It was the chronicle of a death foretold. Last year Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, drafted a memo for his boss spelling out in the starkest terms How Labour Could Fail. This week, instead of celebrating the first anniversary of Labour’s landslide election victory, the two men revisited that analysis and reflected on
For Keir Starmer, it seems everything is going south. His MPs are openly rebelling, his advisers are mutinous and it often feels as though he can’t decide whether to run the country as human-rights-lawyer-in-chief or as Nigel Farage-lite. It’s no wonder that some in his party are beginning to look north for an answer to
It is the most civilised way to travel anywhere in the kingdom. Which is why I am so distraught that the King has cancelled it. This week His Majesty has agreed, reluctantly I can be sure, to decommission his royal train. The decision was announced by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers. Mr
The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in a desperate plight after years of cuts, or better still ‘Tory cuts’. Librarians, who are heroes, struggle to go on serving their local communities. Libraries are hanging on by a thread, and because of those
Perhaps the most traumatic part of attending an American wedding – much worse than the bridesmaids coming in the wrong way, the proliferation of dinner suits and the tendency of couples to write their own appalling vows – is the tradition of the ‘rehearsal dinner’. This, an event the night before the wedding, is where
Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human
Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of the city. ‘We’re outside,’ he told his videographer as they began their trek at Inwood Hill Park, ‘because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at!’ Like
This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in 2020, wrote many books during his long and varied life, but only one, The Camp of the Saints, is remembered. Even his admirers and sympathisers admit that the book isn’t a classic in the literary
Worse for drink, and lonely in his Hollywood apartment, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to write a postcard. He began, ‘How are you?’, an important question as he was planning to send the postcard to himself. Although he never sent it, perhaps he understood the magical ability of the postcard to cheer us up. They’ve
