Politics

Thursday

The Spectator

The risks of Reform

In 1979, XTC sang: ‘We’re only making plans for Nigel/ We only want what’s best for him.’ The song is from the perspective of two overbearing parents, confident that their son is ‘happy in his world’ and that his future ‘is as good as sealed’. Nigel Farage is making plans for his own future but it’s doubtful it’s as good as sealed. This week, he announced Reform UK’s proposal for mass deportations, ‘Operation Restoring Justice’. Some 600,000 illegal migrants will be removed, he promised, should his party win the next election. Britain will leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) so we can return people to countries such as

Thursday

Nicholas Farrell

How Italy’s ‘new young’ party

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The Feast of the Assumption began for me just after midnight with a WhatsApp message from my eldest son, Francesco Winston, 20, which said: ‘Papà don’t come, the police are everywhere.’ He and my eldest daughter, Caterina, 21, had invited me to a party on the beach organised by their group of friends to mark Ferragosto, the most important day of summer. There would be a bonfire and sausages, booze and guitars, and all the rest of it, until the blood-red sun emerged out of the sea at about 6 a.m. to bring it to an end. The huge, shimmering sun rose up out of the sea,

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Dinner party talk won’t help Gaza

I’m one of the Silent People who sit on the sidelines of the great political events and debates of the present. We Silent People don’t sign on-line petitions or go on protests to show solidarity with this group or that one. We don’t tweet our outrage, or blog our bile. We prefer to keep what we think to ourselves. When a verbal punch-up erupts over Gaza or trans rights at a dinner party, I stay silent and wonder what’s for pudding. The thing we Silent People are most silent about is our silence. It’s easy to see why: the silent are suspect The thing we Silent People are most silent

Thursday

Max Hastings

Britain shouldn’t put up with Donald Trump

History is the march of folly and far too many of my countrymen are hearkening to a drumbeat which would lead us to disaster. On Tuesday several of our newspapers led with variations of the same headline: ‘Trump: cut tax to beat Farage.’ This is idiotic counsel, given the state of Britain’s public finances. I would have thought the way to beat populism was not by emulating its idiocies but by prudent, cautious, sensible management of a nation tired of liars. If Donald Trump teaches us anything, it is how to ruin a great nation. Far more useful than parroting the US President’s delusions would be telling the British people

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The National have bungled their Rishi Sunak satire

The Estate begins with a typical NHS story. An elderly Sikh arrives in A&E after a six-hour wait for an ambulance and he’s asked to collect his own vomit in an NHS bucket. The doctors tell him he’s fine and sends him home where he promptly dies. His only son, Angad, inherits all his property, which irritates his two daughters, who receive nothing. The personality of the dead Sikh is left deliberately obscure. Newspapers in Britain and India publish glowing accounts of his achievements but his youngest daughter calls him ‘a slum landlord’ who owed his fortune to ‘a lifetime of tax-evasion’. The bad-tempered tussle over his will takes place

Thursday

Philip Patrick

Could Japan soon be governed by chatbots?

Tokyo Could Japan be the world’s first -algocracy – government by algorithm? The concept has been flirted with elsewhere: in 2017 a chatbot called Alisa challenged Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency. But there is reason to believe that if any major country is going to replace its politicians with AI, it will be Japan.  The citizens of Yokosuka in Kanagawa have had a remarkably lifelike AI avatar of their mayor, Katsuaki Uechi, at their service for over a year now. It (he?) speaks perfect English with a slight Japanese accent, with Uechi’s facial features manipulated to make it look as if he is pronouncing the words correctly. The avatar

Tim Shipman

‘Let Keir be Keir’: inside the cabinet’s away day

Labour ministers face a range of terrible political choices, but when the cabinet met for an away day at Chequers last Friday, the first dilemma was what to wear. ‘There was panic beforehand about what “smart-casual” meant,’ one ministerial aide says. Both Hilary Benn and John Healey turned up in dark suits and red ties. ‘To be fair to the Defence Secretary, he hadn’t seen that bit of the invite,’ a No. 10 official explains. ‘Whereas in Hilary’s case, that is what his smart-casual looks like.’ By contrast, Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, turned up in what one observer describes as a ‘tech bro AI T-shirt’. Finding an economic policy

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

How governments gaslight

The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually assaulting native Germans trying to cool off. In response, some helpful bureaucrat has generated a series of images whose crudely drawn cartoon format makes light of the problem while wilfully, defiantly misrepresenting it. Below ‘Schubsen ist nicht lustig!’ (‘Shoving is not funny!’), a white boy and vaguely brownish boy push a terrified black girl towards

Thursday

Sam Kriss

The vicious genius of Adam Curtis

In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn’t understand his films because they aren’t interested in music. Having known a fair few political journalists, I can say with some certainty that he was right. Most politically motivated types are – not to be unkind, but it’s true – total losers. This cuts across left and right, all ideologies and tendencies, from Toryism to anarchism to Islamism and back: whatever you believe, if you believe it too strongly you were probably a weirdo at school. The other kids went out clubbing; you stayed at home, drawing pictures of Lenin or von Mises on your satchel.

Tuesday

Hermione Eyre

Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine

Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD.

Tuesday

Brian Martin

A small world: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, reviewed

Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with ‘a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings’, and girls from sister schools, ‘fully recovered from eating disorders’. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert’s satirical touch still hits the mark about ‘the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if

Thursday

James Heale

Rachel Reeves, the Iron Chancer

Gordon Brown may not be every teenager’s political pin-up. But as an Oxford student, Rachel Reeves proudly kept a framed photo of him in her bedroom. It was Brown who introduced the first multi-year spending review in 1998: the kind of big political set-piece speech which he relished. Reeves’s speech on Wednesday showed the level of constraints facing the Treasury this decade vs the 1990s. Chess, not poker, is the Chancellor’s chosen game of recreation. As a player and a politician, she prides herself on making decisions guided by skill, care and thought. Yet this week she staked her government’s future on a series of political bets. Her tax rises

The Spectator

Britain needs reform

This week’s spending review confirms that where there should be conviction, there is only confusion; where there should be vision, only a vacuum. The country is on the road to higher taxes, poorer services and a decaying public realm, with the bandits of the bond market lying in wait to extract their growing take from our declining share of global wealth. When every warning light is flashing red, the government is driving further and faster towards danger The Chancellor approached this spending review with her credibility already undermined. Promises not to raise taxes on working people translated into a tax on work itself which has driven up unemployment. A pledge

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Delightful nostalgia for political wonks: The Gang of Three, at the King’s Head Theatre, reviewed

The Gang of Three gets into the nitty-gritty of Labour politics in the 1970s. It opens with the resignation of Roy Jenkins as deputy leader in 1972 in a desperate attempt to quell the party’s growing hostility to the Common Market. He holds a council of war with Anthony Crosland, his old Oxford chum, and they discuss their next moves while awaiting the arrival of Denis Healey whom they both heartily detest. The writers, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, capture the characters beautifully. Crosland considers himself more gifted and mature than Jenkins but he hasn’t yet made his mark by holding one of the great offices of state. He boasts

Monday

Rod Liddle

My apology to Reform

I have read countless commentaries explaining why we shouldn’t take Reform’s victories last Thursday too seriously. They are all wrong. I have the distinct impression that these were the most significant election results for a good few decades. Up here in the north, everyone I know voted Reform. More importantly, when I used to ask people how they voted, they would beckon me to one side and, through a cupped hand, whisper ‘Reform’. Now they say it out loud and proud. And the apology is because I had doubted Reform’s ability to climb above 30 per cent – the crucial figure. I also doubted that they were serious enough about

Thursday

Roger Alton

A football regulator would be an own goal

The UK now has a political class that seems to have lost all interest in sport It’s that time of the year again in football when the Championship sweeps all before it: it’s full of joy and life with packed houses, goals, drama and uncertain outcomes. It’s stacked with great names: Leeds, Burnley, Sunderland, Coventry, Blackburn, Norwich, Preston, Derby (take your pick). It’s where Coventry vs Middlesbrough on the last day of the season should be a big, big match. Leeds hammered six past Stoke on Monday, watched by nearly 37,000, and secured promotion to the Premiership, along with Prem regulars Burnley, who were watched by 21,486. Meanwhile, the great

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

The benign republic of Julian Barnes

Not long into this essay I found myself wondering if it would have been published if the author were not Julian Barnes. I also wondered: would I have guessed the author’s identity if it had been withheld from me? Actually, it’s really five little essays, whose subjects are ‘Memories’, ‘Words’, ‘Politics’, ‘Books’, and ‘Age and Time’. Here is a sample from the first section: We change our minds about many things, from matters of mere taste – the colours we prefer, the clothes we wear – to aesthetic matters – the music, the books we like – to adherence to social groups – the football team or political party we

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

My brush with a rabid monkey

India A crowded bus station. A lady monkey with a baby clinging to its neck sidled past me, eyeing the banana I was eating. I barely noticed them. A moment later, claws dug into my back. A skeletal hand darted forward to grab my banana. The baby monkey was on my shoulder. I leapt up and shrugged vigorously but it climbed on to my head, so I twisted sharply this way and that to unseat the little nuisance. I felt a painful scratch on my neck. The furry bundle leapt off me and scampered away. I’d been bitten. A few bored locals gathered around to see if the kerfuffle was worth

Thursday

Gus Carter

Meet the Zoomer Doomers: Britain’s secret right-wing movement

One of the striking aspects of the AfD’s success in the German elections was the party’s popularity among the young, especially men under 25: one in four voted for the hard-right movement. Support for bracingly conservative positions among Gen-Z men isn’t just a German phenomenon, however. In Westminster and beyond, a new breed of young right-wing influencers is seeking to shift our politics. Meet the Zoomer Doomers. They use acerbic posts to humiliate the defenders of the status quo, in a strategy known as ‘from posting to policy’. Terms such as ‘Boriswave’ – which refers to the net migration figure that spiked at 900,000 under Johnson’s leadership – first appeared

Tuesday

Anna Aslanyan

Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age

When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov Region. In the 2010s, he returned to Russia as a journalist and reported from places high and low. He draws on his experiences in this book’s 17 essays, centred on topics ranging from politics to poetry, religion to rural affairs. Inevitably, war is a recurring theme. One of Amos’s interviewees, Sergei, works for a German