New European

Lauren Boebert, Republican Congresswoman for Colorado and ardent Trump supporter, is one of Capitol Hill’s most vocal advocates of family values, frowning at the peccadilloes of colleagues and this summer attacking Major League Baseball for being “gay”. The 39-year-old’s website states “I believe that strong families are the foundation of American society, and I oppose efforts to redefine marriage as anything other than the union of one man and one woman”. She has in the past criticised fel

Tim McNally, chairman of Piddington Parish Council, has become a star of global media over the past week after his tiny village voted in a referendum to leave the UK in protest at plans to move 1,250 asylum seekers into a disused Ministry of Defence site on its outskirts. CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Australian have been among those eager to talk to the man the New Statesman described as “Piddington’s energetic parish council chair”. But how much is McNally really like Passport to Pimli

“Dear viewer, I know you are wonderful, clever people and will remain loyal to GB News,” said Jacob Rees-Mogg on Friday night, staring down the barrel of the camera to those watching his State of the Nation show. Why should the former cabinet minister feel the need to issue such a rallying cry? Because rumour has it that Reform UK is about to spend a chunk of its recent £72 million windfall launching its own TV channel. As Rats in a Sack reported a week ago: “One of the things that Reform i

The conditions look ideal for the Democrats to win big in America’s mid-term elections. Most weeks president Trump’s ratings plunge to new depths. Democrat supporters seem more determined than Republicans to turn out to vote in November’s mid-term elections; and the Democrats also have a clear lead among independents.  However, that is not the whole story. The Democrats’ ratings are as bad as Trump’s. A recent YouGov poll found that 36% regarded the president favourably. Against 57% unfavourabl

Odd, now, to watch Tess Daly announce the winners of the first series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004. Natasha Kaplinsky gives a little shrug and hugs her dance partner, Brendan Cole, with whom she was rumoured to be having an affair. She later said she hated performing on the show.  Daly, wearing an unflattering knee-length dress, claps briefly. Bruce Forsyth just smiles, rooted to the spot. With the departure of Daly last year, there remains one survivor from series one – Craig Revel Hor

When the most milquetoast man in the artistic universe ends up in the middle of a political shitstorm, you know things have gone badly wrong. On Saturday, Ed Sheeran resumed the US leg of his Loop tour – the name a reference to his signature use of the loop pedal to create a repeating base rhythm over which he can play and sing. At Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, this was technology he needed: having started his 57-date jaunt backed by a five-piece band, this time Sheeran took to the st

In the strange interregnum between the completion and publication of a book, a writer runs a gamut of heightened emotions. For Nick Tyrone, author of The Rise Of Reform: The Inside Story Of Britain’s Political Disruptors, this period may well have been spent rocking back and forth, crying, with his head in his hands.  The problem is this: in the time it takes to print words on a page, Reform UK have giddily torpedoed Tyrone’s central argument that the party is a government in waiting. With ruth

Film festivals have become battlegrounds of political discourse. Unwillingly, it must be said. Long gone are the days when directors and actors were eager to engage in political arguments that led to protests, walkouts, and fist fights. This isn’t the 1960s.  At Berlin earlier this year, Wim Wenders said that film should not be political – “we have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics.” Channing Tatum looked embarrassed

All documentaries are fake to a greater or lesser extent. If you doubt me, I direct you towards Werner Herzog (one of the finest documentarians of the past 50 years) and his “Minnesota Declaration” from 1999, which attempted to shoot down claims that documentary film offered an objective vision of reality.  “So-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants,” he said in his particularly Herzogian way. “Film-makers of Cinema Verité resem

PICK OF THE WEEK Slow Horses (Apple TV) Spooks now occupy the commanding heights of British culture. On November 5, Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw return in Joe Barton’s excellent Black Doves (Netflix) – by coincidence, the publication date of The Taper Man, the second George Smiley novel by Nick Harkaway, John le Carré’s son (the first, Karla’s Choice, was excellent).  Also on the horizon: Legacy of Spies (BBC/MGM+), starring Matthew Macfadyen as George Smiley, Hugh Laurie as Control, Ch

Who will be the new leader of Reform in Wales after a week in Cardiff Bay chaotic even by that party’s standards? The party’s 34 (at least at the start of the week) Senedd members have been rocked by the resignation of Dan Thomas, the former north London Conservative council leader who stepped down as Reform leader after being arrested and bailed on suspicion of assault and coercive or controlling behaviour. That was followed immediately by the defection of MS Sarah Cooper-Lesadd, who took

Liz Truss this week declared an interest in running for office once more – but until that day comes she’s happily not short of a few quid thanks to her mayfly-like period as prime minister. New figures show Truss has trousered £319,925 in ‘public duty allowance’ since her exit from Downing Street, the equivalent of £6,529 for each day she was in office. The allowance was introduced to assist former prime ministers still active in public life, which, by hosting a little-watched podcast on Mike G

For the Kremlin, the ritual of Russia’s upcoming parliamentary elections sends a message: despite years of crushing sanctions and battlefield losses, business continues as usual. The ruling United Russia party is expected to easily retake its place as the largest bloc in Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma – the same position it’s held for more than two decades.  Yet as Ukrainian drones bombard Russia, Moscow’s carefully crafted image of normality is being pushed to breaking

When is a member of something not a member? When it is an “associate member”, apparently… whatever that means. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s show-stopping invitation, during her annual State of the Union speech this week, for Canada to have “associate EU membership” was surprising for many reasons. One was that it remains unclear whether von der Leyen had checked in advance that Canada wanted to be offered such a status, although prime minister Mark Carney has been ad

The Trump administration operates largely devoid of a sense of irony. This is a President who sprouts lies on Truth Social, promises to speak for the everyman from an office filled with gold, and rains bombs down on Iran after vowing no more foreign wars.  But even a few conservatives couldn’t help but notice the irony in Donald Trump’s speech at the GOP convention in Dallas last week. After angry Republicans took to the stage to rail against “crazy communists” and “socialists” in the Democrati

It really is a shame that there’s no obvious equivalent for “be careful what you wish for” in French, as my brain cried out for one earlier today. I’d been minding my own business until online friends, acting as so many annoying toddlers, decided to tug at my sleeve and bring me there – just over there! – to show me something I absolutely had to see.  As it turned out, Green party leader and new candidate for Holborn and St Pancras Zack Polanski had just released a campaign ad… in French. “How

Cancel the babysitter: the live event of 2027 has been cancelled almost as soon as it was announced. Not Oasis’s inevitable third coming, however – but that of Colin Sutton, Reform’s new police and crime commissioner for Norfolk, who just last week announced he was going on a whopping 127-date tour of the UK, regaling theatre audiences with anecdotes from his time as a detective. Sutton had come in for heavy criticism for his jaunt across Britain, announced just two months after he was elec

When, in 2002, Theresa May told the Conservatives they were increasingly viewed by the public as “the nasty party”, it was as a warning. Does Kemi Badenoch view it as the goal? Not one but two senior Tories this week took to, inevitably, X, to apparently mock prime minister Andy Burnham despite the fact that he had just lost his beloved father. In both cases the tin-eared posts were so unpleasant that they had the remarkable achievement of being too much even for users of that sewer-like platfo

Writing about her fellow American exile James Baldwin in one of the many fine columns she wrote for this magazine over many years, Bonnie Greer said this:  “There is in him, too, this driving, passionate, urgent search: for our common humanity. He took no prisoners in this pursuit, because his prison is one in which it is necessary – a matter of urgency – to tell the truth.” The words are every bit as true of Bonnie, whose death was announced today. Bonnie Greer was a writer of enormous ta

Before we boarded Air Force One for the flight back to Washington, Trump ambled over from his limousine, “The Beast”, to talk to us under the wing of the plane. Still in his trademark boxy navy blue suit, white shirt and long red tie, the octogenarian president seemed a little spent after his exertions on stage. His bronzer-tinted face gleamed slightly in the warm Texas night. To be fair to the 80-year-old Trump, he had been on stage for nearly two hours the night before.  In his speech del