Zohran Mamdani

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The young women hypnotised by Polanski

A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the terms ‘Polanski’ and ‘young women’ into Google, and promptly fell down a different rabbit hole. Defining my search terms a little more clearly, it turned out that my informant was correct. So badly deranged are the youngest cohort of female voters in this country that a third of them really do believe that they have

Thursday

Peter Jones

Aristophanes would have loved Zohran Mamdani

Mr Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old elected mayor of New York, who has described the police as ‘racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety’, says that his top policy priority is implementing free universal childcare, taxing the wealthy, freezing rents, running buses for free and heaven knows what else. How very Marxist! The Greek comic writer Aristophanes (d. c. 386 bc) would have loved it. It was he who invented communism, after all, and had his audience in hysterics. His comedy Ecclesiazusae (‘Women Running the Assembly’) was produced in Athens in 391 bc. The women of Athens decide to seize power for themselves. They disguise themselves as men, enter

Friday

Gage Klipper

Mamdani will hand New York’s restaurants to the rich

There’s no shortage of catastrophic predictions for New York under Zohran Mamdani’s leadership. While the city probably won’t see breadlines, the wildly expensive, exhaustingly derivative restaurants that dominate its food scene are likely to become more dominant. Mamdani’s big pledge on food is to ‘make halal eight bucks again’. But it’s a ‘false promise’ of street-food affordability according to Heritage Foundation economist Nicole Huyer. She says Mamdani’s economic programme, which includes higher taxes, steeper leasing regulations and a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030, will effectively make restaurants even more expensive. ‘All of these great socialist policies that [Mamdani’s] planning to implement – he’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Train stabbing attack, Mamdani takes New York and the Andrew formerly known as prince

Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished and he made a private arrangement with the King to live on the Sandringham estate. His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Could Mamdani win through a 'conspiracy of cock ups'?

41 min listen

Zohran Mamdani is widely expected to win the race to be the next New York City mayor. The contest is now a three horse race between Mamdani, the Republican candidate Curtis Silwa and Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor. Current democratic mayor Eric Adams was also running but pulled out this week. David Kaufman, who worked on the Adams campaign, joins Freddy Gray in New York to dissect the race. They discuss the democratic ‘cock ups’ that led to Mamdani’s selection, the impact of the war in Gaza on the race and the dimension of identity politics. Could he win as the ‘anti-Trump’ candidate?

Thursday

William Moore

Claws out for Keir, Mamdani’s poisoned apple & are most wedding toasts awful?

46 min listen

This week: one year of Labour – the verdict In the magazine this week Tim Shipman declares his verdict on Keir Starmer’s Labour government as we approach the first anniversary of their election victory. One year on, some of Labour’s most notable policies have been completely changed – from the u-turn over winter fuel allowance to the embarrassing climb-down over welfare this week. Starmer has appeared more confident on the world stage but, for domestic audiences, this is small consolation when the public has perceived little change on the problems that have faced Britain for years. Can Starmer turn it around? Tim joined the podcast alongside the Spectator’s editor Michael

Kate Andrews

Meet Zohran Mamdani, the man who will ruin New York

Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like any good millennial, he documented every step. In his collared shirt and sneakers, he greeted and hugged supporters, who chanted his name. The celebrating was premature but justified. Four days later, Mamdani won 43.5 per cent of the vote in the first round, defying almost every pollster’s prediction. Within hours, the self-declared ‘democratic socialist’ was