The Guardian e-paper Journal
Andy Burnham has shown that he can win. But can he govern?
By the end, it had become less a byelection, more a mythical quest. Whoever could draw the sword from Makerfield’s stone – or more prosaically, beat Reform UK in a seat where it practically swept the board in last month’s local elections – would claim...
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Trump claims his deal is a win. Well, yes, it is – but for Tehran
Donald Trump is running fast to escape the catastrophic war on Iran that he and Benjamin Netanyahu started four months ago. He is saying anything that appears to suit the moment. In fact, he clearly feels he can now ditch his friend, the Israeli prime...
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The right grasps this key fact: we are still a land of Brexit ghosts
What story does Britain tell itself about Brexit, 10 years after the vote that transformed the country? Watch TV or read the papers and you find one of two viewpoints: from the common room or the conference room. The common room story is about chums...
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A riot, a protest: who decides what terrorism looks like now?
‘If you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin,” the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, asked last week, “how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.” It is. But there is another way of describing the actions...
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If we do want to rejoin the EU, we first need to understand it
As Britain approaches the 10th anniversary of its vote to leave the EU, the British are beginning to debate rejoining what they call Europe. But, as in most previous British debates about “Europe”, this is Europe with the Europe left out. The...
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Here among the voters, the scale of Burnham’s task is clear
Keir Starmer teeters. The defence secretary exits, and thereby seems to confirm the prime minister’s demise. Andy Burnham scents a final, belated breakthrough, while most of the national talk is of violence, a country in crisis and malaise. And in...
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The right has created a false reality – fuelled by toxic images
When voters in Makerfield head to the polls next week, their decision, as is increasingly the case across the nation, may come down to this: whether to be more swayed by a hopeful vision of the UK or by a narrative that defines the country as little...
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They’re both hard right and poisonous. Is it their undoing?
For all their claims to be mould-breaking politicians, the feuding Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe are in many ways predictable and traditional rightwingers. Two wealthy white men in their 60s from southern England, with private educations and previous...
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Blair’s diagnosis is good. But his prescription is truly deluded
Tony Blair is right. Labour has made some big and avoidable mistakes since it came to power nearly two years ago. Keir Starmer had a strategy for winning the election but lacked a coherent plan for what his government would do next. Fair cop. Blair is...
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War, what is it good for? Apart from ducking a son’s wedding
How far would you go for your son? For Donald Trump, the answer is simply: “The Bahamas? That is way too far! Why can’t you just get married on the golf course we buried your mother in? Or better still, the one I’m being carted to the second I get off...
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A saga that lays bare our new, fragmented party politics
If you want a window into how a fragmented nation and a splintered party system are reshaping our politics, look no further than the drama at Worcestershire county council. It shows the consequences of Britain governing like a two-party state when it...
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Let’s call it the Arteta method. A crisis-hit PM should study it
Obviously, I know that politics and football are different. One is a highstakes endeavour that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people, with an impact felt around the globe and down the generations – and the other is politics. I know too...
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Married at First Sight shows us that reality TV can be all too real
She said no. She didn’t want it, she made that very clear, but he did it anyway; pushing her feelings aside as though they didn’t matter, because to him they seemingly didn’t. It’s a story so depressingly common that most women probably carry a private...
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The right hates diversity in the arts. That’s why he is their target
I met Tommy Robinson once. It was 10 years ago exactly, during one of his many failed attempts to mainstream Islamophobia in British politics with a new “movement” called Pegida – a copycat of Germany’s far-right Patriotic Europeans Against the...
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Accountability? Farage in No 10 would give the lie to that myth
The biggest Brexit donor was the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves. He gave £3.2m to the leave campaign. He justified his enthusiasm as follows: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And...
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I’ve interviewed Reform voters – they aren’t lost causes to the left
When Labour suffered heavy defeats in the recent local elections, it lost particularly badly across the Midlands and the north of England. The results are reminiscent of the 2016 Brexit vote and, with the return of those electoral geographies, some of...
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Warning: this article contains a long-forgotten thing – hope
caused by right-left extremism, stagnating economies, inequality, corruption, terrorism, racism, big tech, mass extinctions and the climate crisis make for shared nightmares. Growing numbers of people simply refuse to engage with the news, finding it...
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If they know what Labour is for, now is the time to say so
If this were a poker game, yesterday lunchtime was the point when players were finally forced to show their cards. Was Wes Streeting holding all the aces, as his people relentlessly claimed, or a pair of fours and a lot of empty bluster? Did Andy...
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As Labour sinks into civil war, what about the people?
‘Westminster is a cocoon. Lots of people in lovely jobs, so it becomes easy to forget the world outside.” Catherine West should know. She’s been an MP for 11 years, even if you hadn’t heard of her until this weekend when the Labour backbencher...
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Before any new leader, Labour truly needs a battle of ideas
Labour has spent much of the past year paralysed by competing fears. MPs’ dread of facing voters with Keir Starmer as prime minister has been kept in check by their recoil from the process of replacing him. Impatience with Starmer’s leadership has,...
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So it’s back to the future for an ailing PM, but who will follow?
There comes a time, in the dying days of a relationship, when you start to become irritated merely by the sound of your partner’s breathing. It’s not kind, and it’s not necessarily rational, but it is what it is. Nothing they can do is going to fix it,...
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Westminster is going to feel the consequences of Plaid’s victory
On Saturday, I stood on the steps outside the Senedd listening to the leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth, take questions from the media. It was one of those rare moments of almost feeling history being made. As one of the other journalists said to...
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Starmer may survive but UK politics as we know it is over
He wants a little more time and he may just get it. It seems there was enough in the results of Thursday’s elections to allow Keir Starmer to fend off calls for his immediate exit. But that should not obscure the bigger picture, which is not only...
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A long weekend for Starmer, and a busy one for his Labour rivals
This is going to be an ugly weekend for British politics. How ugly we won’t quite know until Saturday night, when enough votes will have been counted to judge whether Keir Starmer’s government has suffered merely a midterm kicking or a full-blown...
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Let us never fall for this ‘adults in the room’ nonsense again
Some big questions will be asked this weekend – about how Labour fell so far so fast, about when Keir Starmer goes and who takes his place – but at least one big thing will be clear: never entrust your country to people who keep insisting they’re grown...
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What happened to Corbynism is a lesson for the Green party
For more than a decade, Britain’s acrimonious politics has included a fundamental but often misunderstood battle. Sometimes it is fought out in the open and sometimes more in the shadows. Its protagonists extend far beyond Westminster, into the media,...
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Here’s a surefire vote-winner for Labour. If you see Keir, tell him
In the summer of 1987, as life in Britain was being steadily reshaped by Margaret Thatcher, I landed a temporary job as an electrician’s mate in a steel-drum factory. I was a truly useless assistant, and justified my existence by singing songs to...
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Look beyond the pomp: here are the last rites for a dying era
A feature of living at the end of an era is that some events in the present already feel like future artefacts – things you might expect to see in a school history book or a documentary many years from now. Here is King Charles’s 2026 state visit to...
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Where are all the anti-racists when British Jews need them?
For me, it’s mostly sadness. Among others, the overriding emotion is fear. For some, it’s anger. It was certainly anger that was most vividly on display in Golders Green after the stabbing of two men, both Jews, in the broad daylight of a spring day...
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There is an easy antidote to the poison ruining our democracy
How do we know whether political funding is corrupt? Mostly, we don’t. A plutocrat delivers a sack of cash to a political party. A few weeks later, it announces a policy that happens to favour the donor’s business. Are the events linked? We might...
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Labour faces wipeout in its last stronghold. I’ve seen why
Over the week to come, journalists will repeat three things until they, and you, are sick: that local elections fall next Thursday; that the results will decide the fate of Keir Starmer; and that he is set to do badly. But just how badly, and where?...
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The PM is in his happy place: a never-ending procedural row
Have his enemies done it? Have the rebels managed to find a thermal exhaust port in the Death Starmer that would enable them finally to destroy it? No, would seem to be the answer after yet another morning of increasingly unwatchable procedural drama...
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Britain doesn’t need a new PM. It needs Labour to be braver
If not Keir Starmer then who? That’s altogether the wrong question. What matters is not who but what comes next. A black cloud of near terminal despair has fallen upon Labour MPs, but seeking a saviour is a useless endeavour until they decide what it...
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Starmer is just the latest avatar for this era of zombie politics
Finally, belatedly, an honest portrait of Keir Starmer has been allowed to form. It’s been a hell of a journey. At first he was sanctified as the Labour saviour, finally arrived. That gave way to pleas that he was essentially a good sort, new to...
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It’s no surprise that Trump has met his match in Pope Leo
It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the...
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Two men made errors – only one lost his job. It’s not a good look
A good leader never asks their people to do something they wouldn’t do themselves. Hold others to the highest standards, by all means, but only if you have equally high expectations of yourself: otherwise you may command obedience in politics but never...
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The unfolding catastrophe you haven’t even heard of
The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the...
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Poor Keir has now run out of other people he can blame
‘How dare Olly Robbins not have made me look like a chaotic, unprincipled plonker?” is an interesting defence for a prime minister to go for. But we are where we are. Never mind “this is the future liberals want”: this is the past that Keir Starmer...
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Donald Trump has betrayed his voters – and they know it
In a carefully coordinated publicity stunt last week, Donald Trump received a McDonald’s takeaway order from delivery driver Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old grandmother of 10 from Arkansas. Simmons, a Trump supporter and advocate of his “no tax on tips”...
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Evil can be nonchalant, absurd,comical– sound familiar?
Over the past few weeks, a random kaleidoscope of images has been flashing through my head. Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost...
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Starmer needs a good lawyer right now – how about himself?
Keir Starmer is dull and managerial, they said. He’s a process-obsessed technocrat, they said. He is, his opponents argued long before Starmer won a landslide election victory nearly two years ago, a bad choice for prime minister because he is not so...
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Can we ever blame parents for the crimes of their children?
It was shortly before Axel Rudakubana left the house that his mother is thought to have found the discarded packaging for a knife. His parents already knew that their 17-year-old son was ordering weapons by post; that he was watching graphic online...
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Europe is now Keir Starmer’s trump card – he must play it
In opposition, Keir Starmer pushed Brexit to the margin of debate. In government, he has learned that Europe is central to Britain’s interests whether you talk about it or not. The avoidance of painful arguments from the past turns out to be a handicap...
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They crave a new democracy – and we must support them
To be in Budapest last Sunday evening was to see history again being made on the Danube. As rapturous crowds gathered on the riverbank opposite the brightly illuminated parliament building, chanting “Ria-ria Hungaria!” and “Hungary-Europe!”, we all...
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Trump badly needs out of this war. Maybe the UK can help
Not our war, not our problem. For weeks now, that has been Europe’s increasingly confident position on the conflict in Iran: that it didn’t ask for this fight, can hardly be expected to join in when it has no idea what war crimes Donald Trump might be...
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Forget protocol: here’s what King Charles should say in the US
It will be a definitive moment for Charles III and the British monarchy. And for better or worse, it could help salvage British-US relations, after Donald Trump insulted Keir Starmer. In the public high point of his state visit, the king will mount...
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See Netanyahu through Israeli eyes – and he is still a disaster
It is a record of abject failure. I am not speaking of Donald Trump, though I could be. Instead, I am talking about his partner in this terrible war. Naturally, Trump has been the star of the show. He has been the face of the 40-day war on Iran,...
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Rubbing along in the right way is how we know that we’re alive
Does life, of late, feel just too easy? Are you keen to make it harder than it already is? If that sounds like a genuinely demented question in the week that the world came close to threatened Armageddon, then fair enough. I bridled too when I read...
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Ten years after Brexit, this is us: divided and frozen in time
On 23 June 2016, the British voter changed. Before that day, they picked a party, usually red or blue. By that morning, only two tribes mattered: remain or leave. And they kept mattering long, long after the result was declared. Rather than bin those...
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Europe should not bet on the US becoming sane again
Donald Trump is a despot and the US is a democracy. These things can be true simultaneously but not indefinitely. There is now deadlock in the struggle between a president who would be king and a constitution drafted in repudiation of monarchy. But it...
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How private equity came to own everything under the sun
It was the free croissants that gave it away. And the Scandinavian-style furniture. And the tasteful pastel walls. It was different from other nurseries I’d viewed: marginally more expensive, the aesthetic equivalent of a WeWork for toddlers. I was...
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Trump cannot understand Iran. That’s why his war drags on
Five weeks. We are now more than five weeks into the war on Iran. What was supposed to be a “precise, overwhelming military campaign” to eliminate “an imminent nuclear threat” and urge the Iranian people to “take over” their government is now anything...
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It’s the Trump silver lining: he is pushing us closer to the EU
Going anywhere nice this summer? No, me neither, judging by the warning from the Ryanair boss, Michael O’Leary, that a global shortage of jet fuel caused by the Iran war may soon lead to cancelled flights. Suddenly a week in Cornwall looks a safer bet,...
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What can the world do about Donald Trump? Wait him out
The United States is extraordinary. One day it goes to the far side of the moon and revives the space age. On the same day, its president is looking to the far side of the Earth and says he will take Iran “back to the stone ages”. It may well be a...
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A glaring truth about the oil crisis: not all of us will suffer
Perhaps the most celebrated writer on oil markets is Daniel Yergin. His work has won a Pulitzer and his advice has been sought by every president from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. Let’s start by looking at an example. Fifteen years ago, before the US...
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How ideologues laid our green and pleasant land to waste
This country’s a dump. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste gangs, it is one big potential landfill. The chances of being caught range between minimal and nonexistent, and the penalties are...
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Does anyone know what’s in Trump’s mind now? Does he?
Donald Trump’s cognitive skills are amazing. So amazing! So great! So much better than any other dumb presidential contender you could mention, at least according to Trump himself, who bragged once again last week of how he had repeatedly aced what he...
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Will there be peace – or more bombs? Place your bets now
Odd things are happening in the markets. Last Monday, 15 minutes before Donald Trump posted an announcement that “productive talks” with Iran had taken place, oil traders placed half a billion dollars’ worth of bets on the future price of oil. Trump’s...
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At last, a double blow to the tech Goliaths. Now to fight harder
Good news is so rare these days, you don’t quite know how to take it. You want to celebrate, but a rival instinct tells you it’ll be pulled back somehow, the same feeling you get when your team scores a late winner, but you’re filled with instant dread...
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After years of shunning big ideas, Labour needs a thinker
Nature famously abhors a vacuum. So when Morgan McSweeney departed government, leaving a hole where much of Keir Starmer’s thinking used to be, it was always going to be filled eventually. And increasingly, that filling looks Ed Miliband-shaped. The...
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Even in these dark days, I still have hope for Iran’s future
What is a writer’s responsibility? I feel that it has always been to give voice to those who have been silenced and to keep people alive through recreating them in our imagination, time and time again. This is what I have in mind as the Iranian people...
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We’re gambling everything. Act now, before the food runs out
The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the trigger...
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It’s one man’s mania. Now all of us are going to pay the price
Nothing has changed. Yet. But we stand on the edge of inevitable economic cataclysm, such as not seen in our lifetimes. It’s an odd, hold-your-breath moment, waiting for what the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is now certain to happen: an...
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This is Trump’s video game war: flattened by AI and memes
The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The...
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