Sorry but MPs are labouring under an entitled assumption they have access all areas, and they don’t

“What the hell has been going on here since we’ve been away?”

These are the words I uttered having arrived back in the UK in October 2022 from a series of foreign trips including the United Nations General Assembly – the diplomatic equivalent of two days of speed dating – and Japan.

It was three weeks into the Liz Truss Premiership that had opened with the death of Her Majesty the Queen. To a newbie to Government it was the grandest baptism of fire I could imagine. As a special adviser team we’d been straining every sinew at home and abroad, with a total focus on showing that a new Foreign Secretary was in the hot seat, was capable, credible and knew his stuff (he did, having been in the FCDO for two years already) – and then we looked around at what everyone else was up to and I said those words above.

This was the déjà vu I had when the hospital discharged me on Monday evening. I’m fine by the way – my thanks to those who messaged. Lost in a bubble of meds, antibiotics, and cannulas it wasn’t until I was resting at last in my own bed, I got really stuck into the news.

Israel had denied entry to two Labour MPs that almost-high-flyer Dame Emily Thornberry had described in near messianic terms in her fury over the outrage. Kemi Badenoch had ‘disloyally’ not rallied to their support on TV, siding with Israel’s right to decide who enters and who does not, cue orchestrated outrage from Labour MPs over Twitter/X, and as it turns out some murmurings from Tories.

The Foregin Office was, as ever – “deeply concerned”

“What the hell is going on here?” I said, to nobody in particular.

What follows, to be clear, is not really about Abitsam Mohammed MP, or Yuan Yuang MP, as people, or the cause they are entitled to support and pursue. They are victims, if you believe their Labour colleague, Melanie Ward MP, of “racism” no less

As she told the House “we cannot ignore the fact they are women of colour”.

That is a fact, that in fact, we can ignore because it is utterly irrelevant to the actual issue.

I will briefly trot through some obvious facts before explaining the entitlement on display by MPs over this incident was off the charts, and deeply hypocritical.

If there is a political aim that should stem from this incident, it is one I think almost everybody has missed, and is perhaps more worthy of debate than the frustrated campaign plans of two newbie MPs, by an over defensive increasingly secretive Nethanyahu Government.

Fact: The Foreign Office’s own travel advice – which seems to have eluded the current Foreign Secretary, who is both outraged and deeply concerned says that – entry to Israel is in the sole hands of the Israeli state and then lists reasons why some might struggle with their entry:

“including those who are considered to have publicly criticised the state of Israel. Foreign nationals can legally be refused entry if they: have publicly called for a boycott of Israel or Israeli settlements, [or] belong to an organisation which has called for a boycott.”

Fact: Abitsam Mohammed MP, and Yuan Yuang MP, who may well command the attention of their seasoned colleagues, and deserve to, have both done all the things listed there. Speeches, and campaigns, they haven’t hidden it. Indeed they are proud of their work. I don’t judge them for that.  Indeed one of their biggest complaints about their ultimate destination, the West Bank, is that it has no airport (also a fact) and one gets the impression they’d rather not have set foot in Israel at all if they could possibly have helped it.

Fact: Israel is a close ally of the UK, and is likely to remain so, whoever is in government. There are always thousands of questions about why the UK government stays so close to a state many describe as ‘rogue’ or ‘apartheid’ and some of those asking are not Owen Jones.

These are valid questions – it has always been possible to be supportive of the Israeli State and be uncomfortable with it’s government, just it has always been possible, for most of us, to be critical of Israeli actions and not dislike or distrust Jewish people.

Israel wears the reason we’ll stay allies quite lightly. It is a little known – sorry, fact – that there are innocently oblivious Brits, some of them British Muslims, alive today and enjoying their life because we are very close allies with Israel.

Should the Israeli’s have denied them entry? I don’t know. Diplomatically it’s awkward since I think Israel’s allies are growing frustrated with trying to separate the desires of the Israeli state and it’s people towards the ongoing war in Gaza against Hamas – and the desire of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and it’s props, to recover and retain the personal power base he clawed back after the 7th of October happened on his watch. When the war is over, I suspect he is.

The 7^th of October and it’s horrors, which I wrote about here on the anniversary, is weighed against the undoubtedly shocking numbers of woman and children killed in Gaza in what’s followed, albeit the Islamo-facist terrorists in Hamas celebrate that loss of life as martyrdom and fuel for their cause (not my words, literally theirs) and deliberately hide their terrorists within the civilian population.

This debate can roll on, and it will. The debate on Monday wasn’t actually about all this, even though many MPs thought it was. Indulge me, one last undeniable fact:

No British MP, or elected politician in any other country, has an automatic, personal and privileged right of access to any other country. That you are an MP, of any party, or British, does not in reality confer upon you; special status, “official” status, or indeed any status at all. Border access lies, as it long has, at the sole discretion of the host country.

Almost none of the MPs who spoke on this issue seemed to acknowledge this. So we ended in the bizarre spectacle of people assuming a right they do not possess whilst attacking a right we ourselves as the UK government exercise.

It’s a bore to harp on about it, but speak of what you know. I worked for the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary. I knew, when I first heard the story that all the comments were predicated on the assumption these MPs had every right to enter Israel and that Isreal should not have denied that right.

Wrong.

Perhaps the debate should be, should we change that? It would need us all to agree global accords, possibly an amendment to the Vienna Convention, and of course stopping us from blocking politicians we aren’t too keen on from abroad, coming to Britain.

Because we’ve done, we do it, and I bet we keep doing it. Labour blocked an Israeli politician visiting in 2008. The Dutch far right leader Geert Vilders too. In 2009 Alan Johnson removed the obligation on Government to name people they have barred entry to. Didn’t stop us Conservatives blocking people.

We persuaded a Chinese politician to “adjust his travel plans” after he’d announced his intention to tour the UK on an ‘unofficial-official’ visit to spread the ‘truth’ about the Uighurs and how ‘nice’ the Chinese Communist party was to them. We explained the welcome he could expect; summoned to the FCDO, exactly what the agenda of the meeting would entail, and how we’d be obliged to let people know how it had gone.

He became too busy to fit the UK into his busy schedule.

If we must, let’s have a debate about the rights of British Parliamentarians to visit places and report back to the House, their constituents, our media and our polity. It’s a valid one.

But spare us all from the outrage of being denied rights you never had, and attacking a practice and principle we can and will continue to use ourselves.