The Saturday Read: Rebel yell
Inside: Keir Starmer’s crisis week, Glastonbury, Giorgia Meloni and Jacinda Ardern, 75 years of George Orwell, and Jeff Bezos’s big fat Venetian wedding.
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the best of the New Statesman, in print and online this week. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.
Next Friday marks one year since the general election. Labour rode the anti-incumbency wave of 2024 and swept away the Tories. But, as my colleague George Eaton points out, “this bears little resemblance to a one-year administration”.
Earlier this month, Rachel Reeves was forced to roll back her Winter Fuel Payment cuts. This week 126 of Keir Starmer’s own MPs have signed a wrecking amendment to the welfare bill. Frantic threats from No 10 that rebels might face deselection fell on deaf ears, before major concessions soothed their fears. Downing Street looked like it had lost control. Who – if anyone – risks losing their job now because of this mess? The weekend will be rocky, as Starmer scrambles to claw back some authority. Andrew Marr has the details.
I, meanwhile, am writing to you from Glastonbury (tough gig!). The confluence of major political drama and Britain’s best party has become something of a tradition: who can forget 2016 when the festival coincided with Brexit? Or in 2017, when Radiohead yelled “bring down the government”, and Jeremy Corbyn rallied from the Pyramid Stage following May’s disastrous election and the Grenfell Tower fire.
Politics doesn’t feel far from the farm this weekend. Neil Young may be headlining tonight, but it will be Kneecap at 4pm who make headlines. I'll let you know how it all goes... As ever, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.
1—“The Atlanticist script”
No one watching the crisis in the Middle East this week would think the people involved had a plan. Nevertheless, in his analysis, Oliver Eagleton is able to discern motives and strategies: America, confused and indecisive; Europe, marginal and rudderless; and Israel, ready to exploit the chaos that emerged. NH
Starmer’s response to the Iran crisis is illustrative. While his government recently joined in the rote condemnation of Israeli atrocities, and took the symbolic step of suspending a small number of arms licences, it is obvious that no material shift has taken place. The Prime Minister responded to Israel’s latest aggression in exactly the same way as he reacted to its assault on Gaza: by invoking the country’s “right to self-defence” – which, in practice, means its right to exercise a monopoly of violence over the entire region.
2—“A different kind of power”
Two autobiographies of female political originals landed this week. To the left (to the left) there comes former Kiwi leader Jacinda Ardern: stark and unreflective, Megan Gibson concludes on the book, and the woman. Out right is Giorgia Meloni: David Broder doesn’t like her much more. GM
When the Italian edition of the book was published, Meloni’s party was in opposition; today, if she is fighting “elites” at all, she is doing so at G7 summits and Nato meet-ups. Those she calls “elites” are defined less by wealth or political authority than by their attitudes, especially on immigration, national identity, and the nuclear family.
3—“Graduated member of the petite bourgeoisie”
If you haven’t heard of Thomas Skinner, time to learn his name. The mattress salesman turned TikTok sensation is now a raconteur populist and possibly, Nick proclaims in this very funny piece, the future of the British right. (And yes, the anthropomorphic lion pictured above really does look like him.) FMcR
But when his turn came around, he bounded to the podium. His speech was titled “The England I Love”. England is “the absolute guv’nor”, he said, home of the rule of law, the Industrial Revolution and the World Wide Web. It is built on family, graft and community: “The single mum up at 5am, getting her kids ready, before a long day of work, but who still finds the strength to smile.” But these people have been failed, “left behind in [their] own country”, with “kids being taught to be ashamed of their own flag”. He advocated once again for better childcare and support for young parents, as well as more forceful police (because, “let’s be honest, they’re pussies at the minute”). It was simple, stirring, populist stuff. He was the only speaker to be interrupted by applause.
4—“I’m American. Americans are optimistic”
He’s the most important Democrat you’ve never heard of. Freddie joined Ro Khanna at a Phillies baseball game, a town hall in his home county and a coffee shop in Washington DC to talk about his ambition to bring the American left back to power. GM
And what of that famed “special relationship” with the UK? Does the UK have any standing on technology? “It’s a yawn. I care more about what some random congressperson thought about AI than when Rishi Sunak said he was going to do an AI summit. I kind of laughed.” And why is that? “Because it’d be like if I said I wanted to do a summit of what it’s like to live in the developing world. It’s like, what the hell do you know about what’s going on about innovation and technology?”
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With the heatwave it feels like Burma these days, it really has me down and out, it’s like I’m inside a whale and need to come up for air!
You know it folks, we’re talking about George Orwell. It’s his birthday week, and what’s more, this year marks 75 years since his death. He wrote a fair bit for the NS – though he did fall out with editor Kingsley Martin over the Spanish Civil War – and the great news is that I have recently gained access to our archives.
5—“Tuesday sex”
A Hollywood intimacy coordinator has published a book about Tinseltown’s secret sex tips. I’ll end the pitch there, since you’re going to click anyway. Kate Mossman shows you through this episode of “Bonking with the Stars”. GM
She points out that intimacy is first and foremost about a relationship with oneself; that desire in long-term relationships is reactive rather than spontaneous, for men as well as women; that it’s normal to feel like you can’t be bothered. When she asserts that no real human is able to activate instant “sex mode” at the end of a long day, I thought of couples in films who get back to the flat and slam each other into the wall. She believes that “Tuesday sex” – her word for average weekday sex that isn’t great and isn’t crap either – is the stuff of life. “It’s the same when you go to see a play. Nine times out of ten you might just vaguely enjoy it – and then once in a while it will absolutely hit the spot.”
6—“Vabbè”
Venice overflowed this week with outrage at its hosting of the marriage of Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. Pipe down lagooners, says Finn. Your city is a playground – and has been for centuries.
I don’t want to defend a wedding between Bezos, a force of cosmic darkness, and Sánchez, a woman who has never worn an item of clothing that fits. But in a sea of self-satisfied aesthetes peering down their noses at the event, I must: it is hardly the first ugly wedding in the chronicles of romance. Not even the first in Venice. With very few noble exceptions, weddings trend towards bad taste.
7—“Should the radical left rise again”
No 10 are very anxious about the threat Farage poses to Labour’s left flank. So anxious that sometimes Starmer sounds like Farage-lite. But a new problem is brewing: the left is organising. Labour is at risk of, to borrow George Eaton’s words, losing votes to everyone, everywhere, all at once. FMcR
Senior Labour critics complain that the party has a “forgotten flank”, fixating on Reform defectors rather than on Green or Lib Dem ones. Strategists reject this charge, pointing to progressive policies such as Ed Miliband’s GB Energy, the workers’ rights bill and free breakfast clubs. But Labour’s soft left – which assembled at the recent Compass conference – is discussing the creation of a new internal organisation to exert pressure on Starmer.
George’s Best of the Rest
Errol Louis: The establishment caused Zohran Mamdani
Thomas L Friedman: If This Mideast War Is Over, Get Ready for Some Interesting Politics
David A Graham: Trump’s deportations aren’t realistic
Jia Tolentino: Are young people having enough sex?
Richard Tyler: Jeremy Clarkson wants Peroni dead
Marilyn Simon: Redeeming humanity
British zoo’s missing mongoose turns up at pub 15 miles away Mongoose on the loose!
U2 guitarist becomes Irish citizen. Pardon?
And with that…
We have been drinking on the job. Sort of. The wine merchants Yapp Brothers were kind enough to send the NS six bottles last month, and over the course of several evenings my colleagues and I tasted and reviewed them.
Rosé is probably best enjoyed sur la terrasse somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. Well, how about in a fluorescently lit office in Farringdon with a policy correspondent, commissioning editor and business editor? No match for the romance afforded by the vesperal light of the French Riviera… but we thought the bottle gifted to us worked great anyway. I sent another colleague off on a stag do with a bottle of the Malbec in tow (it came with good reviews). And the arts desk tell me the 2021 Côtes du Rhône was a good accompaniment to a late shift in the office.
The good news is the nice men at Yapp are offering Saturday Readers a discount on the same case. If you try it, write in to tell us how you like it. And don’t forget to have a great weekend.
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— Finn, Nicholas and George.