Politics

A few years ago a Marine turned novelist, G. Michael Hopf, captured a classic truth in a pithy formula. Inspired by cyclical theories of history — in particular the generational “turnings” of William Strauss and Neil Howe — Hopf wrote in his novel Those Who Remain, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” One need not put much stock in Strauss and Howe to appreciate the maxim. It could just as well be derived from Sallust or other classical sources. Or from Machiavelli: in his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, the Florentine philosopher considers where best to build a city.

The Taiwanese rock band Mayday – ‘the Beatles of the Chinese-speaking world’ – are being investigated by the Chinese Communist party for the crime of lip syncing. Local authorities are combing through recordings of Mayday’s Shanghai concerts from November looking for evidence of ‘deceptive fake-singing’, as the CCP calls it, which has been illegal in China since 2009 (although the law is rarely enforced). Last month, an anonymous Taiwan-ese government source told Reuters that the investigation had been cooked up because the pop stars refused a request from Beijing to say something nice about China in the run-up to Taiwan’s election this Saturday. The band found itself at the centre of a row between the presidential hopefuls about Chinese interference.

The 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden, but it’s also a referendum on a regime. This is how both sides see it. Liberal democracy itself is at stake according to progressives. For Trump supporters, the question at issue is legitimacy of the Deep State. These are different names for the same thing: a leadership caste and its ideology of government. In practice, liberal democracy means a democracy in which liberals never lose power.

When David Cameron arrived at the Foreign Office on Monday, he told staff he might be a bit rusty when it comes to modern politics. He joked that the only WhatsApp group he is in ‘is to do with my children’s school play’. Cameron may have been out of frontline politics for a while, but the rules stay the same. As Tory leader, he championed his favourites and promoted his supporters to the cabinet table, even at the expense of ignoring older colleagues’ claims. This week, his successor has done the same. A trio of thirtysomething former special advisers elected in 2019 now comprise the Prime Minister’s Praetorian Guard. Laura Trott, 38, the former pensions minister, is the chief secretary to the Treasury.

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements – hundreds of pages of thoughts, documents and reflections. They raise an important question which Baroness Hallett’s inquiry shows little interest in answering: was lockdown based on a false premise, conjured up by poorly drafted models? Only later did No.

Home At the Labour party conference, cheerful in the hall but overshadowed by the war in Israel, Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said that in government he would build 1.5 million homes and a host of ‘Labour new towns’. He wanted to spend £1.1 billion a year on higher overtime payments within NHS England to reduce waiting lists. A protestor poured glitter over him. Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, also said Labour would ‘rebuild Britain’. ‘Rachel Reeves is a serious economist,’ said Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England. Labour took Rutherglen and Hamilton West in a by-election that the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, called a ‘seismic night in Scotland’.