From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Jennings, Nigel Molesworth, Billy Bunter and Harry Potter, public schools hold a special place in the English cultural imagination. And because so many British prime ministers and politicians have had a public school education, their schooldays have often become the object of media scrutiny. From time to time reporters will track down former headmasters, teachers, and schoolmates, to find out what they once thought of their former pupils and classmates, and what they think of the leaders they became.

Such attention is not always flattering. In January 2022, in the midst of the Partygate scandal that would soon bring him down, a letter surfaced from Boris Johnson’s former classics teacher at Eton, written in 1982, which told Johnson’s father of his son’s ‘disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies’, and his apparent belief that he was free of the ‘network of obligation that binds everyone’.

This came as a shock to probably no one at all. Similarly, in 2025, the former Tory Northern Ireland secretary Julian Smith denounced David Cameron’s ‘cavalier’ embrace of the Brexit referendum as ‘some sort of Eton game.’

Such are the men that our cloistered elites have foisted on the nation, and you might think that a sensible country would look elsewhere for its leaders, with a record like that. Yet now, the British electorate appears poised to place another former public schoolboy in Downing Street, with a past that makes ‘cavalier’ seem almost like a virtue.

I speak, of course, of Nigel Mosley-Farage, whose schooldays at Dulwich College have come under a lot of scrutiny over the last two weeks, and not at all in a good way. ‘What were the words overheard by the Nazi child masturbatin’ in the bathroom?’ asks detective Benoit Blanc, in Knives Out.

Well, now we know. This is not the first time that Mosley-Farage’s salad days have attracted negative attention. In 2013, Michael Crick revealed a 1981 letter on C4 News from a former teacher who described Mosley-Farage as a ‘racist’ and a ‘fascist’ who sang Hitler Youth songs in local villages.

These stories came and went, without making the kind of splash that they might have made if, for example, similar allegations had been made about Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer. But now a Guardian investigation based on interviews with some twenty former pupils has painted a more comprehensive portrait of the cheekie-chappie, man-of-the-people, hail-fellow-well-met Pied Piper of Brexit as a young Nazi, who liked to sing ‘Gas ‘em all’ to the tune of George Formby’s classic.

One pupil remembers how the boy-who-would be PM would

…sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’, or: ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers

Another recalls:

It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time. He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil’ and, you know, strutting around the classroom.

This began at age 13-14, and continued right up to 18. Even after Young Nigel became a prefect, he was still at it, according to one of his classmates:

He took me for a walk up to the lower school playground, where all the children from about nine years old to 12 would be. And he singled out, completely at random, a kid of Asian extraction, and just put him in detention for no reason whatsoever. I was flabbergasted, absolutely stunned. I was just disgusted, really. No rhyme or reason, just purely based on the colour of his skin.

The Boy From Farnborough

This is not Hogwarts or St Custards. Some readers may recall the Hollywood version of Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil. It’s a brutal, compelling and rather ludicrous film, which describes a post-war plot by Joseph Mengele to clone 94 Hitlers in different countries, and assign them to families with a similar background to the fuhrer’s.

The Little Hitlers we see in the film are all arrogant, sociopathic little brats, played by Jeremy Black, who look like they were born and bred to pull the wings off birds. But the young Mosley-Farage who appears in these anecdotes could have played this role just as well.

The Guardian interviews reveal a remarkably precocious little Nazi, with his repellent hatreds and white supremacist views startlingly fully-formed, already espousing racist views at the age of 13 with the same airy fervour with which Nigel Molesworth’s schoolmate Basil Fotherington-Tomas called out ‘hullo flowers, hullo bees.’

Boys will be boys, you might think, but in early 70s England, boys like this were something of a rarity. It is true that racist slurs, and antisemitic depictions of Jews as misers were much more common then than they are now. This was the age of Till Death Us Do Part, The Black and White Minstrel Show, and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. But there is still a big leap from Alf Garnett, tuckshop jibes and racial caricatures to telling your Jewish classmates that ‘Hitler was right’ and taunting them with the sound of the gas chambers.

Wasn’t Young Nigel defying establishment norms and having a larf, the way he does now. Once again, there are many ways of defying the establishment that do not require you to celebrate the Holocaust. This requires real hatred and real cruelty, and - at the very least - a complete absence of even the most basic level of empathy.

The Teflon-skinned Reform leader has variously denied these allegations or claimed that he can’t remember them. He has attributed them to a ‘desperate establishment’ witch-hunt, and called them ‘playground banter’, before plaintively insisting that he had never engaged in racial abuse ‘with intent’ or ‘in a hurtful or insulting way’ - a novel notion of racial abuse which is unlikely to ever come from anyone who has been at the receiving end of it.

Mosley-Farage and his supporters have argued that what a politician might have said or done did 50 years ago should not necessarily exclude them from high political office. This argument might have some weight, were it not for the fact that Mosley-Farage has never acknowledged, repudiated or apologised for his youthful fascistic high jinks. In 2014, UKIP founder Alan Sked claimed that Farage had once told him in 2004 to run ex-National Front candidates in elections, because: ‘ There’s no need to worry about the n….r vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.’

Mosley-Farage denied this. But whether true or not, he has become adept over the years at coding nativist and racist views within a wider discussion about ‘immigration’, in which it just so happens that immigrants invariably appear as criminals, outsiders, parasites, invaders, cultural intruders, rapists, and extremists.

Mosley-Farage may wear Barbour jackets and cloth caps, but whether explaining why you wouldn’t Romanians to be your neighbours, or posing in front of the ‘Breaking Point’ posters showing endless lines of brown-skinned migrants supposedly en route to Britain, or disseminating anti-Muslim ‘two-tier policing’ conspiracies in the wake of the Southport murders, the teenage Nazi is never far beneath the surface.

He may not sing songs about gassing Jews, but he has appeared on US TV shows and podcasts espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories about ‘globalism’ that invariably are associated with Jews. On the Alex Jones show in 2018, he argued that ‘globalists’ were seeking to engineer war with Russia as part of a coordinated attempt to override national sovereignty.

Between 2011 and 2016, he appeared six times on the web radio show of the antisemitic American pastor Rick Wiles, to discuss plots by bankers and ‘globalists’ to impose world government. This is the Rick Wiles who called Democrat attempts to impeach Trump as a ‘Jew coup, plain and simple.’

Interviewed in 2019 by Tucker Carlson, Mosley-Farage described George Soros as ‘the biggest danger to the entire Western world’, and claimed that Soros wanted to ‘break down the fundamental values of our society and, in the case of Europe, he doesn’t want Europe to be based on Christianity.’

Such statements are garbage, but they are also antisemitic, far-right garbage. Insofar as he has taken a different path from his teenage Nazi wasteland, the direction of travel appears to be tactical. And the cruelty and bullying has never disappeared from his politics. Mosley-Farage is currently advocating the Trump-style mass deportation of 600,000 people - a savage policy that will devastate communities across the country.

In this sense, the child really was father to the man. And no wonder Mosley-Farage has not enjoyed the scrutiny that Young Nigel has attracted. It comes at a time when Reform is faltering in the polls, when a former Farage crony has been sentenced to ten years for taking Russian bribes, when Reform-dominated councils across the country are disintegrating amid allegations of authoritarianism, acrimonious incompetence, and pervasive racism and extremism

In an attempt to deflect from this negativity, Reform produced a video last week containing Mosley-Farage’s post-budget ‘letter to Britain’ in which he promises to fix the country’s economic problems that he did so much to cause.

Mosley-Farage would rather you think of him as the statesman-with-the-pen and the man with the big ideas, than the boy who mocked Jewish children with the sond of the gas chamber. This is entirely understandable from his point of view. But this is a politician who used immigration to get Brexit over the line, and the more Brexit has failed to produce the outcomes that he predicted, the more this snake-oil salesman and political wrecking ball has exploited immigration for his political benefit.

All this is tragic, but it is not an individual tragedy. Mosley-Farage is too shallow and boorish, too devious and morally-vacant to be a tragic figure in his own right. He is not a good man overwhelmed by his dark side, hubris, or an unavoidable destiny. Hubris is not lacking for sure, but Mosley-Farage has no good side to be overwhelmed. If the boy who once adored Enoch Powell had a political destiny, it has been to become the man he has now, tormenting ethnic minorities, people of colour, foreigners and all the other intruders he believes have ‘invaded’ this increasingly septic isle., just as he did in his teens.

The tragedy is that too many people did not spot the game he was playing or shared his aims, to the point when the country is now poised to mark a new chapter in Britain’s dire history of public schoolboys-turned-politicians, and elect a man who once taunted his classmates that ‘Hitler was right’ and burned the school roll because it had too many Patels on it.

One of his former schoolmates claimed that he was moved to speak to the Guardian because he could hear the same ‘hectoring, jeering tone’ in the adult Farage that he once heard as a boy. The reverse is also true. Pay attention to the MP for Clacton, and beneath the bluster, the fag and the pint, the endless self-aggrandisement and the braying anti-establishment rebel, and it is only too easy to imagine the teenage Nazi that he once was, using the same tone to bully his classmates.

That any country should have allowed this malignant charlatan to have such influence ought to be a cause for national shame and self-examination. To put him in a place when he might become prime minister, raises the disturbing possibility that too many people don’t care what Mosley-Farage once was, or what he is now.

All of which makes it incumbent upon the rest of us to do whatever we can to prevent him from entering Downing Street, and inflicting even more damage on the country than he has inflicted already.

The conversation around the Budget seems very far removed from Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage. All this talk of fiscal headroom and property valuations seems utterly distinct to the conversation around small boats, Ukraine and pronouns. But in fact, they are component parts of the same debate. They are all one storyline, playing out in disparate narrative strands.

Since 2016, populism has mounted an artillery attack against the British economy. It has convinced people that the solution to their problems lies in hatred and suspicion of outsiders. It has seduced them into a rejection of the open society - closing the door to people, goods and ideas in roughly equal measure. The results have been ruinous: a shredded, moth-eaten economy, a thin lice-infected veil where we once enjoyed substantial cloth.

This is not a problem for populism and in fact benefits it. By worsening the existing conditions, it can then demand that voters take ever more radical steps towards its position, becoming ever more virulently nativist as they do so. Look at Farage’s current ascendancy, despite Brexit visibly refuting every promise he made before 2016. National failure is a precondition of populism’s success, not an obstacle to it. And if their demands can speed up that failure, it’s all for the best.

The battle against populism is therefore an economic battle as much as it is a cultural, moral and intellectual one.

We must build an economy which works for people, to remove the inspiration and motivation of populism. But we rarely see any efforts to actually achieve this.

Our tax system looks like it was designed by a clown on meth. Why do we tax employee pension contributions but not employer pension contributions? Why does the marginal tax rate start to behave very strangely around the £50,000 mark and basically experience a seizure at the £100,000 mark? Why do we have a VAT exception on gingerbread men who have chocolate eyes but apply it in full if they are decorated more expansively with chocolate? For no good goddamned reason at all. More importantly: What is our broader economic strategy? What kind of economy are we trying to create? Who knows. To even ask that sounds dangerously abstract and a bit foreign.

The core liberal demand in this area was first voiced by former US Treasury Secretary William Simon. It was that the tax system should look “like someone designed it on purpose”. In other words, it should be based on reason and long-term national interest, not irrationality and short-term personal interest.

We can go a step further and demand that for the whole of a government’s economic strategy. Does it look like someone designed it on purpose? Is it clear what it is trying to achieve? Does it seem likely to do so? And how would that improve people’s lives?

A rational tax system encourages growth and tax revenue. A rational economic strategy encourages wealth and material wellbeing. And those two things together can help bury populism.

The press coverage of this Budget has pitted various groups together - Reeves and Starmer versus their backbenchers, the government versus the opposition, Blue Labour versus the soft left, benefits claimants versus the comfortably off. But the true story of our time is the battle against populism. That is the most important lens to view the Budget. And that is an analysis which is sorely missing.

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Rachel Reeves did numerous admirable things in the Budget. People should bear this in mind the next time they claim there is no difference between the Conservatives and Labour. There is. You are mad if you claim otherwise.

The decision to scrap the two-child benefit limit removes one of the most morally obscene policies the Treasury has ever produced, one which was so objectionable it failed on something approaching a biblical level: we do not punish children for the sins of the father. Reeves’ decision will benefit 560,000 families to the tune of £5,300 a year, leading to a 450,000 reduction in child poverty. I understand that most of the public do not support this. Most of the public should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what has become of them.

Reeves also rationalised her fiscal rule. This is the promise she makes to markets: that day-to-day income and expenditure will match in five years’ time. It is an important rule. The moment the markets no longer believe in it, we’re all in much deeper shit than we are now.

Previously, Reeves’ met the rule with £9.9 billion to spare. This is what is annoyingly termed ‘the headroom’. The problem was that it was just too tight. Small changes blew the numbers off course. There would be a change in productivity estimates for instance, or Labour backbenchers would rebel on disability benefits. Then Reeves’ numbers no longer added up, speculation would grow about which taxes she would put up, and we’d be treated to the madcap chaos of the last six months, where every day seemed to suggest a new possible tax rise.

This is a terrible way to write policy, but it is also economically damaging in its own right. It stops people taking economic decisions because they want to wait to see what will happen at the Budget. It took Labour’s greatest economic asset - stability as a trigger for investment - and eradicated it.

Reeves gave herself the £9.9 billion in the first Budget. Then in the Spring Statement she fiddles in various ways to rebuild it, almost to the penny, and the whole shitshow played out again. This time she seems to have finally learned the lesson. The headroom has been expanded to £22 billion. She has also changed the rules so that the Office of Budget Responsibility only assesses compliance once per year rather than twice.

These are good, smart changes. But that is pretty much where the good news stops. Elsewhere in the Budget we see a continuation of three traditional Treasury approaches to economic policymaking: Sticking plaster solutions, arbitrary no-plan chaos, and fiddly bullshit with time and categories.

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Sticking plaster solutions are clearest in property tax. The government introduced a mansion tax, applied on homes over £2 million. This is morally sensible. People with homes of that value can afford to pay more. But it is not actually very effective. It’ll secure just £400 million by 2029-30 - a rounding error.

We all know what’s required. Even a child knows. Council tax is based on property valuations from the 1990s. It taxes people in low-value homes more than high value ones. It is irrational. But Reeves is too scared to change it, so instead she introduces a second set of valuations for high-value homes in addition to the existing set of dated valuations for establishing council tax.

This is how we end up with such an insane tax system: because it is much easier to add a tax element than to repair what we already have.

Now look at the income tax thresholds. This is an example of arbitrary no-plan chaos. Reeves promised not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance at the election. Reeves has therefore frozen the thresholds instead. These are the points at which you start paying income tax, at £12,570, or when you start paying the higher rate, at £50,271. Because of inflation, people’s salaries are constantly being pushed upwards into these thresholds, but it is not a real increase in pay, because the price of everything else has gone up alongside it. They have no additional purchasing power. And yet by keeping the thresholds fixed, Reeves is extracting more money.

The moral consequences are severe. It means that the tax system is grounded in fluctuation of future inflation. There is no justice, no sense of basic fairness, as to the income tax that someone pays. It is entirely unpredictable and arbitrary.

Elsewhere we see the third Treasury tradition: Fiddly bullshit. This Budget frontloaded the pleasure and backloaded the pain. The benefit changes come into force immediately, but the tax changes are mostly delayed to later in the parliament. More than half of the tax increase comes in 2029/30 - the crucial five year fiscal rule target.

Reeves then went a step further and started writing in cuts to public spending in 2028-29 and 2029-30. A third of the increase in her headroom was due to a projected £4 billion of ‘efficiency savings’, which have about as much objective reality as KPop Demon Hunters. Actually, that’s not right. KPop Demon Hunters makes real money that exists in an objectively real world. The projected efficiency savings invent imaginary money which exists in a future fantastical world.

Elsewhere there is simply nothing. An absence where policymaking should be. This is the single greatest crime in this Budget. It is an historic betrayal, a vitiation of national responsibility. The government came to power promising growth. It pledged to put this at the root of everything it did. But there is no plan for it. No new policies that the OBR scores positively towards higher GDP. No strategy. No vision. No ideas.

It is a vacuum. A void.

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The reason for this absence is ideological. The government has become seduced by populism.

There are moments when it breaks free of this trance - the last Labour conference, or those now rare points where Keir Starmer’s vestigial moral sentiment gets the better of him. But Starmer has now broadly submitted to the ideology which he once set out to destroy. No.10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney happily notifies the press that he is spending 90 minutes in private meetings with Maurice Glasman, a babbling sexual neurotic who considers Steve Bannon his ally and progressives the enemy.

Culturally we can see the impact of this conversion in proposals around asylum, including the flirtation with the notion that the British state should strip refugees of their jewelry - halfhearted Nazi cosplay, essentially. But economically it has been much more ruinous.

Earlier this month, Andrew Sissons and John Springford published the outline of a plan for the British economy. I would urge you to take an hour, make a cup of coffee, and read it in full. It is valuable not just in its own right but as a reminder that there are still serious-minded conscientious people in this country who care deeply about its future.

The authors’ diagnosis of our economic malaise is simple: “Britain has fallen out of love with the things it is good at and in doing so it has undermined its advantages in the international economy.” What is it good at? “Finance and business services, tech and the creative economy, various advanced manufacturing niches”. What do these things rely on? “Openness: to trade, to ideas, to skilled workers”. In other words, precisely the quality which populism aims to kill.

Once you recognise what British economic success entails, it becomes fairly clear what kind of tax system you need to fund it. You would make the system rational, transparent and, most importantly, fair. It is precisely the arbitrary unfairness of the current system which motivates people to avoid it wherever possible and its labyrinthine complexities which provides avenues to do so. Needless to say, Reeves did not take that opportunity.

Populists argue that Britain’s historic openness to trade and immigration hurts the indigenous working class. In fact, it serves them. Successful productive industries create well paid jobs, which increases local spending, which revitalises town centres and provides revenue to the Treasury, which can fund public investment. But when our political priorities strangle those industries, the precise opposite happens. And that is the continuity we are living in today. That, in a word, is why we are so fucked.

Look at what the populists have wrought. Nine years ago they scored their first triumph: Brexit. The campaign was grounded in a fear of immigrants, specifically through a rejection of European free movement. Back then the demonised immigrant was a Polish plumber. Today it is a Syrian refugee. The scapegoat changes, but the storyline remains the same.

The consequences to trade were disastrous. Our trade in goods is now lower, as a share of GDP, than in 2019, whereas other economies of our size and type have reverted to around the same level as before the pandemic. Manufacturing is still a vital part of the British economy, particularly in major towns where it is often a regional anchor. They were the ones which took the worst hit.

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This process continues today. Our obsession with immigration, fuelled and made vicious by populism, is once again strangling the life out of our economy. It is killing us.

Take higher education. This is a British success story. It is a vital economic lifeline to the country. Almost every medium-sized UK city has a university. They support their local economy through demand and supply. And they bring youth and vigour and dynamism to locations which might otherwise face stagnation.

The government’s response to this success is to try to kill it. Ministers never say anything good about universities anymore - that is against the populist code, which treats them as incubators for liberalism. Tuition fees were frozen in the face of inflation for years on end, basically eradicating their revenue. Universities were instead encouraged to make ends meet by taking on international students, who pay higher fees. Then the government decided that this was intolerable because it had to reduce immigration.

Labour originally threatened to impose a six per cent levy on international students. Instead, it decided this week to apply a £925 flat fee per student from 2028, with an exemption for the first 220 students per provider. This is better than the original threat but still completely insane. They are actively trying to reduce numbers, despite the fact that these numbers bring real economic benefit to the UK. They’re not even unpopular. Just two per cent of the public want the government to restrict international students. And yet the government is intent on reducing them and indifferent as to the effect it will have on universities.

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Yesterday, new immigration numbers were released.

They showed that net migration at the end of the year ending June 2025 was 204,000, a drop of 445,000 compared to a year earlier, driven mostly by a sharp decline in student dependents and health and care visas.

This is largely a result of policy decisions taken by the outgoing Conservative government. We haven’t yet seen the impact of policy decisions taken by the new Labour government, which has decided to follow a similar populist approach. They will lead to even greater reductions, predominantly due to Shabana Mahmood’s purposeful demeaning residency rules and high salary and qualification thresholds for young skilled workers. The Home office estimates a further fall of 100,000. Other estimates suggest net migration could fall as low as 70,000 next year.

This is covered as if it was good news. The reality is that it will hurt us very badly indeed. This is stated in black and white in the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) paper published alongside the Budget. “Our central forecast sees potential output growth slow from 1.8 per cent in 2025 to 1.3 per cent in 2026,” it states. “The slowdown next year partly reflects a further fall in levels of net migration”. You can’t get any clearer than that, and yet we choose to ignore it.

This kind of decline would hurt any country but it hurts us most of all. An economy which relies on high-skilled services needs human capital. A country with aging infrastructure and cities which lack decent connectivity needs imported labour. A nation which wishes to have a decent health and social care system needs foreign nationals to work inside it.

Instead, Starmer says the reduced numbers are a “step in the right direction”. A direction to where? How many immigrants does the government think we need? What kind of sectors should they be operating in? On what basis should we make those decisions and towards what end? No idea. There is simply no coherent government view on this issue, except to do whatever Farage and his press supporters demand of them.

The populists will welcome the fall in numbers - not because of the reduction in immigration per se, but because it will impoverish the country. This is the immigration doom loop, outlined by Jonathan Portes and Minnie Rahman: Reducing immigration damages the economy and hurts public services, which feeds the disillusionment on which populism thrives, which leads to further demands for reduced immigration, which then starts the process again.

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We are in a struggle against populism. That is the story of our age. It desires a closed society: closed to people, and goods, and ideas. It would impoverish us, then use the hatred and anger which results to target immigrants in ever more grievous ways.

The open society has the ability to improve people’s lives in a way populism never will. But to do so, it must commit to its principles: rationality, transparency, sober policy-making and national responsibility. We need a tax policy which is geared to growth, an economic strategy which desires growth, and a political agenda which is prepared to face down the nativist complaints which get in the way of growth. That is how we will improve people’s lives. That is how we can kill populism.

The Budget may have had some welcome policies, but on the core issue of our time it was an act of criminal negligence.

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Odds and sods

It’s that time of year again: The day of my world famous Black Friday Sale. For one month only, you get a massive 50% reduction off a paid subscription to Striking 13. That’s 50% off of fuck all, giving you absolutely nothing back in return. Just £2.50 a month or £25 for the year.

Other websites offer piddly deals, like ten or 20% off their goods. But I go deep with the cuts, slicing half off the asking price. What better values can there be? Well, admittedly the sort that offers something which you cannot get for free. But there is no sense of pride in that, none of the deep satisfaction that comes with funding independent liberal journalism.

Joking aside though, I really will give you nothing. Sign up here.

We’ve gone live with our first Origin Story live show of 2026.The previous shows all sold out quickly, so we’ve booked our biggest ever venue - the Bloomsbury Theatre. We’re already starting work on how that night will work. It’s going to be rather wonderful.

This week’s i paper column was on the Budget, obviously, and this week’s Origin Story, in a rather wonderful bit of timing, is a recording of our previous live show, which you can watch below. Oh, while we’re on the subject of Black Friday deals, the i paper has a very robust offer of £20 for the year or £2 for the month for a premium subscription. That has the rather significant additional benefit of giving you things you can’t just access for free, ie getting you past the paywall, and I highly recommend it.

I am loving Pluribus, on Apple TV. It’s such a delightfully unusual piece of work. At first I thought that the notion of the whole world being happy is as distant from our current preoccupations as it is possible to imagine. But it turns out that the sight of people behaving in a drone-like fashion is in fact very on point to the world we live in today.

Most of all, it is so refreshingly different. We’re so used to seeing dystopian Children-of-Men-style thrillers about collapsed future states, that it’s actually a relief to see a topical sci-fi which comes from a completely different angle, namely that of a disturbing utopia. We live in a George Orwell world, but Aldous Huxley has always had just as much to say and it’s about time we explored his concerns a little more thoroughly. It’s also very satisfying to see a return to the style of the Twilight Zone.

Most of all, I start each episode with no idea at all what the hell is going to happen next. Feels great.

Right that’s your lot, you cunts. Fuck off.

2025-11-19T09:08

It’s 9:08 (CET) on November 19, Julien Constant, Le Parisien’s journalist on the police beat, hits publish. Even though he is not the resident technology journalist—that would be Damien Licata Caruso—their name is on the byline for an article about tech in the “miscellaneous” section:

Google Pixel et GrapheneOS : la botte secrète des narcotrafiquants pour protéger leurs données de la police

Google Pixel and GrapheneOS: The drug traffickers’ secret weapon to protect their data from the police

A wonderfully sensationalist title on an article composed of quotes from unnamed police officers and analysts. Included is a quote from a police source that the presence of GrapheneOS “constitutes a clear indicator of technical sophistication and intent to hide.” The article then states that “the software can erase everything on the phone and then show a fake Snapchat page when someone tries to read the information or decrypt it.”

What?

2025-11-19T11:15

It’s 11:15 now and Mr Constant hits publish again. This time on an interview with the head of the national cybercrime unit, Johanna Brousse, titled Téléphones protégés utilisés par les narcotrafiquants : « Rien n’est inviolable ! »

Secure phones used by drug traffickers: “Nothing is tamper-proof”

That title! Wow! What secrets could this subscriber-only article hold?

3 questions and 3 answers. That’s it.

(this is my own paraphrasing…)

Q1. Why do drug traffickers use these devices?

A1. To hide their communications.

Q2. Are these types of telephones widespread in the world of organized crime?

A2. Doesn’t really answer the question, says that some people have a legitmate reason to keep their communications private. They conclude with a little “if we find out there is a connection between the criminals and GrapheneOS, we will charge them.”

Q3. What tools do the police have to fight these criminals?

A3. Nothing is tamper-proof! You just have to be smarter and stronger. Engineers need to create the tools to recover the information, but it is expensive and reserved for organized crime and terrorism.

I know. Pulitzer-worthy.

2025-11-19T11:56

Later on that morning, @GrapheneOS@GrapheneOS.social posts a thread revealing the interview questions and their responses. They are unhappy. Quite unhappy. It’s understandable.

The thing is, one does not mention GrapheneOS on the web unless they love drama. Did Mr Constant know this? Did the police know this?

2025-11-19T19:45

I know that Emma Confrère, economics and et cetera journalist at Le Figaro, doesn’t care what GrapheneOS thinks. She also likes sensational titles, so at 19:45 published Qu’est-ce que GrapheneOS, ce logiciel détourné par certains trafiquants pour supprimer les informations de leur téléphone ?, or:

What is GrapheneOS, the software used by certain traffickers to delete information from their phones?

(The frickin’ article is tagged “telephone,” “dealer,” and “application.” Dealer! Hilarious! I tagged my post “dealer” too, because why the hell not?)

Confrère glosses over the history and tells us that “certain criminals” can use GrapheneOS to reset their phone with a simple code. That is to say, that instead of entering a code to unlock the device, they can enter a different code to wipe the device.

Sensational! They are referring to a “Duress PIN,” and there are applications for that, you don’t need a special operating system.

Anyway, Confrère then explains that GrapheneOS was cited in a confidential memo sent out on 7 November to police services as a tool used by drug traffickers. She then paraphrases and quotes the same information mentioned in the article in Le Parisien, and includes some quotes from GrapheneOS.

2025-11-20T12:25

The next day at lunch, La Quadrature du Net, a French digital-rights advocacy group, shares the story and offers a good synopsis underlining the French government’s support of Chat Control. This is, in my opinion, the real story. France supports Chat Control. Several other EU members support Chat Control. What is Chat Control?

The “Chat Control” proposal would mandate scanning of all private digital communications, including encrypted messages and photos. This threatens fundamental privacy rights and digital security for all EU citizens.

— https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

The government is indeed showing their cards: they need public support to snoop on encrypted devices so they make sure we hear about the violent criminal drug traffickers using GrapheneOS.

Thank you, LQDN.

2025-11-21T07:16

Content mill PiunikaWeb is in need of clicks and churns out GrapheneOS accuses Murena & iodé of sabotage, pulls servers from France over police ‘threats’, signed by their resident football fan. This isn’t a citable site or reputable source of tech info. The two-member team has published thousands of articles between them on the theme of Google Pixel phones. This post tries to fan the flames:

The drama surrounding GrapheneOS has escalated from a debate over security patches to what looks like full-blown corporate and geopolitical warfare.

Dang. Warfare?

The claims made are pulled from asses unknown and reference an earlier story about a social media post…

Rewind to 2025-11-18

GOS said they are “aware a small company […] has been attacking [them] with misinformation and libel since November 12.”

The content mill mentioned this and points the finger at Murena, /e/OS, and iodé because somehow a press release from September is a “dig.”

2025-11-21T14:26

Welcome back to the present timeline…

The drama is reaching its peak now and Gaël Duval needs to intervene:

I’d like to state *very clearly* that Murena and e Foundation are not related in case to this ridiculous and pseudo-drama

What we seek is to totally ignore these guys, and have nothing to do with them.

And again, and again, despite what they are repeating, we are NOT competitors, as we are not in the hardened-security market spaces.

Good. To the point, no name-calling, create distance. Well done.

(But there is still more time for drama!)

2025-11-23T00:42

GrapheneOS says “screw you guys we’re goin’ home” as they pull a Cartman—Eric Cartman, the crybully from South Park—and announce plans to relocate their servers away from France.

2025-11-24T20:27

You guys, you guys!

We no longer have any active servers in France

2025-11-25T14:38

Pebbles of drama spread ripples across the pond of alternative ROMs. Mr Duval is forced to call a spade a spade:

The rethoric behind the violent graphene sect when we try to defend ourselves from their accusations: “they are accusing us!”

The zealots and acolytes must have been busy. They too like a little drama.

2025-11-25T15:38

Setting the record straight, we are informed that their feelings were definitely not hurt by any newspaper, despite the bias, because they were totally going to bail on France anyway:

A false narrative is being pushed about GrapheneOS claiming we’re ending operations in France due to the actions of 2 newspapers. That’s completely wrong. If both newspapers and the overall French media had taken our side instead of extreme bias against us, we’d still be leaving.

This is also the cue to their followers to stand down…

My thoughts

It might seem like I have a bias for or against certain actors in this story. You may have even been reading and thinking to yourself, “who does this person think they are?” Rest assured, I am of zero consequence to any project mentioned here. I have helped people install GrapheneOS, /e/OS, and iodé, and I think any step away from Google is a step in the right direction. I also use the GrapheneOS camera app.

I do have two major issues with what has happened here:

First, the lack of due diligence from two national newspapers. Le Parisien should have at least let the tech journalist take the reins and conduct a proper Q&A with GrapheneOS and include their responses in the interview article.

Then, the bad buzz this has caused. Instead of just releasing a single statement and drawing attention to the looming threat of Chat Control and its future iterations, for example, or simply saying “the statements in these newspapers are false,” GrapheneOS did what they have done in the past. They caused drama, pointed fingers, and made an attempt to paint themselves the victim. Now the Murena, /e/OS, and iodé projects have been pulled into this drama and users may be debating whether they should continue supporting the projects or not.

This has happened before in different shapes and forms. If GrapheneOS disagrees, they make sure people know. They have publically denigrated Linux, Firefox, YouTubers, open source developers, and other alternative Android ROMs and then acted like they were wronged.

It doesn’t matter if that was the intention or not. There could very well be a secret plot against them, but the Internet is the courtroom, and the public is the jury. The optics here are not in their favour. The attitude makes these projects, and in extension the open source community and the users of open source software as a whole, look like a bunch of chatroom trolls and cartoonesque socially-awkward mean-spirited nerds that can’t follow their own rules.

Brutal economic realities are prompting a shift in Labour’s tone on Europe. But will it dare tell the whole truth about Britain’s predicament?

Rachel Reeves has approached this week’s budget like a reluctant swimmer inching into freezing water, trying to ease the unpleasantness by incremental exposure. The chancellor started paddling delicately around the problem of insufficient revenue at the end of the summer. First, she refused to stand by former insistence that tax rises in last year’s budget would be the last. “The world has changed,” she said.

Then, earlier this month, she took a bigger stride into the icy waves. There was a speech promising to “do what is necessary” to fund public services and keep borrowing costs down. Downing Street did not discourage speculation that this meant reneging on Labour’s 2024 manifesto promise not to raise income tax. Too deep! Within 10 days the Treasury had retracted the hint. The manifesto commitment still stood after all. As any cold-water swimmer knows, this aborted plunge and shivering retreat is the worst of all techniques. Nothing prolongs the pain like indecision.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

From public service broadcasting to an independent judiciary, these are the things that we must fight to keep

How can we defend our democracies against those who would destroy them? We talk a lot about strategies for keeping anti-liberal, nationalist populists out of power, but Donald Trump’s daily wielding of a wrecking ball shows that it’s equally important to reinforce your democracy so it can withstand a period of populists in power.

Germany has a concept called wehrhafte Demokratie, often weirdly translated as “militant democracy” but actually meaning a democracy capable of defending itself. Under this motto, some in Germany are proposing to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now one of the most popular parties in the country. That’s the wrong way to go. It would only reinforce the far-right party’s supporters in their conviction that the democratic state itself is a kind of liberal elitist conspiracy, and impart to the AfD the nimbus of martyrdom. The French experiment of a “republican arc”, in which virtually all the other parties agree only on keeping out Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, is also visibly backfiring. Such a wide range of parties unsurprisingly fails to agree on urgently needed reforms and the National Rally can go on criticising from the sidelines. So it’s worth contemplating the example of the Netherlands, where the party of the inflammatory populist Geert Wilders was allowed into power in a coalition government, failed to deliver, brought that government down by withdrawing from the coalition, and lost the subsequent election (albeit only narrowly) to a liberal party led by the young, dynamic Rob Jetten.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist

Coding purists once considered BASIC harmful. AI can't even manage that

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