Politics

Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.  The conventional wisdom about such victories – particularly about those achieved by Wilson and Blair – is that they are the fruit of Labour moderates taking control of the party from the left, thus reassuring the conservative-minded middle classes. You still see this narrative about Starmer surprisingly often. He

17 October 2019 will forever be etched in the memory of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico, as Black Thursday. That afternoon, two convoys of soldiers knocked on the door of a safehouse hiding Ovidio Guzmán López, son of drug baron ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and scion of the Sinaloa Cartel, to execute an arrest warrant. ‘The boss has fallen! The boss has fallen!’ crackled the walkie-talkies. Within minutes, heavy gunfire erupted as mobsters arrived with machine gun turrets mounted on the back of their pick-up trucks. They took over the neighbouring streets and then the rest of the city, seizing roads and bridges and setting buses alight to act as burning

The Prime Minister of France has warned his people that any form of Frexit would leave them weeping into their pastis. ‘Don’t be like the British who cried after Brexit,’ said Gabriel Attal, in a radio interview on Thursday.  ‘A large majority of British people regret Brexit and sometimes regret not turning out to vote, or voting for something that was negative for their country.’ Attal then cited a couple of examples of this negativity; what he described as ‘massive economic difficulties’ and more ‘illegal immigration than ever’. Attal’s Brexit bashing is an indication of the panic spreading through the ruling party The man described as a ‘mini-Macron’ has clearly