The Spectator

Yesterday

The Spectator

Burnham’s unwillingness to face the media should worry us all

From our UK edition

There are so many hopes invested in Andy Burnham’s premiership that disappointment is inevitable. In some cases, it is also desirable. The member for Makerfield has been co-opted by Labour’s soft left and communitarian right for their respective agendas. To govern will be to choose. But a particularly poisoned chalice has been proffered to the next prime minister, one he should dash from his lips. Of all the figures on the left who made the pilgrimage to Makerfield to campaign, the presence of Hugh Grant was most ominous. Perhaps the actor who played the prime minister in Love Actually with such élan was there to school our would-be premier on how to deal with obstreperous American presidents. But Hugh Grant is not just a more metrosexual Cary Grant.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: No. 10 heads north, Stokes retires and earthquakes hit Caracas

From our UK edition

Home Andy Burnham, who was expected to become prime minister on 20 July, took off his tie and put on a dark T-shirt for a speech in which he said he would establish a ‘No. 10 North’ in Manchester as the ‘nerve centre of a rewired Britain’. He promised council houses, welfare reform and ‘good growth in every postcode’ by means of ‘Manchesterism’. He took no questions. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, presented the delayed defence investment plan, and said that spending would rise by £15 billion by 2030. He landed his successor with £4.7 billion of the sum being left unfunded. The Ministry of Defence would also have to find £10.7 billion in efficiency savings in the next four years.

The Spectator

What kills more: heat or cold?

From our UK edition

Absolute mayor Andy Burnham wants more devolution and elected mayors. Do voters want that? – Since 2001 there have been 55 referendums on whether to establish the post of elected mayor. Only in 17 cases was there a majority in favour. – The towns and districts keenest on having an elected mayor were Middlesbrough (84% in favour), Croydon (80%) and Mansfield (70%). – The areas least keen on an elected mayor were Guildford (81% against), Bath (79%) and West Devon (77%). Ratings game Which attracts the biggest TV audience in Britain: Wimbledon or the World Cup? – England’s opening match in this World Cup, vs Croatia, attracted a peak audience of 15.4m. England’s quarter-final defeat to France in 2022 had an audience of 19.4m. – This compares with the 8.

The Spectator

Letters: Burnham is a master brand-builder

From our UK edition

Telling stories Sir: As a filmmaker by training and a marketer by profession, I couldn’t agree more with your leading article (‘Northern soul’, 27 June) on the absence of narrative in our politics. The appeal of figures such as Burnham and Nigel Farage lies in the storyworld they build around themselves – be it via pints shared down the pub, off-the-cuff honesty, or a Monty Python line landing in the Commons. But the PM who stays the course, as any brand-builder learns the hard way, must know two things: their own story, well enough to tell it plainly; and the people they speak to, well enough for them to make it their own. Aim a dull narrative at everyone and you reach no one; tell a story worth sharing and both left and right will see themselves in it.

Monday

The Spectator

Livestream: Tim Shipman meets Nick Clegg

From our UK edition

Watch the livestream of Tim Shipman meets Nick Clegg on Monday 20 July at 7pm here. Tim Shipman is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist and political editor of The Spectator. With a journalism career spanning nearly three decades, he has broken some of the most consequential stories in modern British politics. In our event series, Tim Shipman Meets the Party Leaders, he’ll learn the triumphs and setbacks of party leaders, past and present, as well as reveal the behind-the-scenes stories that you won’t hear anywhere else. In the second instalment in the series, we’ll be joined by former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

Friday

The Spectator

Who’s the most underrated American?

Bill Kauffman Luther Martin: a voluble and drunken Maryland attorney who walked out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 after warning his fellow delegates that their handiwork provided the framework for a centralized and militaristic empire that would efface regional distinctions and erode the liberties for which American patriots had fought and bled a decade earlier. An unheeded prophet who breathed the Spirit of ’76. Lionel Shriver Edith Wharton. Hardly unrecognized, but under-taught and too little familiar to the international literary readership (e.g., in Britain). A spectacular stylist, she wrote novels that still sound modern and perfectly accessible 100 years later – and she was a real feminist before the days the word meant humorless pill.

American

Wednesday

The Spectator

How does this week’s heatwave compare with 1976?

From our UK edition

Prime numbers It looks as if Britain will just miss out on having seven prime ministers in the space of a decade as nominations for the Labour leadership election will not open until 9 July (David Cameron left office on 13 July 2016). Have we ever had seven PMs in the space of ten years? – After Lord Liverpool left office on 9 April 1827 Britain saw a further eight premierships within the following decade. Two, however, saw the same person returning to office, so we had seven different prime ministers within the space of ten years.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Burnham wins, Starmer resigns and a heatwave hits

From our UK edition

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, stood outside 10 Downing Street and said that he would resign as leader of the Labour party. Nominations for a successor would open on 9 July (though he still meant to unveil his defence investment plan in time for the Nato summit on 7 July). His decision to depart followed the convincing victory in the Makerfield by-election of Andy Burnham, bringing him back into parliament. An election for mayor of Greater Manchester in his place would take place on 30 July, with Bev Craig, the leader of Manchester City Council, as Labour’s candidate. Mr Burnham packed a suit and tie into which he changed on the train from Manchester Piccadilly to London. He was sworn in as an MP that afternoon. Mr Burnham had received 24,927 votes (54.

The Spectator

How Burnham can avoid Starmer’s fate

From our UK edition

Welcome to the cabaret, Andy Burnham. Last year, the editor of this magazine wrote about ‘Weimar Britain’: the fear that political instability, economic turmoil and rising anti-Semitism was making our country as decadent and dangerous as inter-war Germany. As our sixth prime minister of the post-Brexit decade departs, and our seventh looms into view, we have developed a national addiction to perma-crisis, seemingly trapped in a game of ‘Topple the PM’. We are far from a January 1933 moment. But the joke isn’t funny any more. This turbulence is not inescapable, though. What is needed is a premier able to stay the course, to set out how they want to change Britain and to discover the drive and charisma to bring their party and the country with them.

Christopher James

Painting Days

From our UK edition

In memory of Bruce Chilton  Those unhurried afternoons we stood at our easels, muddying canvas with paint from a dinner plate. Schubert’s Trout Sonata on Radio 3. Tea stone cold, we were more Pete and Dud than Monet and Renoir, barely exchanging a word while the sun washed the room with light.  Occasionally, taken with the music, he’d give voice to a note or phrase, forgetting perhaps I was there.  There’d be a stop for a pipe; a pause for lunch – always sandwiches and soup. ‘Could I trouble you for some mustard?’ A little cricket talk, perhaps, or something about his motorcycle, some nuisance with the carburettor, or a tie he had his eye on in Jarrolds (‘But not at that price’).

The Spectator

Letters: Why the left loves Larkin

From our UK edition

An irresponsible drama Sir: Britain is faced with a fabricated panic which has prioritised personality over policy. Keir Starmer has been forced out of office largely to provide the media with a piece of theatre, a drama of great irresponsibility in which Act One has been written but nothing sketched out beyond it. Michael Gove’s brilliant account (‘Butterfly effect’, 20 June) has shown that Britain’s economy has benefited greatly from our detachment from the EU, but points to an area where the misnomer of ‘Exit’ has magnified problems of national identity, which remain and require what amounts to therapy on a grand scale.

Wednesday

The Spectator

How does this World Cup compare with the first?

From our UK edition

Football fiasco With 48 teams, this is the largest World Cup ever. How does it compare with the first? – The inaugural World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930. It should have had 16 teams, in a format which endured until 1970. However, only 13 turned up. Siam (now Thailand) and Japan accepted invitations but then withdrew. – Egypt were supposed to travel by ship with the French team, via Marseille. However, a storm in the Mediterranean prevented them making the connection. – England didn’t compete until 1950, when they were eliminated in the group stage after defeats to the US and Spain. Health and safety How have defence and welfare spending changed as a proportion of GDP?

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Belfast riots, Starmer bans TikTok and Trump turns 80

From our UK edition

Home The electors of Makerfield decided who might be prime minister. After John Healey resigned as defence secretary, Al Carns resigned as armed forces minister. Mr Healey had declared that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, had ‘been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country’. Dan Jarvis was appointed Defence Secretary. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said the armed forces would have to ‘dial back’ operations without more funding. Belfast had multiple nights of anti-immigrant rioting in response to the terrible knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Two Ukrainian men were found guilty of plotting firebomb attacks on properties linked to Sir Keir Starmer.

The Spectator

Trump has been outplayed by Iran

From our UK edition

The Founding Fathers may have modelled America on Ancient Rome, but they would have found the ersatz gladiatorial spectacle Donald Trump mounted at the White House to mark his birthday a grotesque perversion of their dreams. An ‘ultimate fighting contest’, staged to pay homage to Trump’s rule (though dressed up as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary celebrations) was exactly the cult of one man the Founding Fathers most dreaded. The President is not an emperor unconstrained, however. A shellacking in November’s midterm elections will show how hemmed in he is. And nowhere is his weakness more apparent than in his so-called ‘peace agreement’ with Iran. It is the latest in a series of humiliations visited on the Great Republic by this tawdry tinsel Caesar.

The Spectator

Letters: Keep AI out of the Church

From our UK edition

I Spy Sir: Overt political allegiance and class snobbery may indeed have thwarted Toby Young’s undergraduate ambition to be ‘tapped on the shoulder’ by the security services (No sacred cows, 13 June), but I wonder if he underestimates the importance of persistence. We were almost exact Oxford contemporaries and ‘out’ right-wingers to boot. During my first term I recall vividly a long conversation into the early hours with a fellow St Edmund Hall freshman, who confided that he had set his heart on joining MI6. He also insisted that one of the fabled dons responsible for recruiting spies was none other than the senior English fellow at our college, who after distinguished service in the second world war was now close to retirement.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Belfast burns, Sullivan resigns and the Iran ceasefire cracks 

From our UK edition

Home A horrible video circulated on social media of a man on the ground in a Belfast street being stabbed in the head. His life was saved by bystanders, one with a hurling stick; a Sudanese man, aged 30, who had arrived from Dublin and been granted leave to remain, was charged with attempted murder. In reaction, houses were set on fire and a bus and cars were burnt; in east Belfast, 100 masked men kicked in doors and broke windows, saying they were ‘getting the foreigners out’. J.D. Vance, the American Vice-President, blamed the death in Southampton of Henry Nowak on ‘the mass invasion of migrants’. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, said he had phoned Mr Vance and told him he was wrong.

The Spectator

Securing Britain’s defence should be Starmer’s legacy

From our UK edition

Few critiques of British mythmaking have been more astute than that of Correlli Barnett. He argued that 18th-century statesmen were hardheaded industrialists and merchants who understood the basis of military power. Then a new culture emerged, created by Victorian educationalists, one that had a ‘high-minded emphasis on religion and the classics’. By the end of the 19th century, Britain’s elites no longer understood the nation’s military-industrial base. They had become little more than a complacent establishment, rather than men of action. Hampered by inefficiencies and ill-prepared for conflict, Britain emerged from the second world war shrunken, uncompetitive and condemned to further decline.