New Statesman

The rise of balaclava Britain, Kemi Badenoch’s billionaire baloney and Donald Trump’s AI rebrand.

The first warning signs came 48 hours before kick-off.

If you review books, you get to throw out a lot of questions without hope of having them answered.

Jimmy Lai spends 23 hours a day in a small, stiflingly hot concrete cell.

Reform has been on a downward slope for the best part of 2026.

For the last decade, the UK’s pension story has been one of participation.

To watch Donald Trump welcome Xi Jinping to Washington this week, you would think the People’s Republic of China was one of the United States’ closest allies.

An 80 strong group of Labour MPs has urged the Prime Minister to “turn rhetoric into reality” and fulfil promises he made on the road to No 10.

Andy Burnham faces a challenge familiar to any business leader: having a plan is one thing; building the support needed to deliver it is another.

What makes the UK unique as a holiday destination?

Britain’s technology debate is obsessed with unicorns.

On Andy Burnham’s first full day as Prime Minister, the newly sacked Darren Jones made it clear he would remain a force to be reckoned with.

With all those sailors washing up in its port over the years, Liverpool had to find a way of dealing with the ne’er-do-wells.

Public transport is a key enabler of social and economic progress, helping bring families and communities together, and connecting people to jobs, skills and essential services.

The success of the Warm Homes Plan will ultimately be decided in households across the country, not in Whitehall.

People sitting in the dark to save electricity.

John Healey is in the uncomfortable position of a man who has just stepped into a lift in which someone else has recently farted.

The storm began in the Irish Sea, brooding off the coast of Dublin, working itself into a rage over the 135 miles or so to Blackpool, and then, finally, falling furious over the cobbles of Clitheroe, Lancashire.

At the time of writing I am on day four of an increasingly surreal debate on social media.

At the time of writing I am on day four of an increasingly surreal debate on social media.

The classics always need reviving; what keeps them classic is their adaptability.

The insult was architectural: one cell, three bodies, a shelf for each man, a bucket, cold seeping through masonry.

The insult was architectural: one cell, three bodies, a shelf for each man, a bucket, cold seeping through masonry.

In 1998, German computerised financial exchanges were competing with London’s old-school trading floors.

For most of us, meeting an American mobster would be both difficult and unpleasant.

The new Prime Minister was hitting the phones.

It’s an interesting quirk of the English literary canon that there are almost no great novels about Westminster politics.

To the British Museum, along with half of London, to see the Bayeux Tapestry – or so we’d planned.

Were you to examine the cross-section of a political journalist’s brain you would find the precise wording of Section 44 of the Rycroft Review, a phone number for Iain Duncan Smith, three memorised Robert Caro quotes and precisely one joke: “Wow, The Thick

Were you to examine the cross-section of a political journalist’s brain you would find the precise wording of Section 44 of the Rycroft Review, a phone number for Iain Duncan Smith, three memorised Robert Caro quotes and precisely one joke: “Wow, The Thick

And so, to the Labour Conference I trudge.

My mother is improving, cognitively if not physically.

Ikea, Sudoku grandmasters, Ken Livingstone, quadratic equations, chancery law, John Lewis, the Tu clothing range at Sainsbury’s, matcha lattes, suet.

It’s Saturday morning and my mother is spraying cold water in my face, her preferred form of parental violence.

What would the UK feel like with no BBC?

This time last year I was preparing to speak at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, where I introduced Keir Starmer.

Outsourced workers on publicly owned TransPennine Express are to strike during the Labour Party Conference in a move designed by the RMT Union to pressure Andy Burnham to fulfil the government’s promise to “end the era of outsourcing by default”.

When I was told about an exciting new prime-time presenting opportunity, I assumed it was for Strictly.

As Westminster’s attention was pulled across the Atlantic, shocking scenes unfolded in the Channel on the night of Andy Burnham’s trip to the UN.

Dressed all in black, a boy of around five hovers in the entrance of a corner shop, reaches up to grab a wedge of watermelon and runs down the street, cradling it in his arms.

I won’t question Ailbhe Rea’s judgement that “Ed Miliband’s dynamism is remaking Britain’s foreign policy” (Politics, 11 September).

Orientalism is having a moment.

One of the many criticisms of Keir Starmer’s leadership was that he had little or no sense of history.

Britain’s economic revival and the investment, opportunities, and prosperity it can create will not be written in one city.

This summer, we have experienced the dangerous consequences of human-made climate change.

Labour must develop a practical plan for local places that lets go of the past and creates the common ground for the infrastructure, security and welfare that we need in the future.

For a long time, dementia has been seen as too complex and too difficult to solve.

At the Liberal Democrats party conference in Brighton, the merchandise stand is offering bags of 25 yellow balloons, reduced from £7 to £4.

Sebastian Faulks has never believed in God, though his novels skirt around the edges of faith.

Andy Burnham finally has what he always wanted.