Politics

He may not have much respect for the ‘Clown’, but when it comes to the Queen Emmanuel Macron is as smitten as his compatriots. With political relations between France and Britain at their coldest for decades, and Macron reportedly regarding Prime Minister Boris Johnson as more suitable for the circus, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has provided the French president with an opportunity to warm up his rhetoric. In a video address to Her Majesty published on Thursday, Macron praised the constancy of the Queen’s Francophilia throughout her 70 years on the throne. ‘Times have changed, Europe has evolved, our continent is again experiencing war,’ said Macron. ‘Through these transformations, your

Is Boris Johnson’s government about to fall apart? Twice since World War Two, Tory governments have broken up after a prolonged period of rule. They have died not because of a single crisis, but slowly expired due to sheer exhaustion, disunity, and lack of purpose or ideas. Now Boris’s regime, after another lengthy Tory period in power, looks as though it may be heading towards a similar exit. But can it avoid its fate? The parallels between today’s events and those of 1963 and 1992-7 are inescapable. In all three cases we have a tired team of Tories bereft of ideas simply running out of steam. In all three we

Fresh from their impressive gains in last month’s elections, attention in London Labour circles has now turned towards the future intentions of Sadiq Khan. The capital’s mayor won re-election last year and is due to see his term expire at the beginning of May 2024. But after two terms in office, will he be running for a third? In January he told James O’Brien on LBC that he was ‘looking forward’ to standing again for the mayoralty and said he ‘doesn’t want’ Sir Keir Starmer’s job. But such claims have not dampened speculation that Khan could return to the Commons, depending on the date of the next election. If, as

Shakespeare’s Globe has a new wheeze to popularise its shows. The latest production, Henry VIII, is supported by a seminar about racism in this late play which the Bard co-wrote with John Fletcher. The online event, hosted by the Globe’s Dr Will Tosh, features dramatist-in-residence, Hannah Khalil, and Mira Kafantaris, a critical race theorist from the US. Both these experts proclaim their status as migrants and they examine Shakespeare through the lens of racist exploitation. At first glance it seems tricky to link racism with Henry VIII who was born four years before Columbus sailed for the Caribbean. But racism is everywhere, it seems. ‘Anne Boleyn’, explains Kafantaris, ‘was foreign born,

Poland is back. Not so long ago, the country was seen as an effigy of democratic backsliding, rather than a post-communist success story. In 2017, the European Commission made its first use of the Article 7 procedure against Poland over concerns about eroding separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden warned about ‘what’s happening from Belarus through Poland and Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world’. In doing so, he placed the Polish government in the company of some of the worst dictators on the planet. But within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland managed to