Politics

Deputy heads have rolled. Britain’s populist Reform UK party, in the person of chairman Lee Anderson, announced this morning that Dan Jukes, Nigel Farage’s right hand man, and James Orr, the party’s head of strategy, have stood down and abandoned the party conference. “They have left the building and they won’t be coming back,” Anderson said. Footage screened by Channel 4 on Thursday night showed Jukes appearing to suggest a way to get around electoral law to secure a foreign donation of £500,000 ($675,000). A reporter posed as a UK-based son of an American father, who was to give money to the son to give to Reform after being wooed by both Orr and Jukes.

Eleven years ago, on a cold midnight in Los Angeles, I lay on a chaise lounge at the pool of the (now abandoned) Standard Hotel, made famous in Sex and the City. I was gossiping with the Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte of the nascent online right: Breitbart editor and podcaster prototype Milo Yiannopoulos; his then assistant, the future think tank wonk Allum Bokhari; VICE’s politics editor Grace Wyler; an anti-abortion activist who was, for some reason, wearing a gay sex harness as a blazer, and a blonde Canadian named Lauren Southern, who wore a beanie that said “libertarian” and would go on to announce she had “left the right” every two years whenever she needed a check.

Thursday night, New Orleans. I have flown in from Los Angeles for work and am walking off the jet bridge, thinking about dinner, when 15 men in vests coalesce around me. I have never been arrested before. Even they find it strange, because I am British, and I am in Balenciaga, and I am ever so nice about it all. They take my belt, wallet, every piece of identification, my rosary and missal, cash. They put me in chains. Real chains. Every man they arrest, whatever he has done, ends up garlanded in steel like this: wincing, hopping, clattering. It hurts more than they make out on TV.  I mean to stare into his lens with defiance and stoicism, but I am fat and covered in filth and stains and drool Yes. I am being deported.

The Irish Rovers sang about the biggest mixup that you have ever seen: he was christened David Anthony, but still in spite of that, his father called him William while his mother called him Pat. Picture the feelings of Lake Ontario this morning. It was christened Lac Saint-Louis by Samuel de Champlain, but it's woken up to Canada calling it William and the US calling it Pat – or rather, Lake America (without the “of,” as Trump helpfully specified in his video on Truth Social). Do you really need two Dakotas? Although Lac Saint-Louis is surely a better and more historically founded name than Lake America, one can sympathize with the American compulsion to rename things. After all, what would Texas be without a little American intervention? (Mexico, as it happens.

It’s poetic that the same day Darline Graham won her primary to seek a full term in the United States Senate, the Wall Street Journal admitted it had published an AI-written op-ed and, based on opinion page editor Paul Gigot’s remarks about it, would happily do so again. “AI is a fact of modern life. People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more.” On social media, journalists at the New York Times and elsewhere were quick to voice objections to Gigot’s leniency, but others, including one at the Washington Post, shot back at the critics: how was publishing an AI-written op-ed any different from publishing a ghost-written one? She’s gaffe-prone.