Politics

Dixmont, Yonne It has been a terrible year for the Le Pen family. Jean-Marie died in the first week of January. He was the patriarch who in 1972 co-founded the National Front and grew it into a formidable political machine before handing over to his daughter. Marine took command in 2011 and, through a strategy of ‘de-demonisation’, transformed the rebranded National Rally into the biggest single party in the National Assembly with 125 seats. She has reached the second round of the last two presidential elections, but it won’t be third time lucky for Marine Le Pen. On Monday, a judge disqualified her from politics for five years for misusing

Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong. A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a

In Westminster, politics is often a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. But this week, two politicians from opposing sides found themselves being praised for the same thing: the Sentencing Council climbdown. After a long standoff with the government, the independent body stalled plans to bring in new rules on sentencing criminals from ethnic minorities, which were widely criticised as ‘two-tier justice’. The plans were first revealed by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, after he spotted advice given to magistrates and judges which would have meant certain minorities could receive preferential treatment on sentencing compared to white men. Jenrick went on the attack, warning that the