Politics

Thursday

James Heale

Keir Starmer’s mission impossible

Labour backbenchers have spent years dreaming of the day they are in power and get ‘the call’ from the Prime Minister, inviting them to become ministers. But this time, a few were surprised that when the call came they heard the cut-glass accent of Sue Gray on the line. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised them. Her power over the government is hardly a secret: she helped run the country as a civil servant during the Tory years. Now she does so as a political adviser. Why disguise it? Sunak told the electorate to judge him on how well he fulfilled his five missions. In the end, they did Gray is

Thursday

Katy Balls

Starmer’s first big test

During the election campaign, Keir Starmer confessed to taking Friday nights off. ‘I’ve been doing this for years – I will not do a work-related thing after six o’clock, pretty well come what may,’ he told a radio host. But one month into his premiership, and the Prime Minister is struggling even to take his pre-planned summer holiday. Claims that Labour’s decisive victory would make the UK a pocket of stability in a polarised world now look hubristic. Starmer leads a country that others such as Australia and Malaysia are warning their citizens not to travel to. Meanwhile he is engulfed in a very public Twitter spat with tech billionaire

Thursday

Paola Romero

Evita meets Thatcher: the woman fighting Venezuela’s autocracy

Maria Corina Machado is showing the world how opposition politicians can fight an autocrat. When President Nicolas Maduro tried to thwart her campaign by banning her from taking domestic flights, she drove between her rallies on a motorcycle. When he then banned her from running as a candidate in Venezuela’s presidential election, which takes place this Sunday, she found a retired diplomat to run as her proxy. Without even being on the ballot, she may bring down Maduro’s socialist regime. Machado mixes the crowd-pulling allure of Evita Peron with the politics of Margaret Thatcher Venezuela is used to left-wing populists whipping up crowds by railing against America, the rich and

Thursday

Katy Balls

The new divide in Labour

Labour MPs ought to have been jubilant when they gathered for their weekly all-party parliamentary meeting on Monday. Most were still riding high after their party won a landslide majority. Yet there was a frisson of unease as some of the new flock took the opportunity to raise a grievance: the two-child benefit cap. ‘It’s the first week and they’re already complaining,’ sighed one MP this week. The unhappiness has been brewing since last summer when Keir Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said they were in no rush to lift the ‘nasty’ two-child benefit cap, introduced by Theresa May’s government in 2017. The policy, which restricts welfare payments to

Tuesday

Michael Beloff

Will the Olympics ever be politics-free?

The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ – must rank as a paradigm example of a precept more honoured in the breach than the observance. It is rivalled only by his anticipation that the Games would be ‘a vehicle for increasing friendly understanding among nations’. In an elegant series of vignettes entitled Aux Armes! Sport and the French: An English Perspective (Fairfield Books,

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Farage returns, Abbott reselected and Trump guilty 

Home Nigel Farage took over leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice and is standing for parliament in Clacton. This came as news on Monday to Tice, and to Reform’s candidate for Clacton, Tony Mack. Outside the Wetherspoons pub where he launched his campaign, Farage had a McDonald’s banana milkshake thrown over him. Farage proposed net-zero immigration. The Conservatives then said they would ask the independent Migration Advisory Committee for a recommended level for an annual cap on visas, and put that to a parliamentary vote. Invasive Asian hornets, which can eat 50 bees a day, were found to have survived a British winter and might stay permanently. Rishi

Saturday

Rohit Kachroo

Why South Africans lost faith in the ANC

A red dawn had just broken when Stephanie Sathege joined the queue to vote at her local polling station in the Johannesburg township of Alexander on Wednesday. The voting booths hadn’t yet opened, but she and dozens of other people were enthusiastic enough to be there ahead of time. A 62-old black South African, this was the seventh time she had been allowed to vote in a general election, having lived under democracy only half her life.  Today, just as she did 30 years ago, Stephanie is contributing to an historic outcome. But this election day would be different to all the previous ones.  ‘Since 1994, I have been voting for the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Headed for the canon: Withnail and I, at the Birmingham Rep, reviewed

After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film. This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version

Katy Balls

Inside Labour’s fight with the unions

By the end of the year, Britain may be one of the few countries in the democratic world where the right is losing. In America, Donald Trump is the favourite to win. Ahead of next month’s European Parliament elections, momentum is with Germany’s AfD, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Austria’s Freedom party. Migration is the most pertinent issue pushing Europe rightwards, but many voters are also turning to insurgent right-wing parties as a rebellion against the cost of net-zero policies. Labour sees an electoral benefit in sticking to its green energy plans to stop voters defecting to the Greens In the UK, the future of green scepticism looks somewhat

Tuesday

Philip Hensher

Exploring the glorious literary heritage of Bengal

The first time I went to India, nearly 30 years ago, I was sent as a young novelist by the British Council. Unusually, my first encounter with the country was Kolkata, a city I loved instantly. At the first event, after I had finished reading, an audience member gently asked if I liked Indian novels. I thought I was prepared, and mentioned R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Vikram Seth. The questioner smiled. ‘Those are all writers in English,’ he said. ‘What about writers in Indian languages?’ I was stumped. Perhaps many people of generous reading habits have the same block without knowing it. The liveliness of English-language writers

Tuesday

Michael Arditti

A timely morality tale: The Spoiled Heart, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

Who would have thought that the battle between champions of old-school socialism and contemporary identity politics for the post of General Secretary of Unify, a fictitious British trade union, would make for such riveting reading? Nayan Olak and Megha Sharma have little in common save their skin colour. He is the son of corner shopkeepers, who started work on the factory floor at 16 and is now the union’s Head of Workplace Disciplinary Actions. She is the daughter of a non-dom property magnate and recently appointed Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  Their political priorities are neatly encapsulated in their job titles. While never explicitly favouring either candidate, Sunjeev Sahota

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance

To come across dates and names carved into a choirstall or ancient tree is to experience a momentary frisson, a startled connection with the past. Yet this practice of making ‘unauthorised’ personal graphic statements in public spaces is often thought of as antisocial, something to be erased immediately. Unless of course they are by Banksy, whose spray-painted outpourings cost local councils a great deal to clean off before they came to be regarded as valid documents, articulating the thoughts and imaginings of the disaffected. In her ingenious new book Writing on the Wall, the art historian Madeleine Pelling has chosen to use these often transitory pieces of historical evidence as

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: hate crimes, surprise knighthoods and flaming rickshaws

Home The Hate Crime and Public Order Act came into effect in Scotland, making it a crime to communicate or behave in a manner ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive’, with the intention of stirring up hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. The Scottish government offered online training to 500 Police Scotland ‘Hate Crime Champions’. The author J.K. Rowling named ten people who call themselves women that she called men. Police Scotland said complaints had been received about her, but that but no action would be taken. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We should not be criminalising

James Heale

Could Sadiq Khan lose London?

With Labour 20 points ahead in the national polls, a lot of Tories have already written off next month’s mayoral contest in the capital. London, they maintain, is a Labour city that occasionally votes Conservative. But supporters of Sadiq Khan and his Tory challenger Susan Hall agree: it’s going to be closer than many think. The mayor’s image is as likely to be found on Conservativeleaflets as on Labour ones Three factors are held by both camps to be at play. The first is the incumbency factor versus ‘time for a change’. Khan’s re-election team has consulted other campaigns which won three in a row; all agreed this was the

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

In defence of forgiveness

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned. Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all

Thursday

Sam Kriss

How depressing when people over-identify with their ethnicity

I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day

The Spectator

What does Rachel Reeves stand for?

As the world discovered when she was caught lifting other people’s work for her book on women in economics, Rachel Reeves is not the most original of thinkers. But she has political talents. She has cultivated her image as an uninspiring technocrat in order to present herself as someone who will not spring surprises or take risks as chancellor. She thinks the state is inefficient and taxes are too high. She believes in ‘securonomics’, which sounds like a pleasing contrast to years of Tory policies. It is easy to preach fiscal discipline, but in office Labour would find it very difficult to contain spending Polls show that voters now think

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Putin may seem confident – but Russia’s future is bleak

How old will you be when Vladimir Putin’s next presidential term ends in 2030? Which of today’s world leaders will still be in office? By that time Putin will have been in power for 29 years, and just under half the population of the Earth at that time will have been born during his reign. On current form, Putin is set to see in at least two more US presidents – or more, if he chooses to stay in power until 2036. Putin has made a fetish of defending a Russian national sovereignty that no one had attempted to destroy When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many

Thursday

Toby Young

Joe Biden’s dog is out of control

I was shocked to read about the behaviour of Joe Biden’s dog, Commander. According to a CNN report based on freedom of information requests, he bit US Secret Service agents on 24 separate occasions between October 2022 and July 2023. There were also numerous other incidents involving the White House staff. These were not playful nips, either. The agents reported being bitten on the wrist, forearm, elbow, waist, chest, thigh and shoulder, with at least two bites requiring stitches. On one occasion, an agent was bitten so badly that tours of the White House had to be suspended for 20 minutes while a janitor mopped up the blood. During his

Anshel Pfeffer

Permanent stalemate in Gaza suits Netanyahu

Jerusalem After midnight on Thursday is dead-time for the Israeli media. The weekend editions have gone to print (newspapers don’t come out on Shabbat) and the Friday night TV news shows have been pre-recorded. The country’s journalists are yearning for respite from a long week covering the war. Benjamin Netanyahu chose that black hole of news, 2 a.m. last Friday, to leak his ‘Day after Hamas’ plan for post-war Gaza. There was no speech. No briefings. Just a page and a bit, double-spaced, presented to his cabinet for discussion. The plan has not been designed to end the war in Gaza. It is about Netanyahu’s own political survival But the plan