The truth about small boats

GB News will never love Kemi Badenoch

The channel’s viewers are her lost voters

The painful human reality of the small-boats crisis

The migrants crossing the Channel are seeking a better life in Britain

Martyn Oliver: “Schools are more than a single-word judgement”

The Ofsted chief inspector on the organisation’s new assessment system

I want to be deputy leader so I can do more

Also this week: taking the fight to Reform, and ministerial karaoke at Labour conference

Kemi Badenoch’s sarnie of destiny

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster

Letter of the week: Love thy neighbour

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

Is Shabana Mahmood the next prime minister?

Only Keir Starmer can solve Labour’s immigration bind

The Labour government has abandoned British Jews

Shabana Mahmood is correct that British Jews are “justified in asking for more from their government”

Britain’s sense of decline is terminal

Even the Doing-OK parts of the country suffer from the anxieties of the past decade

As the new MCC president, I want to open up the game to everyone

It will be a privilege to watch cricket history and innovation converge

Thomas Pynchon’s lasting triumph

His latest novel borrows too freely from his previous work. But what work it has been

Andrew O’Hagan’s ode to friendship

In his memoir/manifesto, the author suggests the close relationships we make with peers shape our lives

The World Cup in the age of extremes

Next year’s edition, to be held in Donald Trump’s America, will only be the latest in a long history…

When did opera become elitist?

Alexandra Wilson’s history of the art form in Britain shows how it used to appeal to everyone, from miners…

The price of revolution

Jason Burke chronicles how radical activists in the 1970s found violent new ways to pursue their causes

NS Poem: These Foolish Things

A new poem by Craig Raine

Good Boy: horror in a dog’s life

Ben Leonberg’s directorial debut, told from a canine’s-eye view, gives new, tail-wagging life to a predictable genre

Alan Partridge’s late style

Can a national joke survive when it’s also trying to become a national treasure?

Does Taylor Swift really shine on The Life of a Showgirl?

The new album trades her heart-thumping highs for soft-rock meanderings

My night out with the citizens of nowhere

At St Pancras’s champagne bar, I forget Brexit even happened

Beware weight-loss drug statistics

The details are more complex than pharma’s pitch suggests

My mother, the Broadway star of Cloudesley Ward

She’s in hospital, the cat’s starving (apparently), and somehow Deborah Levy turns up in the lift

Finally, I tackle my fear of woodwork

A workshop course has somehow helped me confront both grief and power tools

This England: Best foot forward

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

October 1977: Martin Amis reports from the Conservative Party Conference