Good morning. Our Ideas Editor Nicholas Harris has written a feature on why Nigel Farage’s Clacton by-election is no laughing matter. Count Binface has stolen the headlines, but the Nigel Farage and the comedian Jim Davidson, whom Nicholas watched perform in Clacton, represent an England that will not go quietly. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have two months for £2 here.

I went because he dared me. “What the f*ck do you want to come and see me fo? [sic] Just write I am sexist and racist not funny and a fossil and save the train fare. Hope you are ok. Jim Davidson OBE.” Those were the exact words of Davidson’s email, a reply to my request for press tickets to one of his gigs. And what the fuck did I want to come and see him for? While Jim Davidson is still a touring comedian, in polite quarters “Jim Davidson” is a punchline, a catch-all for a dying breed, one exiled from Saturday night primetime to provincial theatres, hotels and drive-thrus. Perhaps I wanted to see the pathos of that journey: the ocean of fame, lifting people high upon its crests, before sending them crashing to the depths. But the truth is I had more calculated and politicised reasons for watching Davidson perform.

In the past two years, Davidson has effectively become the house comedian of Reform UK. At the party’s 2024 conference, I saw him lounging in the VIP area – an open-top Reform battle bus – and heralded as “the greatest cultural hero of our time” by Lee Anderson. Reform’s unofficial “chief whip” is now a regular at Davidson’s gigs, and a dinner companion. Davidson has also been photographed with the Reform deputy leader Richard Tice, and is occasionally in touch with Nigel Farage. On his YouTube channel he broadcasts political commentary: “Andy Burnham Is a W*NKER”, 200k views. And his fiancée, Tash, his sixth, is a Reform party member.

Davidson himself is a lifelong Conservative, and was a friend of the late Margaret Thatcher. He will not join Reform, as doing so would involve giving up his Carlton Club membership. But he is undeniably part of the party’s soul. Anderson’s speeches – with their nicknames, pantomime and yollering – are amateurish Davidson efforts. At Reform’s 2025 Conference, Anderson was introduced to the stage as a “famous international comedian”. And this is all part of the attempt to turn Reform into a culture as much as a party, an all-inclusive resort of right-wing politics, with unlimited drinks. They have a TV channel (GB News), a broadsheet (the Daily Telegraph), a tabloid (the Daily Express), a telly don (David Starkey), an Emmanuel Goldstein (Rupert Lowe) and a suite of minor celebrities (GB News presenters, Laila Cunningham; the convicted racist Lucy Connolly). I wanted to see this culture for myself, in its naked form, outside Reform’s institutional bounds. And so, after some email negotiation, I arranged tickets for Jim Davidson’s gig of 5 July, at the West Cliff Theatre in Clacton-on-Sea.

Ididn’t know, when I went, that Clacton was going to become the biggest joke of the political summer. Two days after the gig, Nigel Farage resigned, triggering the 2026 Clacton by-election. And SW1 hasn’t stopped laughing since it became clear that Farage would have one main opponent: Jonathan Harvey, who once helped write Victoria Coren Mitchell’s bum-clenchingly bad autocue on Only Connect and now haunts high-profile constituency results as a giant space alien called “Count Binface”. Since then, it’s been one skit after another: Binface on the Today programme, Binface on Newsnight, and an unravelling tapestry of Binface lore (he says he is a 5,900-year-old alien called a Recyclon, and his home planet is Sigma IX). There has been noble talk of Britain’s satirical traditions, and praise for this representative of “Silly Sausage Britain”.

Harvey himself is only giving interviews in character, so it’s impossible to know what he really thinks of the show, or of becoming its biggest clown. But Binface’s appearance as a comedy candidate has come to feel oddly charged. Comedy is something like a surrogate nationalism in Britain, a source of pride and identity. It does a disproportionate amount of political load-bearing via “satirical” television and “radical” comedians. Like some ancient theology, it is riven with schisms and excommunications. And so, while there will be no political struggle in Clacton, this by-election is far from uncontested. If Reform is a culture as much as a party, there is a culture behind Binface and Jonathan Harvey too, one he laboured in the margins of for much of his TV career. It is the culture of Have I Got News for You (which Harvey worked on, and wrote for), Private Eye magazine and BBC 6 Music, Waterstones dads and Amandaland mums. It is arch, metropolitan, wry and retains a battered optimism about British liberalism, one that very easily looks like smugness when it catches the light. It backed Al Murray’s “Pub Landlord” character when he stood as a comedy candidate against Farage in South Thanet in 2015. It backed Eddie Izzard against Farage on Question Time before the Brexit vote. It thinks, all told, that what Farage needs is a good milkshake to the face – if not, as Jo Brand once joked on BBC Radio 4, “some battery acid”.

This culture has been embarrassed before. Ironically, it was via light entertainment that Boris Johnson became liberal England’s favourite Tory. But apparently no defeat can dampen its cheer, or self-confidence. When Binface spoke to Alastair Campbell last summer, they agreed that the true political divide in Britain is between the “sane and mad”. Which raises two questions. Is it “sane” to go looking for political hope in the bottom of a bin? And what, in a society divided in such Swiftian terms, would you do about the “mad”? Because, unfortunately for the sane, mad people don’t know that they’re mad.

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Good morning. Our political editor Ailbhe Rea has written this week’s cover story. In his first days in No 10, Andy Burnham showed his determination to do politics differently. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have two months for £2 here

When Andy Burnham shared a video of his newly appointed cabinet on his Instagram at the end of his first day in office, he accompanied it with the rock anthem “How You Like Me Now?” by the Heavy. If “how’d you like me now” is the question, the answer is that some of Burnham’s Labour colleagues like him rather less than they did when they still thought they were in with a chance of staying in government. At the Grafton pub in Kentish Town on the evening of 20 July, Starmer, Reeves and their former colleagues drank late into the evening, “a mixture of furious and sad” at Starmer’s treatment and the sheer, unexpected extent of the clear-out of perceived Starmer loyalists. Sacked cabinet members arrived one by one, to applause, with resentments towards Burnham and his team building as the night wore on and word of new appointments trickled through.

Burnham’s team, for their part, were delighted both by their cabinet appointments and that they had managed to keep them so tightly held, while much of the lobby incorrectly guessed that Mahmood was to enter No 11. Haigh – the right-hand woman who, along with Burnham’s chief of staff, James Purnell, oversaw the appointments planning with the incoming premier – received the most important job: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and First Secretary of State, the de facto deputy position formerly held by George Osborne, Peter Mandelson and John Prescott. In her new role, running a beefed-up Office of the Prime Minister, there is little Haigh won’t be across, driving Burnham’s agenda from the centre, while also overseeing the redistribution of power around the country.

After initially favouring Miliband for the role of Chancellor, in the end Burnham delivered the great surprise of the day by appointing Healey, chosen because he has “the same outlook” as Burnham, one No 10 insider says. He is being described as a “split the difference” candidate between Mahmood and Miliband, sharing Burnham’s radical priorities but with the serious, “safe pair of hands” demeanour of a former defence secretary.

Burnham’s team felt there were enough Starmer allies in the mix – Yvette Cooper and Emma Reynolds, for example – to ensure Labour unity. Burnham’s No 10 team, too, retains many Starmer advisers, alongside well-liked newcomers including Alison Phillips, the former Mirror editor, and Hayden Munro, Jacinda Ardern’s former campaign director. Yet Burnham’s cabinet appointments, favouring a wide range of people from across the Labour ideological spectrum, but mostly united by their shared efforts to get rid of Starmer, have been perceived as nothing short of a declaration of war. “They started a factional war on day one,” a newly fired senior adviser says, describing it as “absolutely nuts”.

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Good morning.

In our magazine this week, I have written about Keir Starmer and what will come after him. You can read the piece here. If you’re not subscribed, you can have £2 for two months here.

Over the past decade, no prime minister has served more than three years in power. None has left any deep legacy, aside from Boris Johnson who will always be remembered for taking Britain out of the EU, even if that was the consequence of a referendum called by someone else. Keir Starmer is far from the most disastrous of this bunch of prime ministers, nor is he the shortest-serving. But of all of them, it is he who already seems the most non-existent; the most ghostly in his presence, somehow still there and already not.

Here is a man who has been part of our public life for almost 20 years, rising to the top only to be removed in a carefully orchestrated coup that, in normal circumstances, would be a moment of explosive drama and repercussion. And yet, instead, Starmer departs the public stage in a scene of deep, tepid bathos, with no obvious emotional reaction either personally, politically or even nationally. He leaves behind no band of vengeful loyalists or uncontrollable swells of rancour. The country appears to have shrugged and moved on. And so, the Prime Minister departs as he served, removed and distant, a foreigner to politics, forgotten before he has even left.

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Good morning. This is Ailbhe Rea, political editor of the New Statesman.

When did Andy Burnham’s northern conquest begin? He had a sense of “unfinished business” from the moment he left Westminster in 2017, and never ruled out returning. Some of Keir Starmer’s closest allies would suggest the signs were there from the start of his leadership. “Andy was the first person to proactively criticise Keir and tilt for the leadership when things were difficult in 2021,” one recalls. Any time Starmer was struggling, his allies felt, Burnham unhelpfully popped up to remind Labour of his existence.

Starmer’s team were jittery about a possible coup as soon as his popularity began to falter in 2025. Lisa Nandy, asked about a possible Burnham return on LBC, said she would support him with “whatever he decides to do”. In a rage, No 10 called her team. “If she’s calling for a new prime minister, she has to resign.”

One week later, Burnham himself made his pitch ahead of the Labour Party conference, asking his party “Are you up for it?” on the cover of this magazine. But at that point, they weren’t. He then tried and failed to win selection for the Gorton and Denton by-election, when Ed Miliband offered his support.

The plan became serious in March 2026, when Burnham had a pivotal conversation with Louise Haigh, the former cabinet minister who had forged a new role for herself as a power-broker and leading figure in the Tribune group of MPs, and with another pivotal person: Nandy, still a serving member of the cabinet. In a secret meeting in Manchester, it was decided that Burnham should stand again; he should find another seat, trigger another by-election, and this time he would be explicit about his intentions. Miliband, too, kept in touch and told Burnham, “If you want to go again, I’ll support you again.” After the May elections seemed the logical time. The only question was which seat…

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Andy Burnham has won in Makerfield. Here is everything you need to read. You can access to the full site for £1 a week here.

What happens now?

Ailbhe explains everything. In particular: Team Burnham is hoping Keir Starmer will “come to his senses”.

Do the right thing

Andrew Marr writes that only Keir Starmer can take Labour’s hope away now, and says that he must make way.

Tracked: 100 Labour MPs call for Keir Starmer to go

Labour’s last lifeline

Ryan Wain argues that Burnham must now turn hope into change.

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Thank you for reading.
— Tom

Good afternoon. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

John Healey has resigned as defence secretary over the government’s military spending plans. Can Keir Starmer survive this?

On our website, Andrew Marr writes that the mood in Westminster resembles the moment when Sajid Javid’s resignation heralded the collapse of Boris Johnson’s government. Yet, he argues, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have no one to blame but themselves.

Meanwhile, Ethan Croft digs into the details of Healey’s letter, while Megan Kenyon reports on the reaction from Labour MPs.

And for a more detailed look at the former defence secretary, once considered a Starmer loyalist, read Ailbhe Rea’s in-depth profile of Healey from March.

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Good morning. This is Anoosh Chakelian, Britain editor of the New Statesman.

HMO Britain is snowballing from a tale of certain postcodes into a national story. Last year brought 82,100 applications for asylum in the UK – slightly lower than in 2024, but still the third highest total on record. The world is unstable, on the move, and the British state is an unfit host: failing to build homes at a rate fast enough for its citizens, let alone the newcomers desperate to reach its shores.

Meanwhile, landlords of Serco properties I’ve spoken to have described the contracts as a dream ticket; one with HMOs in Norfolk called the company “the fairy godmother”. They are paid guaranteed rent and maintenance costs with “none of the aggro” and “none of the bureaucracy” that an ordinary let brings, according to another with 30 Serco-run properties across the north-west.

For this week’s magazine, I reported on the shortcomings of the Serco state – and how Britain lost control. Read the full article here.

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Good morning. This is Ailbhe Rea, political editor of the New Statesman.

Andy Burnham wears the pressure lightly. On a scorching day in Makerfield, he is wearing his classic black T-shirt and trousers, looking the same as he does on the news, only with a slightly sunburned nose. He has been spending his days walking around the constituency, and jokes that the “belly I had at the start of the campaign”, when he was pictured out running in “my old Everton shorts” is “slightly reduced now”. We’re door-knocking on the neat semi-detached houses of a new development in Hindley, three miles from Wigan. He represented this area as the MP for Leigh from 2001 until 2017, and marvels at how these houses didn’t exist back then.

As Burnham tries to convert undecideds, one by one, I dig into what he would actually do as prime minister, whether he has a plan, and, if so, what it is. He flits between the two, plainly enjoying the door-knocking more than the chat with me.

We start with his record as mayor of Greater Manchester. By most measures, he has made a success of the job, and stayed popular doing it. His summary of his record is simple: “Highest growth, highest reduction in inner-city deprivation.” He has eye-catching projects to point to as well, such as the distinctive yellow “Bee” bus network, which he brought under public control, and the “bed every night” scheme, which has substantially reduced rough sleeping in the city. He is seen to have connected with people, met the moment and championed his part of the world, an intangible feeling backed up by the data: he won a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote and is, as it currently stands, the most popular politician in the UK.

Yet Burnham’s critics – including some of his Labour colleagues in Westminster – argue that he has been playing politics on “easy mode” in Greater Manchester. He has no official opposition, a relatively small budget of £3bn; all he has had to do is “spend money and say nice things about Manchester”, as one critical colleague puts it. Far from Burnham being a political messiah, his Labour critics warn, people are projecting onto him whatever they want to see. He just wants to be loved, others say, and will struggle to maintain his popularity if, or when, he actually has to make difficult decisions in No 10.

For this week’s magazine, I shadowed Burnham as he campaigned to be Makerfield’s next MP – and possibly, Britain’s next prime minister. Read the full profile here.

Read the interview here

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Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

In this week’s cover story I examine the problems Britain refuses to face. We have now spent the better part of a decade rotating prime ministers through the same storm, each unable to calm or weather it. There is a temptation to treat this as novelty. But its roots lie deeper than they seem on first appearance. In 1980, Michael Foot reflected on how easily the House of Commons could be carried away by “those swelling tempers when it converts itself into a mob”.

Across Whitehall, the inability to respond to the crises engulfing our nation is staggering. It costs more to build, borrow or power Britain than any of our competitors. The scale of the challenge is no longer in doubt. Economic stagnation, strained public services, and rising political fragmentation are now familiar features of the landscape. It’s easy to reach for the 1970s and 80s as a metaphor for the times we live in, but I think the 1840s is more instructive. Now, like then, everything is simultaneously in flux: technology, capitalism, religion, democracy.

Yet if these revolutions are now underway, who do we have to rise to the level of events? Where is our Disraeli? Where is our Marx?

There is energy on the populist right, and fragments of renewal across the centre and left, but no settled account of what Britain is becoming, or how it should be governed in response.

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Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

The argument over Keir Starmer’s future, previously held in private, has now moved into the public domain. Questions that once belonged to anonymous briefings and late-night conversations dominate the front pages. Yet despite the noise, the outcome remains unresolved.

In our cover story, Ailbhe Rea reports from inside that strange interregnum. She finds a government dusting itself off after a bruising couple of weeks, a prime minister determined to fight on, rivals angling for the throne and a new battle of ideas that threatens to engulf the party.

Andy Burnham is attempting something unusually high-risk in modern politics: to turn a by-election into a demonstration that Labour can win a general election. Wes Streeting, newly unleashed, is making the case that the party’s deeper problem is not leadership alone but the absence of argument.

Neither man has yet secured the prize. But both are already competing to define the terms on which the next phase of Labour politics will be fought.

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Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

London has long been called “the libel capital of the world”. The Aga Khan, Kremlin insiders and Kazakhstan’s one-time dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev have all availed themselves of Britain’s relatively strict libel laws, as have myriad well-heeled Britons. It’s not just journalists who have been targeted. Environmental campaigners, online reviewers, even victims of sexual assault have been hit with libel suits.

But in March 2022, soon after Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, London’s libel lawyers became international news. MPs lined up to accuse claimant-friendly law firms of abusing the legal process to intimidate critics into silence.

Boris Johnson announced a clampdown on “the oligarchs and super-rich” who use the threat of legal action as “a new kind of lawfare”. The Conservative prime minister said his government would introduce legislation that would stop “strategic lawsuits against public participation” – commonly known as “Slapp” litigation. These are generally defined as cases designed to intimidate, harass and financially exhaust critics and to silence free speech.

Four years later, however, comprehensive anti-Slapp legislation is yet to materialise. In our latest issue, Peter Geoghegan, the editor of Democracy for Sale newsletter, and investigative reporter Jenna Corderoy dig into the battle over Britain’s libel industry – and why hopes for reform are fading. You can read an extract of their piece down below, or you can click through here to read it in full.

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The battle for Britain’s libel industry

London’s libel gold rush long predates the city’s “Londongrad” days. In the Second World War, a young lawyer named Peter Carter-Ruck came back from duty as a gunner in the Royal Artillery and set about turning the then almost moribund Libel Act of 1843 into the basis for a lucrative business. His trademark was aggressive suits on behalf of wealthy clients. In 1963, Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, instructed Carter-Ruck to sue “every single person connected with Private Eye, right down to the girls in the office” over a story that suggested an official biography of his father would gloss over incidents such as Churchill sending the army to tackle striking Welsh miners. Carter-Ruck secured all the top libel barristers for his client to prevent them acting for the magazine – which swiftly apologised and paid Churchill’s legal costs. Private Eye also had to publish a full-page retraction and apology in the Evening Standard.

After this, a charabanc of colourful characters used libel threats, primarily against publishers, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. James Goldsmith settled a notorious libel case with Private Eye on the steps of the Old Bailey. Robert Maxwell and Mohamed al-Fayed had an army of lawyers on retainer. Soon, rich claimants with far less obvious ties to the UK were filing defamation cases in London.

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Good afternoon. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

For much of the past 72 hours, Westminster has been gripped by a sense of mounting chaos. To understand what is happening, we have a bumper edition of the magazine this week:

• A special report from inside the rebellion against Keir Starmer from our political editor Ailbhe Rea

• A blistering essay on the state of affairs from editor at large, Andrew Marr

• And an exclusive intervention from one the figures tipped to challenge for the leadership should a vacancy arise, the minister for the armed forces Al Carns

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Good afternoon. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

If, as predicted, Labour suffers a near-wipeout in the Scottish, Welsh and local English elections tomorrow, Keir Starmer is very likely to face a leadership challenge. Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting are all ambitious for power and popular among different Labour factions.

Streeting believes he has enough supporters among MPs, but his rivals believe he is unlikely to win with the Labour membership. Burnham believes he has the numbers among the members and – uniquely among Labour’s leading figures – the electorate, but without a seat in parliament, he is still unable to challenge the Prime Minister.

Rayner, on the other hand, does have a seat, and has indicated she will not stand aside if Streeting launches a leadership bid before Burnham’s return to parliament. Rayner is determined to see a leader who can unite the Labour Party.

You can find all of this and more in our special election issue of the New Statesman this week. You can read an extract of this piece down below, or you can click through here to read it in full.

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Prepared to risk it all…

Angela Rayner is likely to be a decisive figure. She has let it be known she will not stand aside should Streeting launch a leadership bid before Burnham’s return to parliament. While Rayner is not hostile to Streeting on a personal level, she believes his victory would be a continuation of what she sees as the Labour right’s disastrous control of the party, which she blames for the infighting that has led it where it finds itself today. Rayner is determined to see a leader who can unite the Labour Party.

But she is also known to be sceptical of the idea that the members of the NEC who rejected Burnham’s attempt to return to parliament in January will allow him back now. Rayner – who, like Lyndon Johnson learned the art of politics not in the classroom, but on the shop floor – is clear that there is still an overwhelming Starmerite majority on the NEC that would block Burnham’s return.

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Good afternoon. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

In an exclusive investigation – THE COVER UP? – for the New Statesman, the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, questions why institutions across the British state have failed in their duty to get justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.

Epstein’s activities in the United Kingdom and the former prince Andrew’s use of public funds must be properly investigated by the authorities. Brown reveals that two parliamentary select committees may be about to begin investigations into Andrew’s activities as Trade Envoy between 2001-2011.

For the first time Brown reveals his own historical dealings with the former prince Andrew when he was chancellor of the exchequer and prime minister. You can read an extract of the piece down below, or click through to read it in full.

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The prince, his protectors and questions to be answered

“Will anyone in Britain ever be charged in relation to the sexual violence perpetrated and orchestrated on British soil by the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein? Nothing less than the prosecution of those who aided and abetted Epstein will do justice to those who suffered grievous, unconscionable sexual abuse. The very fact that the former prince Andrew – who strenuously denies any wrongdoing – has been questioned by the police has given new hope to victims. It has led to the belief that action is now underway on this side of the Atlantic.

However, the misconduct in public office that is being investigated has focused more on the potential passing of confidential government documents to unauthorised recipients than on the more serious alleged crimes of trafficking and sexual abuse revealed in the Epstein files.

The American lawyer Brad Edwards, who represents Epstein’s victims, says some of his clients were abused in the UK. Because of the way Epstein’s trafficking ring operated, evidence could be assembled from drivers, airline and airport staff, ticketing agents and credit card companies. Testimonies should also be secured from estate agents, banks, border officials and royal protection officers. The British authorities should re-interview Andrew, not just over possible breaches of the Official Secrets Act, but over his use of public funds, and especially over incidents in which women allegedly brought to him at Sandringham, Buckingham Palace, Windsor and other locations, may have been trafficked into the country by Epstein.

The King has said that no one should be above the law, and alongside the police investigation, a select committee in parliament should examine how public funds were used, and whether a cover-up took place that prevented Andrew from being interviewed by US investigators.

It would be a damning indictment of the quality of British justice – and our claim to lead the world in the exposure and prosecution of modern slavery – if, through our failure to follow up on what we already know, we did not get to the truth.”

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Good afternoon. This is Ailbhe Rea, political editor of the New Statesman.

One summer’s evening in 2016, Jeremy Corbyn held a rally with hundreds of his supporters in London, as Labour MPs prepared to mount a leadership challenge against him. Addressing the crowd on the pavement outside Soas University, Corbyn declared he would fight on, continuing to champion his anti-austerity, left-populist politics. “What about Europe, Jeremy? Where were you when we needed you?” a lone heckler called out from the crowd. It was Zack Polanski, a Lib Dem council candidate, who had joined the party just as many were deserting it. Today, of course, he is the Green Party leader, the “eco-populist” hammering Labour from the left, on a platform that in style and substance is not a million miles away from the Corbyn project he once heckled.

Polanski has been on quite a journey to become the left populist leader he is today. For this week’s magazine, he sat down with me to talk about it, including some or his profound changes of mind on huge questions for British Jews and British progressives. He told me how he was “lost in the propaganda” around Corbyn back then, that he is sorry for once saying that he couldn’t vote for Corbyn as a Jewish man, and that his views have changed on the anti-Semitism complaints that Labour faced under his leadership. He told me, too, about the lessons he is drawing from the Corbyn project, the last time the British populist left had its moment. So who is Zack Polanski?

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Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.

British politics has been stuck for much of the past year. From my countless conversations with MPs, civil servants, aides, cabinet ministers and advisors I keep hearing the same thing repeated: Keir Starmer is not up to the job. If we look to the polls, we know the electorate feels much the same. MPs say the status quo is no longer tenable, and nevertheless stasis has reigned.

The events of last week might change that. Technically, nothing new has emerged – we know that the Prime Minister made a poor judgement in the appointment of Peter Mandelson to ambassador of the United States, a decision for which he has already paid a price. But this is not why his premiership is ailing. Instead, Starmer’s reaction to the crisis – the way he has chosen to fight for survival – reveals a deeper failure of leadership than just one lapse in judgement. Starmer has shown us his instincts in power, how he holds everyone to account but himself.

But what happens next? Is the herd starting to move?

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Good afternoon. This is Andrew Marr, editor-at-large of the New Statesman.

Keir Starmer will address the House of Commons this afternoon, as questions pile up over how Peter Mandelson was appointed US ambassador, despite failing his security vetting.

As so often in these political crises, the final decision about the future of the Prime Minister rests not with his media critics, his grandstanding enemies in politics, the analysed intricacies of a fiddly Whitehall plot – or, indeed, with the voters.

All these groups will have their time. But there are only two people who will make the final decision. One is the person who shaves Keir Starmer’s chin in the morning, brushes his teeth and drinks his coffee. The other, perhaps more important, is a Labour-supporting lawyer called Victoria Starmer. She knows the almost impossible pressures of the job and the pain, frustration and anger her husband increasingly feels.

Once this crisis is over, there is an urgent conversation to be had about whether we have made the job of leading Britain impossible – loading too many problems onto too flimsy a centre – whether we are talking about Tory, Labour or in the future, perhaps, Reform politicians.

That’s for another day. For now, let’s look at the case for Starmer deciding to go. However strange it might seem to say so right now, Peter Mandelson’s vetting is a side issue. As a people we face horrendous problems: lack of growth, threats from abroad, lack of hope and self-belief. Starmer did well to keep us out of the Iran war but, across the rest of the picture, his government isn’t working…

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Good morning. This is Finn McRedmond, staff writer at the New Statesman and editor of the Saturday Read.

By now, we are used to hearing about the radicalisation of young men – that unfortunate cohort, captured by the manosphere, enchanted by men’s rights activists, veering to the populist right.

But what about the young women? If we want to understand why the political gender gap is widening, we need to look to those moving sharply to the left. To do so, Emily Lawford, the New Statesman’s online editor, has spent months in the femosphere – at The Feminist Library, deep in their TikTok feeds, at university feminist societies and Palestinian solidarity marches.

With exclusive polling from Scarlett Maguire, the director and founder of Merlin Strategy, our cover this week asks: Who are these radical young women? What do they believe? And how will their feelings of disenfranchisement and isolation manifest at the polls?

You can read an extract of Emily’s piece down below, and click through here to read it in full. Some of Scarlett’s polling is available down below, and you can click through to see the rest. It is free for subscribers, and if not a subscriber? We still have a great deal on. As ever, thank you for reading and have a good week.

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“Isolated”

It was a Wednesday night and seven members of the University of Leeds’ feminist society had invited me to join their book swap. We were in a classroom in the healthcare wing, and there was a pile of books on the table: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Someone had brought Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz. We’d debated whether Harry Potter gets more respect than The Hunger Games because the main character is male, the racial politics of Wuthering Heights, the sexual politics of Sally Rooney.

The literary conversation was winding down. I asked the table how they felt about the young men they knew. “I don’t care for them,” said a girl called Ruby imperiously. She had red hair and lots of silver jewellery. “They’re not bad people, but they refuse to call out their friends who make other girls uncomfortable. They’ll laugh at jokes that are sexist, racist, homophobic, they don’t care about political issues… I don’t think they like women a lot.” If a man is attracted to you, she said, he might talk about things like toxic misogyny…

These women weren’t outliers. According to the New Statesman’s polling, young women are twice as likely to not want children as young men. All the Leeds women told me they feared a Reform government pressuring them to have babies. One woman mentioned Suella Braverman’s pledge to scrap the Equality Act and repeal other human rights laws. “It just feels… out of control.”

It all felt impossibly bleak. Most of the women I met were educated, engaging, bright and charismatic. But they weren’t excited about their futures.

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Good morning. This Will Dunn, business editor of the New Statesman.

Over the past year I have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former ministers, officials and advisors, technologists and MPs about our government’s headlong rush into the AI future. The UK has committed to adopt AI more quickly than any other G7 economy. Plenty see it as a source of economic growth and a means to produce a smaller, more effective state.

But what I found in this investigation shocked me: a government that was wholly unprepared for the arrival of a transformative technology; officials and advisors whose belief in AI borders on religious faith; a network of vested interests; and a technology that has already been given power to shape every conversation, to write political speeches, to influence major economic decisions. “Make no mistake”, one former No 10 adviser told me, “this is a war.”

You can read an extract of my piece below, or click through to read it in full. It is free for paying subscribers (click here!). If you do not subscribe, you can avail of our Spring deal. Thanks for reading. Finn will be back on Saturday with a run down of the week in full.

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Who is in charge?

On 20 April 2025, an official in the British government emailed their colleagues a story from that day’s Financial Times. The headline read: “UAE set to use AI to write laws in world first”. The officials, all of whom are involved in implementing AI in the running of the British state, read the article with amusement. “We were tempted to say: ‘We got there first,’” one of them told me. But they felt that the UK was “not fighting for the crown of the first AI-written line of legislation”, so they decided not to make public a fact very few people know: text composed by a large language model has made its way into an act of parliament. British laws are already being written by AI.

This is a matter of sovereignty. The software products we refer to as “AI” are all built on advanced “foundational models” from the US and China. This is a technology we do not control, but which plays an increasingly active role at every level of the British power structure. It is part of every conversation, drafting emails between officials, summarising ministers’ briefings and composing speeches delivered in the House of Commons. The Bank of England is using machine learning to inform its decisions on interest rates. The BBC uses AI to redraft articles. Every student at Oxford – where 31 of our previous prime ministers were educated – is now being educated with the help of OpenAI. There is little public understanding of how quickly this technology is moving through the institutions of power, or how enthusiastically it’s being pursued by a government that believes AI software could solve all its problems…

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Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman.

For this week’s cover story, the philosopher John Gray writes about the consequences of Donald Trump’s mindless war in Iran. Late last night the president announced a two week ceasefire, if Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

But this is no guaranteed silver bullet – an enduring settlement still needs to be negotiated. And beyond the regional destruction, the impacts of this war will still travel far beyond the Middle East. Below is a sweeping essay on America’s imperial overreach – from Vietnam to Iraq – and how national hubris and self-deception can lead to ruin.

You can read an extract of the piece down below, or click through to read it in full. The New Statesman is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. The good news is that you can save some money if you buy now. Much more from us on Iran over the coming days. Until then, thanks for reading and have a great week.

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The unravelling

Trump-whisperers such as the Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte believe they can inject a sliver of reason into his deliberations. But Trump’s logic is instinctual not rational. As his lifting of sanctions on Russian oil has demonstrated, he has visceral sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s blend of tyranny and oligarchy. Détente with Russia will create many lucrative business opportunities. While Nato may linger on in name, the transatlantic alliance is operationally defunct. America is returning to its pre-1914 trajectory as a civilisation separate from Europe.

In the UK, the default position is to wait out the storm until sanity returns to Washington. Why Putin or Xi Jinping should exhibit similar patience is not explained. Could there be a better time for them to act? Ramping up hybrid warfare in under-defended Europe will give Putin leverage in any peace deal in Ukraine. With Trump having shifted military assets from the Asia-Pacific to the Middle East and running down munitions, Xi may be able to absorb Taiwan without firing a shot. There has been talk of an Anglo-Gaullism in which the UK relies on itself and European allies for its security. Obviously, this presupposes much higher defence spending, and soon. But renewing Britain’s defence capacity requires reindustrialising the economy, an enterprise that could take decades. Without an actionable plan, British Gaullism is an idle dream.

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