Politics

To understand the Conservative party’s approach to government, it’s useful to think of there being two Britains. This is something British people love to do; we divide the country into North and South, rich and poor, London and not. The division that matters for the Conservatives, however, is a little different. It’s not a matter of economics or geography, but age. It’s the divide between Old Britain and Young Britain. Old Britain, with the aid of the Conservative party, is very slowly throttling Young Britain The Conservative electoral strategy is simple and straightforward: it will do whatever it needs to win the votes of Old Britain, and it will do

Guess who turned up in Bangkok this week at the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting? The forum, which includes the US, China, Australia, Japan, Russia, but not France, was visited by none other than President Macron. ‘You must be asking yourself what a French president is doing here’, he charmed in English.  Macron claimed to be the first European leader to be invited to the forum. He insisted he was there because France is ‘a country of the region’. According to the Elysée this invitation ‘validates the Indo-Pacific strategy launched in 2018’. It does indeed, but with far more subtle ramifications. What has always been a logical, albeit humiliating, step

In the glitzy Fifa museum, in squeaky-clean downtown Zurich, there is a new exhibition which sums up the upbeat, inclusive image which football’s world governing body is so eager to portray. It’s called ‘211 Cultures – One Game’, and it consists of 211 items of football ephemera, one from each of Fifa’s member associations all around the world. Most of these items are fairly anodyne: trophies, fan regalia, football shirts and suchlike – curios you tend to find in any sports museum. A few are items of genuine historical interest: the Spanish contribution is a table football set, invented during the Spanish Civil War by a Spaniard called Alejandro Finisterre,