“Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain

The art of the political profile

Capturing the essence of people in power requires a different approach every time

Nick Clegg saves the internet

He’s not the hero we want, or the hero we deserve. Not a hero at all actually

Nick Thomas-Symonds: Labour’s Brexit repair man

The EU relations minister on Keir Starmer’s determination to cling on, and the UK’s changing relationship to Europe

My hair-raising deputy leadership race

Also this week: A ticking off from Mum, and all aboard the Man City bus

No 10 escalates Operation Save Bridget

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster

Letter of the week: Backbenchers vs backbone

Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine

Why Starmer believes he can defy Farage and Burnham

The Prime Minister will use Labour’s conference to frame himself as the only serious choice

Has Donald Trump become woke?

The tactics and techniques of yesterday’s progressives have been turned against them

Can Shabana Mahmood save Labour?

If the Home Secretary solves the small-boats crisis, the party has a fighting chance of winning the next election

Is there any hope for the British high street?

Even London’s Oxford Street is succumbing to decline

Keir Starmer must forge a future-facing nationalism

Criteria for belonging can be based on the common good

No one will escape Reform’s immigration plans

Faced with the prospect of being deported, I feel a need to justify my existence in the UK

Ian McEwan and fiction’s problem with climate change

In What We Can Know, Britain has sunk beneath the waves – but literature remains buoyant

How much is that doggy worth to No 10?

A new non-fiction book reveals the fascinating forays into how pets shape politics

How Richard Holmes humanised Tennyson

The biographer of England’s great poets reveals the secrets of inhabiting his subjects’ lives

Patricia Lockwood’s dispatches from the brain fog

The author’s autofictional account of Covid and its after-effects, Will There Ever Be Another You, confirms her place as…

The manosphere’s literary muscle men

Two novels explore the crippling solitude of a pair of ripped English professors

Kerry James Marshall’s nuanced vision of black lives

The painter’s retrospective at the Royal Academy presents a sweeping challenge to Western art’s exclusion of African-American figures

One Battle After Another is serious about racial politics

Behind the silliness and relentless action of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest thriller is a timely statement about America’s rightward…

House of Guinness’s sinister, sepia world

The new drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight expertly depicts the ruthless origins of Dublin’s brewing dynasty

The Lady from the Sea drowns out the Ibsen

Simon Stone’s contemporary take on the Victorian-era family drama is witty but struggles against its rain-soaked staging

How eating organs became cool

Meet the hipsters who want tripe for dinner 

After three glorious decades, it’s full-time for The Fan

As the final whistle blows for this column, I look back on an era in which football has grown…

The people I’ve been seeing

Some have been real, like Richard Coles, and others ghosts from my past – like Debbie, the barmaid I…

Wake me up, now September’s here

I am no clearer as to what kind of normal might exist in a world without my dad. But…

This England: Skipping the protocol

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…

August 1931: The Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald forms his National Government with Tories and Liberals