A blunderer in high office
The Covid Inquiry has revealed that Boris Johnson treated Covid with insouciance, even after its lethal potential was known.
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
The paranoid style
Letter of the week: Peerless foreign secretaries
Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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What’s printed on Cameron’s ministerial briefs?
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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Demolition Britain – where new-build schools are too dangerous for pupils
Schools under two years old are being condemned while students shiver in tents or fall behind on lessons at…
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The lost art of the landline call
Also this week: the ghost of Princess Di, and the end of the Caramac bar.
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OpenAI has executed its turbulent priests
Sam Altman’s dramatic firing and rehiring has shown who is really in control of ChatGPT.
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Keir Starmer needs a coherent plan for immigration
The public anxiety about borders is real, and it will still exist under a Labour government.
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The West’s dominance is a dangerous delusion
Hubris and ignorance might prove decisive in its proxy wars in Ukraine and Israel, and in its economic contest…
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The flawed logic of progressives’ support for Islamist movements
Western liberals insist on universal human rights – but overlook the brutal rejection of these values by groups they…
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The Booker Prize is becoming irrelevant
The judging panel hasn’t picked an exciting winner in years because there simply hasn’t been one.
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JFK and the myth of the great martyr-saviour
How the assassination of President Kennedy began the age of American conspiracy.
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Emmanuel Macron does not understand France
A leading French thinker on the forces of a new movement that is neither left nor right.
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The return of the “longest hatred”
Across the world anti-Semitism is surging, and Jewish people are once again living in fear.
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Bill Gates is bad for humanity
By “maximising” lives, the billionaire philanthropist is making ours worse.
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The everyday economists guiding Rachel Reeves
The shadow chancellor’s history of women economists raises profound questions about the future of work.
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From Barbra Streisand to Michael Mann: new books reviewed in short
Also featuring Peter Cowie’s biography of Ingmar Bergman and Stuffed by Pen Vogler.
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Sarina Wiegman’s mystery playbook
In her book the Lionesses coach shows composure and compassion – but the art of football management remains a…
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The NS Poem: Hoops
A new poem by Erica McApline.
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The secrets of Shakespeare’s “stupid”, “grotesque” portrait
The infamous “pudding-faced” Droeshout portrait is widely agreed to be hideous and embarrassing. Is there more to it than…
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Ridley Scott’s fast and furious Napoleon biopic
In this ruthlessly efficient and entertaining epic, starring Joaquin Phoenix, facts are beside the point.
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ITV’s Cary Grant drama: chutzpah, desperation or total insanity?
This cheesy series starring Jason Isaacs fails to capture the glamour of Grant and 1960s Hollywood.
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Should Britain pay slavery reparations?
Laura Trevelyan and Clive Lewis represent “two sides of a horrible shared history” in Heirs of Enslavement.
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If you watch football with me, you need to respect my rules
Watching a game is a private pleasure, I don’t want to listen to any banal observations – I have…
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My sobriety ended when Waitrose put its port on offer
I nearly made it two days in a row, but the deal on Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage was simply…
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This England: Cold press
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…
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Sophie Chandauka’s Q&A: “Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ gets me in the zone”
The entrepreneur on our failure to regulate AI, the West Wing and dancing with her father to Abba.
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