Who runs Labour?

Britain’s ailing body politic

It is to be hoped that, following his cancer diagnosis, King Charles makes a full and fast recovery. It…

Letter of the week: Windfall power

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

Labour’s quandary: should that £28bn go in recycling or straight to landfill?

Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.

The King of suffering

Charles III’s cancer diagnosis marks the first, and possibly last, time Britain will understand him.

Labour is haunted by the ghosts of 1997

Also this week: Why Keir Starmer isn’t boring, and dancing with David Miliband.

Sheryl Sandberg: “Ending hate on social media will cost billions”

The first woman on Facebook’s board – and the co-author of Lean In – on Hamas’s 7 October attack…

What Peter Mandelson’s return means for Labour

Is he drawn by the proximity of power, or by the struggle for Keir Starmer’s political soul?

Joe Biden’s lost voters

The US president is losing much-needed support over the war in Gaza, and mainstream Democrats aren’t helping.

The Trumpian end of the liberal world order

With the former president’s return the West may finally be released from its mission impossible.

How Olaf Scholz lost Germany

German voters have come to distrust their chancellor – but that’s just the start of his problems.

The Church is being villainised over the Clapham chemical attack

Religious figures have been drawn into debates over false asylum claims – but it is the process that is…

Thomas Hardy’s life of desire

Why did the great novelist of female attraction create such misery in his marriages?

The NS Poem: Can dragonflies hurt you?

A new poem by Matt Howard

From Paul Strathern to Kerry Hudson: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi and James and John by Chris Bryant.

In praise of sluggish politics

Deliberation and reversals are democracy’s great virtues, writes Jonathan White. But can it keep pace with a world in…

The invention of the Teddy boy

How the subculture emerged from postwar London’s tribal landscape of fashion, class and violence.

Opera singer David Butt Philip on how Brexit is impacting British musicians

Could the world-beating tenor be one of the UK’s last great singers to build a career in Europe?

American Fiction is a bold and bracing satire of publishing’s race problem

Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure shows the “African-American experience” as far richer than it’s often…

Netflix’s One Day is a romcom without any chemistry

With its bland universality in place of electricity or charm, this adaptation feels unconvincing and embarrassing.

The joy of Joni Mitchell’s return

Her appearance at the Grammys in a wheelchair, walking stick in hand, could add 20 years to the shelf…

Tristram Hillier, England’s quiet surrealist

The painter’s immaculate pictures of an off-kilter world are works of concentration and contemplation.

We eat piles of pancakes come Shrove Tuesday, but eschew the Lenten fast

From Welsh crempog to northern havercakes, pancakes were the last hurrah before an abstinence that was good for the…

Lives are at risk when algorithms go wrong

Keeley was in agony. Why didn’t the NHS 111 software register the danger she was in?

My health scare is over, so now there is space for all my other worries

At the moment I am conducting an experiment as to how long I can go without a toaster. It’s…

Who, in this Wild West of contraception, can you trust?

Whatever the method, reading the endless lists of side effects is a preventative in itself.

This England: Get into the groove

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

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Seyi Obakin Q&A: “I yearn for a government that will end homelessness”

The charity leader on great team spirit, investigative shows and optimism.