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Good afternoon from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
The not-so-strange death of Europe
One of the pleasures of being an editor is occasionally getting the chance to commission an article that turns into an important book. I hope James Jeffrey’s article, “Racing the sunset: a pilgrim odyssey across a dying Europe”, will end up between hard covers as it deserves a much wider readership than the 15,000 Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels political and policy influencers who read The Mace’s weekly wire.
For 10 months, the ex-army officer trekked 3,500km across Europe by foot. The scale of migration he witnessed may not have been as dramatic as the storming of Ceuta, but his exclusive account for us of his solo odyssey is a wake-up call to how the Europe he knew growing up in Germany has vanished as a result of open borders and illegal crossings.
Setting out from Berlin to walk to the far western coast in Spain’s Galicia region, Jeffrey couldn’t predict what he would encounter walking through three of Europe’s largest countries.
Hollowed out
Alongside the beauty and magnificence of the lands traversed, the evidence on the ground – in particular the human component, along with the villages, towns and cities that house most of those humans and also give form to their shared European culture – gave credence to the claims that “old Europe” is being hollowed out right before our eyes.
The debate about mass migration is full of numbers, as it should be. But these numbers fail to give an adequate sense of what the human aspect looks and feels like in the embodied realm when so many people come from elsewhere.
It’s a distinction that the mass-migration observer and novelist Jean Raspail described as “a rude awakening, a plunge into reality”, when what you’ve seen online or on TV actually becomes physically real in front of you; when “the series suddenly breaks through the screen, the glass smashing into one’s steaks and fries”.
Flashpoint Cueta
We saw such a moment on July 31 when close to 60,000 African men invaded the Spanish territory of Ceuta from Morocco, just across the Strait of Gibraltar. Many swam there and others stormed the border fence.
So serious is the issue that EU interior ministers held emergency talks on Tuesday about the political problem of border security. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, has called for “united action” on the issue. She has said that the flux of migrants from Morocco into Ceuta showed that “we must do more to further strengthen our borders”.
Decline and Fall
The wave of migrant immigration that James Jeffrey witnessed on the ground during his cross-continent trek was not so headline-grabbing. But almost 10 years after the publication of Douglas Murray’s seminal book The Strange Death of Europe, his journey confirmed Murray’s pessimistic conclusion that Europe as we know it is self-destructing due to its border policies, declining birthrates and embrace of multiculturalism amounting to a form of “suicide”.
At the end of his book, Murray ends with two alternative visions of Europe – one optimistic, one highly depressing. Alas, Jeffrey’s travels across Europe over the last year only confirmed the more apocalyptic vision which the recent pictures of Ceuta being overrun by a swimming army of young and paperless men in flip-flops has brought home to the public in no uncertain terms.
What makes Jeffrey’s account unique is that he was able to compare today’s multiculturally ravaged Europe with the Cold War era he knew and loved growing up in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s as the son of a British Army officer.
His years in Germany as a military “pad brat” living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall left him with a desire to reconnect with the country. But his travels only achieved the opposite: a sense of being an alien in the Europe he once loved. His full article will be published in the autumn issue of The Mace.
Service with a smile
Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo – backed by Andy Burnham – has just set out her new vision for the civil service. As we report in an exclusive article written by Jonathan Freeman, Chief Executive of the Charity for Civil Servants (CFCS), she is confident that civil servants will “adapt and evolve to meet the challenges of the new world”, just as it has since 1854 and the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.
Despite Romeo’s vision, suspicion remains among many commentators. But a report that Freeman will be publishing later this summer turns this scepticism on its head. Polling among 1,100 civil servants shows that Dame Antonia’s confidence in the civil service today is well-founded.
According to Freeman, the report will show that civil servants are more than ready to support the new administration on two of the flagship changes to the substance and operations of government, just as they have always supported the government of the day.
In this exclusive new research for the CFCS, civil servants said overwhelmingly that they are prepared to ensure that decision-making is focused in local communities. Some 66% of respondents expect that “more roles will move outside London”, which they support. This is hardly surprising as a majority of civil servants are already based outside London and the south-east; as of March 2025, almost 75% of civil servants were based in other regions of the UK.
Our robot friend
The new report will also reveal that AI is regarded by civil servants as an “opportunity not a threat”. Freeman’s research for the CFCS reveals that civil servants are acutely aware they are on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. More than a third of the workforce expects automation to result in significant headcount reductions in routine administration, while others anticipate a massive upheaval in required skills.
But, particularly among the younger cohort of civil servants, there is an anticipation that AI will help deliver a shift in focus towards complex, citizen-facing challenges. They understand that AI can help them to be more efficient, more responsive and more effective. In short, they welcome the potential that AI presents to enable them to do their jobs – serving ministers and the country – better. They know that this will disrupt and all they ask is that they be supported and trained effectively through this vital transition.
Read Jonathan Freeman’s exclusive op-ed article here.
Amazing Grace
One result of a new prime minister in Downing Street has been a radical shake up of the No 10 comms team, including the appointment of a new “political spokesperson”. Sarah Brown, who has spent the past decade handling communications for Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has been brought in as Downing Street’s director of communications.
But it is Grace Pritchard, a former special adviser to Ed Miliband who ran communications for Burnham during the Makerfield campaign, that has caught my interest. I like that she has no qualms about using a glamorous photo of herself in a party dress, holding a champagne flute, on her X profile.
I am guilty of the same. The photo for my Insta @williamrpcash (please follow!) was taken years ago while sipping a pina colada at the bar of the La Mamounia hotel in Morocco. To date, it seems that no pressure has been exercised within Burnham’s closest ranks to change Pritchard’s photo as it may not “project” the right image.
I am not suggesting in any way that Burnham’s new political spokesperson – who describes herself on X as a “Yorkshire lass” (Wakefield via Westminster) – may be any sort of party girl. Far from it. Her LinkedIn profile photo is of an anonymous rural landscape. But it has been noted that Andy Burnham has enjoyed posing in pubs on the campaign trail with a pint and, at times, seems to be outdoing Nigel Farage when it comes to being your regular pint-pulling politician.
Lass is more
Frankly, this Northern lad (and lass) culture is a welcome change from Starmer’s dull quasi-puritanism or the cliched “beer and sandwiches” image of No 10 from Harold Wilson’s time negotiating with the trade unions. My mother used to work as a “garden girl” secretary and typist in Downing Street in the 1960s and would often work late shifts when Labour foreign secretary George Brown would return from the Commons to meetings with Harold Wilson blind drunk.
Brown’s drinking problem was so bad that in 1976 The Times wrote a leading article with the line, “George Brown drunk is a better man than Harold Wilson sober.” A tired and emotional Brown had resigned from the Labour Party and then famously tumbled into the gutter outside. It was meant as a paradoxical tribute to his raw courage and core character.
Grace under pressure
Grace Pritchard’s rise through the Labour ranks from running the party’s regional comms to a desk in Downing Street has been rapid. She was singled out by name during Burnham’s victory speech, where he told her on stage that she had been “absolutely brilliant” as part of his core northern campaign team.
“Grace is the best – widely respected as one of the sharpest comms people in the party,” one senior Labour colleague told Politico.
She began her career as a political correspondent but realised she couldn’t be impartial so went into comms instead. “Every journalist in the country has my phone number and they know if they need something, they can come to me and they’ll get an answer,” she told Leeds Trinity University media students in 2024.
Pritchard is a popular choice as Burnham’s spokesperson within the top Labour ranks. Everyone she has worked for – from Ed Miliband to Jo Coles, now deputy mayor for York and North Yorkshire – seems to have risen to the top with her. Formerly head of press for the anti-Brexit pressure group Best for Britain, Pritchard then became senior communications manager for Yvette Cooper, now Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
Dark arts doyenne
Part of her success stems from handing scoops to and garnering good relationships with political journalists outside Labour’s usual circle. “What was really important to Labour’s win (in 2024) was having relationships with papers naturally friendly to the Labour Party, like the Mirror, but also having really strong relationships with the Daily Mail and Telegraph,” she told Leeds media lecturer Leigh Purves.
Pritchard has been credited with using her cross-party media contacts to spin the news cycle in Starmer and now Burnham’s favour, and she’s also happy to admit she is well trained in old-fashioned Fleet Street-style media negotiations to win over the narrative.
“You either ‘kill’ stories by getting rid of it, like by debunking it and making it not news,” she told Purves. “Or by giving the journalists something that’s more interesting and ferrying them in a different direction, which is the ‘dark arts’.”
The Advocate: Lucy Gilchrist
Director of public policy and government affairs, Pepsico UKI - “Advocacy enables better policymaking”. Read more >
The Strategist: Dominic Raab
Former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab has joined geo-political advisory firm Kreab. Read more >
Leader in UK Public Affairs: Zara Harrington
Head of Public Affairs, Diageo. Read more >
Industry Watch: Sarah Brown
Director of communications, 10 Downing Street
Andy Burnham’s new No 10 comms unit will be led by former Sadiq Khan’s media director Sarah Brown. Read more >
Industry Watch: Tom Rayner
Managing Partner, Public Affairs and Policy team, Portland.
Tom Rayner has been promoted to managing partner of Portland’s public affairs and policy team, following Anita Boateng’s departure for Hanover. Read more >
The Mace Questionnaire: Rt Hon Darren Jones MP
With Andy Burnham purging Starmer loyalists, his politically savvy fixer-in-chief Darren Jones is now on the backbenches. In his Mace Q & A, the former Chief Secretary to the PM reveals that when the political going gets tough, he plays the D:Ream anthem “Things Can Only Get Better”. Read more >
From the Archive
With Burnham extending more local power to mayors, we look back at our Pepys columnist warning from 2022 about giving too much devolutionary power away. Read more >
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Credits: copy editor Piers Martin, digital editor Oliver Dean, associate publisher Wendy Coumantaros, captain of IT Daniel Colburn Smith, designer Cath Mackenzie, managing editor Emelia Wild and editorial assistant Ella Beadman.
