Peter Rhodes on terrorists, bandwagons and an app to keep you warm

In yet another exercise in putting the record straight, Keir Starmer repeats how much he regrets his “island of strangers,” speech. I can't be the only one who thinks that if Starmer's words had been hailed as brilliantly perceptive by the “right” sort of people (EU liberals, US Democrats, refugee activists, etc), he'd have rushed to assure us that, yup, “island of strangers” was exactly what he meant to say. History will recall Keir Starmer as a man whose greatest personal regret was that he could sit on a fence or a bandwagon, but not both at the same time.

In a way, you can understand hip-hop/rap/punk performers endorsing the IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah at Glastonbury. Shock sells and the more you shock, the more you sell.

But what are we to make of the audiences, those braying, brain-dead, mostly middle-class kids who thought it was cool and edgy to chant along? Where is their sympathy for the kids - kids like them - who went to an innocent, Glastonbury-style festival in Israel two years ago and were set upon by the killers, kidnappers and rapists of Hamas? And when did the IRA, those psychopathic architects of the Birmingham Pub Bombings, suddenly become chic?

It makes one wonder. Supposing dozens of terrorists stormed Glastonbury with machine guns and grenades, slaughtering hundreds of festival-goers and taking hostages - how long would it be before the hostages were quietly forgotten and the murderers were applauded as heroes?

Meanwhile, those legends of the Sixties, The Searchers, made a farewell performance at Glastonbury which came as a surprise to those of us who attended their previous farewell tour a couple of years ago. That was when vocalist Frank Allen declared, to massive applause: “Anyone who wasn't a teenager in the Sixties had a deprived childhood.” Can't argue with that.