Politics

Contemplating a new year always raises questions. Was there a Third Protocol? What was wrong with Oral-A? Can Keir Starmer survive 2026 as prime minister? It is the biggest question in politics this year and the fact that it does not have an easy answer illustrates the mess Starmer has got himself into over the past 18 months. A few days before Christmas, a senior figure in No. 10 outlined how Labour’s high command still believes the winds will change for the party in 2026: a ‘virtuous circle’ of falling interest rates and inflation, more investment, growth, and rising confidence in the government among the public and the Parliamentary Labour Party. Another Starmer loyalist noted the old adage: ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn.

January Downing Street said Rachel Reeves would remain in her role as Chancellor of the Exchequer ‘for the whole of this parliament’. She made a speech standing behind a placard saying: ‘Kickstart economic growth.’ Axel Rudakubana, 18, was sentenced to at least 52 years in prison for the murder of three girls in a knife attack at Southport. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, announced a ‘rapid audit’ of grooming gangs by Baroness Casey of Blackstock. Wildfires raged around Los Angeles. Luke Littler, 17, became world darts champion. The aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires in California (Mario Tama/Getty Images) February President Donald Trump of the United States and the Vice-President, J. D.

Suddenly it’s Ibsen season in Washington, DC. It’s true that only Shakespeare’s plays are performed worldwide more often than Henrik Ibsen’s. But to have two of the great 19th-century Norwegian playwright’s works running at once in the nation’s capital is unusual. And the works in question – An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck – deliver contradictory messages. Together they say something not only about the state of the arts in Washington, but also about the state of the liberal mind. Politics is very much a presence on the capital’s stages. The city’s two main Shakespeare organizations, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Folger Theatre, last year presented seasons heavily influenced by the presidential election.

As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria. Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in doubt as to who was in charge.

When John Swinney, the Scottish National Party leader, and former ambassador Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. “If you’re going to do it,” Scotland’s First Minister suggested, “you might as well go big.” This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term.

New York vs Los Angeles is done to death. Those cities have already captured the American heart on stage and screen. The next great rivalry (or is it an alliance?) is unfolding between the bastions of the nerds: Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Each prizes a different facet of intellect – DC the operator, San Francisco the inventor, functioning as co-architects of a new American order. We tell ourselves SF and DC represent different values: disruption and order, innovation and stability. And yet the cities are locked in a symbiotic embrace. San Francisco builds new worlds in the image of its algorithms; Washington manages those worlds through policy and process. But this is a cold comfort. While both claim to act in the public interest, each sees the human as a problem to be solved.

Javier Milei, Argentina’s self styled “anarcho-capitalist” President, defied pessimistic poll predictions on Sunday to win in the midterm elections and save his radical economic reforms. With almost all the votes counted, Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party had won nearly 41 percent of the national vote, while the main left-wing Peronist opposition Fuerza Patria party netted just over 31 percent.  Up for grabs in the election were 127 of the 257 seats in the lower house of Congress, and 24 out of 72 seats in the upper house Senate. The LLA won 64 lower house seats and 12 in the Senate, enough for Milei to overcome an opposition veto against his most radical measures.

One of the most striking things about Trump 2: The Trumpening is how few characters are still on board from the Donald’s first term. Other than the President himself, it’s almost a completely different cast. Even the First Lady only rarely appears, as though she’s contractually obliged as a guest star for the occasional episode. But there’s one very important exception: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And while Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts millions of Americans, Miller Derangement Syndrome is, as they used to say during Covid, a comorbidity. MDS may have reached its peak earlier this month when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to Miller as a “clown.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine continued his excellent sartorial adventure at the White House, appearing in an elegantly cut black suit and shirt on Friday as he met with President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room. But while they may have helped avoid any emanations of wrath from his host, his habiliments did not appear to prompt Trump to approve the dispatch of Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv, a coveted item indeed. “We’d much rather not need Tomahawks,” Trump said. “We’d much rather get the war over. It could mean a big escalation. It could mean a lot of bad things could happen.”  Back to square one, in other words. In August, Trump had claimed that his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin would lead to a breakthrough. It never happened.

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent the last week gnawing on the hand that feeds her, showing that no one in American politics is worse at reading the tea leaves.   Taylor Greene entered Congress in 2021 wearing a face mask that read “Trump Won.” She was so fervently a supporter of January 6 pardons that Georgians invoked an "insurrectionist disqualification clause" to try to remove her from Congress. But now that MAGA is riding high on a wave of world peace and prosperity, Taylor Greene has changed her tune and, though she says she’s still conservative, is sounding more like an unholy fusion of Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi.   Over the weekend, MTG appeared on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast, claiming that she is still “MAGA through and through.