Ruth Dudley Edwards: From Northern Ireland to the Middle East, there’s drama everywhere you turn

First to the big picture, miniaturised in London on Saturday in yet another pro-Palestinian demonstration wending its angry way through my central London neighbourhood.

There were plenty of balaclavas, shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (‘God is greater’), unpleasant rants, not least from Humza Yousaf, the last first minister of Scotland, anti-Israeli and Jew-hating chants like, “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and banners extolling the fanatical revolutionaries of Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen.

The following day I was at the Hyde Park commemoration of the 1,200 innocent people murdered in Israel on October 7, 2023, and appeals for the hundred so far surviving hostages.

The only chants were “Bring them home”: there was singing and speeches of sadness, but I didn’t hear or see one message of hate.

Stability is not encouraged by our egregious foreign secretary David Lammy, who has just proudly surrendered the strategically significant Chagos Islands to Mauritius, as China licks its lips.

In the name of peace, he calls for the Middle East ceasefire the bad guys crave.

We’ve had the excitement of Sir Keir Starmer’s government going spectacularly adrift before he’d even clocked up 100 days, and British voters suffering from an acute attack of buyers’ remorse caused by sleazy revelations about the mysterious Lord Alli’s funding of luxuries for the prime minister and other entitled senior members of the cabinet.

Closer to home, in the centre of the drama has been equally mysterious, now ruthlessly demoted, Sue Gray.

Why did Lord Alli donate £10,000 to the election campaign of her son, Liam Conlon, chair of the Labour Party Irish Society? And on being elected, why was he immediately appointed a parliamentary private secretary? What does her newly-created title of prime minister’s envoy for nations and regions actually mean? Is it just a face-saver, or does it give her meddling rights?

What, anyway, are her loyalties? Why was the then most powerful woman in the government so preoccupied with trying to find a huge sum to revive the indefensible Casement Park project? And why did Sinn Fein’s Conor Murphy describe her in a private discussion as a “friend at court”.

Why did this puritan make such a harsh report on breaches of socialising regulations at Boris Johnson’s Number 10 Downing Street during covid when she had herself been prone to cavalier attitudes towards rules?

In the 1980s, on leave from the civil service, with her country-and-western singer husband, Portaferry’s Bill Conlon, who has a band called Emerald, Ms Gray bought the Cove Bar, which is outside Newry.

In a gig in Brighton, the comedian Patrick Kielty recalled that “this bar was meant to be officially shut most Friday nights at half 11… and was flat to the mat with Willie Nelson at 20 to f**king two”.

As an illustration of the mess everywhere appears to be in, Sinn Fein are imploding over another child protection scandal, while President Michael D Higgins’s interventions on the Middle East have been so flagrant that even the indulgent Irish electorate are protesting.

Here is this magnificent letter to the Irish Times. “Sir - The government should consider making the post of minister for foreign affairs redundant as it appears President Higgins has appointed himself to this ministry. – Yours, etc, R Whelan.”

What next?