The War on Whitehall

The Canadian example

Mark Carney’s election victory has proved that populist advance is not inevitable.

Letter of the week: Keep the faith

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

Does anyone want a Tory-Reform alliance?

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

Will Labour’s “Sea Wall” be swept away?

Under threat from Reform, coastal MPs are demanding a new strategy from Keir Starmer.

What happened to the original Davos Man?

Also this week: Japanese Farageism and the birth of the new Observer.

Lawrence Newport: “It’s more than system failure – it’s people failure”

The campaigner and Dominic Cummings ally on why political change requires bravery.

Keir Starmer must attack now to see off Farage

Donald Trump’s chaos gives the Prime Minister the perfect opportunity to move decisively.

The BBC finds itself not guilty

Also this week: Gordon Brown takes on Murdoch, and The Sun’s grasp of voting patterns.

Harvard, elite privilege and the weaponisation of anti-Semitism

How should liberals pick between Donald Trump and this bastion of institutional elitism?

Friedrich Merz has emboldened Germany’s far right

The incoming chancellor’s coalition compromises leave a lot of space for the AfD.

The nastiness and cowardice of Kneecap

The language is coarse, their lack of conviction is cynical.

How the world stopped Hitler

The Second World War was not just won on the battlefield, but in seemingly marginal regions from Ireland to…

Solvej Balle’s day without end

In this Danish novel, a woman stuck in a repeating time loop is forced to consider the very fundamentals…

The sounds that shape us

Alice Vincent’s Hark asks why gender, age and parenthood change the way we listen.

Britain’s small boats obsession

Overcrowded dinghies used for desperate, dangerous crossings have become totemic in our toxic immigration conversation.

From Philippe Sands to Simon Park: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring The Dream Factory by Daniel Swift and The Fall of the House of Montagu by Robert Wainwright.

The second birth of JMW Turner

This year marks the 250th anniversary of his birth, but it was a midlife encounter with two landscapes that…

Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope is an exercise in the male gaze

The Italian director’s latest film is all beauty and no sense.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes brings horror flooding back

Jeff Pope’s meticulous, minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events of July 2005 reveals the shameful circumstances of De Menezes’ death.

The Organ Symphony is an ode to the human body

This bizarre and brilliant BBC Radio 4 series imagines what our heart, brain, lungs, kidneys and liver might sound…

Fruitcake has long been a part of British celebrations

And it will be at my wedding.

The NHS will be paid to cut waiting lists – at great cost to patient safety

Are some people destined to become collateral damage so that lists “fall” faster?

My mother is in hospital

So I seek the consolation of cats.

Ah, baking, the only hobby I’ve really stuck to

On Good Friday, I rose at 4.30am with certainty: today was a day for hot cross buns.

This England: Great pub-licity

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

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Larry Lamb Q&A: “Playing Mick Shipman has made me a better man”

The actor on pub memories and loving life.