics, says Andrew Gilligan. Online campaigning is only of interest to a handful of Westminster nerds and journalistsEd Balls has ‘had to take the roast chicken out of the oven’. For Sarah Brown, ‘waking up in our house in Fife was today’s special treat’. William Hague is ‘enjoying a good Burger King at Wetherby services’, and the breaking news from Eric Pickles is that he is ‘out with the team in Brentwood’. In the general election as it appears on Twitter — or should that be Pooter? — there can be no doubt that the battle of ideas is well and truly joined. Questioning the importance of the ‘Web 2.0 campaign’ has, of course, become as outrageous an assault on the conventional wisdom as, say, challenging gay marriage.

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

Down at that self-proclaimed centre of ‘tolerance and harmony’, the East London Mosque, they’ve been holding some pretty tolerant and harmonious meetings lately. On 9 July last year, for instance, there was the half-day conference on ‘social ills’. One of the ‘social ills’ — with an entire session to itself — was ‘music’, described by one of the speakers, Haitham al-Haddad, as a ‘prohibited and fake message of love and peace’. Then there was the talk, on 26 June, by a certain Bilal Philips — named by the US government as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And if that particular outrage was a little too small-time for the dedicated holy warrior — only six people died — the East London Mosque was also kind enough to host, on 1 January last year, a video address by Anwar al-Awlaki, spiritual leader to two of the 9/11 hijackers.

How can we punish Blair?

Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency.Readers may remember the Not The Nine O’Clock News parody of those Seventies current affairs programmes in which a professor and a social worker earnestly discussed teenage delinquency. Expecting the usual concerned talk of deprivation, poor parenting, and high-rise flats, the interviewer was disconcerted to find both his guests averring that the only answer to youth criminals was to ‘cut off their goolies’. (It was perhaps funnier at the time — Britain then knew nothing of talk radio, or David Blunkett.)This week, as Tony Blair finally appears at the Iraq inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, is in the same position as that interviewer.

The minister for Hizb ut Tahrir

By one of those bizarre coincidences, I bumped into Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, on Tuesday night, just after I had accused him in print of being ‘the minister for Hizb ut Tahrir’. Quite extraordinarily, Mr Balls has spent much of the past seven days defending two primary schools run by supporters of this deeply nasty, racist and segregationist group after the Tories attacked his department’s decision to give them £113,000 of public money. As you might expect, our meeting was brief. Mr Balls said I was disgraceful. I said I fully reciprocated the charge: Minister for Hizb ut Tahrir, while harsh, was entirely justified by the facts in this case. ‘No evidence has been found that extremist views are being taught.

Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelingsIt may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq. Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time. The set of classified interview transcripts with senior army officers who had returned from Iraq, leaked to me this week, reads like the problem page of Bella magazine, with relationship troubles — special relationship troubles — breaking out all over.

Chucking millions down the Tube

Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in?At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings. George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Green Park tube station. Transport for London has, you see, noticed that the tube, being underground and reached by steps and escalators, is not terribly accessible to wheelchairs.

Washington must talk to Tehran

Last November the Iranian people were privileged to watch perhaps the year’s most bizarre presidential home video, in which the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described how a divine glow of light had played around him as he delivered his first address to the United Nations. ‘I felt it,’ the President recalled. ‘All of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27 to 28 minutes, all the world leaders did not blink.... It’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking. They were astonished, as if a hand had held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.’ The real reason for the glazed looks of the assembled world leaders that day at the UN was almost certainly rather simpler.

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

Britain, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn, once had a nuclear weapon named the Tony. (It was a prototype warhead to be fitted to the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, tried in the 1950s but never developed.) The record books of our great nation’s early nuclear experiments also yield something called the Peter (appropriately enough, a trigger device for a larger explosion) but, alas, no Alastair, no Gordon (though there was, perhaps in anticipation of the late Robin Cook, another prototype unhappily christened the Pixie). The first-generation Tony, produced by trench-coated chaps with soldering irons in a collection of sheds just off the A340, was reassuringly cheap. Hidden under a thick 1950s bedsheet of secrecy, it was also free from specific public controversy.

The real threat to Britain

In these frightening days, we must seek our consolations where we can; and one of mine, over the last month, has been running a private contest to log the most idiotic remark made by one of the battalions of ‘security experts’ on standby at times like this to provide vitally needed, life-sustaining, 24-hour fatuous commentary on all major broadcast news outlets. There was the lady from the prestigious think-tank on Sky News who said, quite late on 7 July, that the bombings were ‘clearly a major incident’. There was the ‘risk management consultant’ on The World Tonight who said that shooting people in the head, à la Jean Charles de Menezes, was not necessarily intended to kill them. There is the Home Office minister, Hazel Blears, but she has had to be disqualified on suspicion of cheating.

Have the bombs scared the government?

Watching the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week, as he denied any link whatever between the London bombings and the war in Iraq, I must confess that I felt the tiniest prickle of sympathy. How undignified it must be, endlessly having to pretend that black is white, the sun sets in the east and the Pope’s religion is really not quite as simple an issue as some irresponsible commentators make out. It is of course true, as Mr Straw says, that al-Qa’eda wanted to attack us long before the Iraq war, and did attack several of our allies. But London was something quite new: the first al-Qa’eda attack against a Western country carried out by its own citizens. As the intelligence services predicted before the war, and as the government’s own research reported after it, Iraq has radicalised a significant cadre of British Muslims, a few of whom are prepared to become foot soldiers of terror.

Can Iraq make it?

Baghdad The election-night special on Iraqi TV, rather like the election itself, bore little resemblance to anything that British viewers might be familiar with. There were few candidates to interview (too scared), no counts to visit (too slow), and a merciful lack of macho electoral clichés. In Iraq, the terms ‘battleground seat,’ ‘war room’ and ‘political annihilation’ are not the concoctions of spin-doctors in suits trying to sound tough. They are all too horribly real. The Iraqi Dimblebys might not have had any exit polls to talk about — would you want to stand outside a polling station all day with a clipboard in this country? — but they did have suicide-bomb polls. In the absence of actual results or a reliable turnout figure, the main measure of the elections’ success or failure so far has been the number of voters blown up.

Slaughter of the regiments

Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting ‘Starbucks’ regimentsW est Belfast in the autumn of 1982 was a bad place to be a British soldier. Booby-traps, like the one which destroyed Corporal Leon Bush, aged 22, of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, were routine, decidedly not news. Corporal Bush’s death, like most soldiers’, was quickly forgotten by everyone except his family. It was, therefore, an enormous consolation to Corporal Bush’s blood relatives when they discovered that he had two families who wanted to keep his memory alive: themselves, and the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters. ‘They came to stay with the regiment at its base in Germany,’ remembers Patrick Mercer, a captain in the WFR at the time, and later its commanding officer.

The case for not attacking Iran

Do the last few days remind you of anything, by any chance? Presidential heavy breathing about a ‘rogue’ Middle Eastern state; a supporting chorus of exiles with dramatic new claims; and a senior member of the US government bearing intelligence which turns out to be more spin than spine-chilling. Less than a month after the presidential election, the Bush White House has begun its campaign against Iran. In the week that Americans break for Thanksgiving, it might seem that, for Washington, the festival of the moment should really be Groundhog Day. Yet while the methods and timing are about as surprising as a delay on the Tube, and while we may be tempted to say that all the neocons have done is to change the ‘q’ to an ‘n’ in the name of the target, there are excellent reasons not to dismiss the latest American sabre-rattling.

The strongman of Baghdad

The first recorded political act of Iyad Allawi — now the interim prime minister of Iraq, then the student organiser for Saddam Hussein’s Baath party — struck some as a little extreme, even by the standards of Sixties campus politics. ‘We were at medical school in [pre-Saddam] Baghdad together,’ said his contemporary and, more recently, colleague on the Iraqi governing council, Raja al-Khuzai. ‘When we turned up for our exams, we found Iyad at the door of the examination hall, wearing combat gear and holding a machine-gun. He said, “I’m not going to allow anyone to take the exam. We’re on strike.” We were scared.’ Following the unfortunate failure of this démarche — the exams eventually went ahead, after the authorities sent in tanks — Mr Allawi evidently decided that the time for liberal pussyfooting was over.

Define ‘Islamophobia’

Define ‘Islamophobia’

City slacker

City slacker

No Khan do

No Khan do

How the British bobby turned into Robocop

How the British bobby turned into Robocop

Robocop returns

Robocop returns

A matter of taste

A matter of taste

Why Labour supporters should shun Ken

Why Labour supporters should shun Ken

The retirement of Rebus

The retirement of Rebus

Buck up, Boris!

Buck up, Boris!

Looting for scoops

Looting for scoops

A gold medal for idiocy

A gold medal for idiocy

Lost in Libya

Lost in Libya

The true cost of the Olympics

The true cost of the Olympics

The real battle for Labour’s soul

The real battle for Labour’s soul

We need a compact with Muslim Middle England

We need a compact with Muslim Middle England

The revolution will not be tweeted

The revolution will not be tweeted

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

How can we punish Blair?

How can we punish Blair?

The minister for Hizb ut Tahrir

The minister for Hizb ut Tahrir

Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

Yanks are from Mars, Brits are from Venus

Chucking millions down the Tube

Chucking millions down the Tube

Washington must talk to Tehran

Washington must talk to Tehran

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

The real threat to Britain

The real threat to Britain

Have the bombs scared the government?

Have the bombs scared the government?

Can Iraq make it?

Can Iraq make it?

Slaughter of the regiments

Slaughter of the regiments

The case for not attacking Iran

The case for not attacking Iran

The strongman of Baghdad

The strongman of Baghdad