Ian Leslie

The line of ex-prime ministers at the Cenotaph ceremony is getting embarrassingly long. Since 2016, Britain has added four to the invite list and is about to add a fifth. We wouldn’t wish for any of them to return to their former office. In any objectively scored league table of post-war British PMs, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer would all struggle to get out of the relegation zone. This run of bad leaders is one of the central mysteries of British politics, and perhaps we don’t ponder it enough. Is it an unlucky streak, like getting tails five times in a row when you bet on heads? That seems implausible. There is probably a shrinking number of talented candidates. Even so, you’d think we might get lucky now and again.

There is an argument that the (further) disgrace of Peter Mandelson has been magnified out of all proportion. Mandelson was fired from his government post several months ago. These latest revelations will rightly ensure his permanent exclusion from civic life and possibly his inclusion in jail, but they shouldn’t be the dominant story of the day. Britain has much bigger and more urgent problems than the question of how to withdraw an honorary title from someone who can make no use of it anyway.Yes, the affair raises a question mark against Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s judgement, but the page is already dense with those. The marginal value of this one is near zero. Why aren’t we obsessing over our chronically sluggish economy? Our failure to build houses and infrastructure?

For all his problems, Keir Starmer has never been a victim of high expectations. When he entered Downing Street in 2024, voters did not throng the streets as they did for Tony Blair in 1997. There was little talk of new dawns. Britain was too battered by Brexit and its aftermath, and by a series of dismayingly inadequate Tory prime ministers, to feel optimistic about its next leader. Starmer’s reversals stem from a staggering lack of forethought about how to run the country he had just spent three years campaigning to govern Then there was the leader himself, a man almost incapable of inspiring warmth or excitement. Voters accepted him as the least bad option. But there was also a sense that he was solid, dependable and competent.

Last week I attended a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No.3 at the Barbican Centre in the City of London. Gustavo Dudamel conducted his former orchestra, which he nurtured to global fame: the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela. It was a special night, as pretty much every performance of this symphony is. Mahler’s third is gigantic in every sense. His level of ambition for it was insane. He set out to do nothing less than capture the whole world: the creation of the earth, mountains and valleys, flora and fauna; all of music, high and low: the village band, church choir and Romantic orchestra; and all of humanity: joy and nostalgia and pain and terror, and, above all, love.

This is one of a series of posters that adorn the walls of Westminster Underground station, through which many MPs and aides travel to work. On Friday, MPs will be voting on whether or not to legalise assisted dying. The posters, funded by a campaign group called Dignity In Dying, present a series of individuals happily contemplating the prospect of ending their own lives. The vibe is feel-good, joyful and glossy, somewhere between a cosmetics brand and Kamala Harris ‘24. I think they are the creepiest ads I’ve ever seen. When this bill was introduced a couple of months ago, I didn’t have much of an opinion on the issue. I’d read that things were getting pretty weird in Canada and the Netherlands, so I was wary.

In 2019 Labour lost its fourth election in a row and suffered its worst defeat since 1935. The party was crushed, not just electorally but emotionally. In 2015, it had parted ways with Ed Miliband and fallen for Jeremy Corbyn, like a wounded lover rushing from one dysfunctional relationship into an even worse one. For four years it tore itself apart in a series of unseemly internecine rows over a leader despised by most of its own MPs, pilloried in the press, and held in contempt by voters, including traditionally Labour voters. Ideologues held sway in the party’s institutions and at its grassroots. The electoral map had been reshaped to the Tories’ advantage, perhaps permanently, by Brexit. Labour now needed a staggering 123 additional seats to win a majority.