The truncheons and tunics have been replaced by high-vis jackets and tasers, but we still like to think the police here are different. In their local expertise, and the way they represent the public, not the state, those famous “Peelian …
Reform is coming for Dagenham
The best place to watch the drama of Britain’s fastest changing postcode is next to Rainham’s 12th-century Norman church. At quarter past six, a tube-carriage haul of glum commuters is dumped at the station, where Essex meets the London sprawl. …
Why Starmer shouldn’t trust Trump
“Everything has changed,” Keir Starmer warned us only a few weeks ago, noting how Donald Trump’s re-election is reordering the globe. And yet somehow, even after “Liberation Day”, everything in Britain has stayed the same. Austerity is back, just with …
Netflix is degrading our politics
In the 1850s, Gustave Flaubert began an experiment that would impact culture to this very day. What would happen, he wondered, if someone lived their life in the manner of the books they read? The resulting novel, Madame Bovary, was …
What Callaghan can teach Labour
James Callaghan is one of those prime ministers — like Gordon Brown or Rishi Sunak — who seems like a political footnote. That’s a bit unfair, though. True, his premiership only lasted three years, and ended when he led Labour …
How lockdown created Starmerism
Naff; garish; tedious; mandatory; much hyped at the time; discrediting to many; ending with a large damages bill and a collective pact of forgetting — lockdown was an office Christmas party on a national scale. Five years on, almost nothing …
The danger of Starmer’s conservatism
The challenge of political leadership, Henry Kissinger observed, is that all the easy decisions have been taken by someone else, leaving only the most difficult and agonising choices for those at the very top. The most difficult issues of all, …
Rearmament is a noble lie
In Oracles, Magic and Witchcraft Among the Azande, one of the seminal texts of British social anthropology, E.E. Evans-Pritchard used the example of a granary which suddenly collapses, killing an unfortunate Zande tribesman, to elucidate the difference between magical and …
Europe’s great delusion
Wars, it is said, make people conservative, since they are fought for an idea of home under threat. And yet their innate tragedy is that, even in victory, they usher in a world transformed. We are seeing this revolutionary fable …
Can Keir Starmer trust his generals?
On 31 March 1982 Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord and the professional head of the Royal Navy, walked into a meeting in the House of Commons in an admiral’s full uniform. Tension was rising over the Falkland Islands, and …
The true cost of Net Zero
If you think your energy bill is already high, brace yourself. Labour may have promised a Net Zero electricity system that would cut average bills by £300 — but as new research reveals, the opposite is going to happen. We …
Trump’s angry imperialism
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” observed Joan Didion. Yet politicians are different. They tell stories not so much to live, but to survive. Stories give leaders an aura of purpose and control, imbuing their decisions with great …
Are we all Gaullists now?
A conventional wisdom is sweeping across much of Europe as indignity is heaped upon it by the new imperator in Washington. Maybe Charles de Gaulle was right after all. Finally, it seems, France’s age-old push for “strategic autonomy” has found …
Can Starmer exploit Europe’s crisis?
“The big dividing line among political leaders is between those who are conviction politicians and those who are not,” wrote Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s National Security Adviser, in his 2010 book, The New Machiavelli. “Strong leaders go into meetings knowing …
Britain is lost in Trumpland
One does not have to look far to discern a revolutionary atmosphere in the current West. The blizzard of executive orders from the new Trump administration resembles not so much a handover of power as a surprisingly bloodless form of …
