Cast your minds back to June 2019. Theresa May had resigned, having failed to get her EU withdrawal deal through a mutinous parliament, and the Conservatives were in the middle of choosing a new leader. They had been thrashed in the previous month’s local elections. Nigel Farage and his Brexit Party were resurgent, and there was a very real possibility of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn winning a looming general election. The Times then published an article from three of the Conservatives’ rising stars. The party and the country were in terrible danger, the trio warned. Boris Johnson alone “commands the instant credibility needed to achieve support for a renegotiated deal amongst a suspicious public let down by delays and defeat”. Beyond Brexit, ...

With so much of the country’s infrastructure seemingly falling apart, it’s eminently sensible to turn politics into a branch of engineering. Enter the firm of Starmer & Associates, clipboards at the ready, emanating quiet competence. They have plans to deliver on priorities, within the limited budgets set by our highly constrained economic circumstances. There is a lot of fixing to be done and Keir Starmer’s natural mode is to be a problem solver, one who doesn’t mind being thought of as dull so long as he is effective. Speaking at a conference last week, the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, himself often dismissed for favouring rhetorical flourishes over practicalities, cast Starmer’s strengths this way: “His passion is cold – as ...

Even before the first episode of HBO’s The Idol was released last Monday (5 June) it was making headlines, with social media agog at its transgressive sex scenes, and a production source telling Rolling Stone it was “torture porn”. The series stars Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a pop star who has undergone the Britney/Miley Cyrus/Amanda Bynes treatment. She has breakdowns and embarrassments in the public eye, and fears she’s producing hollow, commercial music at the behest of her slightly oppressive handlers. The real story, however, is the “boundary-pushing” sexual relationship she develops with a part-time nightclub owner, part-time leader of a sex cult called Tedros – and oh, sorry, how Jocelyn “develops her voice” through it. Tedros is played by the singer-songwriter Abel Tesfaye, who records ...

We don’t yet know what the eventual outcome of this sorry, shabby, drawn-out saga will be. But the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon today (11 June), which followed the April arrest of her husband Peter Murrell – until recently the all-powerful chief executive of the SNP – inevitably casts a long shadow over the nation and the party that the couple dominated for so many years.  Sturgeon’s arrest and subsequent questioning by police involved in Operation Branchform, an investigation into how £600,000 of funding raised by the SNP for independence campaigning was spent, was widely expected (she has been released without charge pending further investigation). That is not to reduce its drama. On 5 April, officers swooped on the home shared by Sturgeon and Murrell in ...

Self-pitying, misleading, manipulative, delusional and undignified, it was, in some respects, a fitting resignation statement from Boris Johnson.  It encapsulated many of the attributes that have characterised his entire career. It is worth stepping back to note what we actually learnt from the statement. The Privileges Committee – a majority of whose members are Conservative MPs – had concluded that Johnson had misled the House of Commons and had determined that he should be suspended for ten days or more. Today we may be discussing Johnson’s future but we should not let this fact simply become yesterday’s news. For a recent prime minister to be found to be guilty of misleading the Commons, and for a substantial suspension to be recommended, ...

Caroline Lucas is the 55th MP in this parliament to have announced she will be standing down as an MP at the next general election. Lucas is Britain's only Green MP. She has represented Brighton Pavilion since 2010 and sits on a majority of just under 20,000 votes – a safe seat that has now, seemingly, been thrown into doubt. It is hard to work out whether her vote in Brighton is personal, making this seat Labour’s to lose. I have some doubts that it is; I think the Greens could well hold on here. Before Lucas’s win in 2010, the Greens were gaining support at each election cycle. They saved their deposit in 2001 (after polling more than 5 per ...

“Work saves us from three great evils,” wrote Voltaire. “Boredom, vice, and need.” For the Enlightenment philosopher, toil wasn’t merely a means to gain a living – but the thing that infuses life itself with value. That axiom gets to the heart of how our culture views work. So it is unsurprising that some find the proposal of a universal basic income (UBI) – which would untether wages from work – incomprehensible. Appearing on Good Morning Britain earlier this week, the businesswoman and Apprentice winner Michelle Dewberry called the potential effectiveness of forthcoming UBI pilot schemes the “height of delusion”. I have reservations about UBI. But these are not the result of believing work is inherently virtuous. I believe that technological change ...

Rachel Reeves gave the most comprehensive outline of her economic policy to date in America last month (the subject of Jason’s cover story this week). And it was still vague. Labour’s £28bn green prosperity plan was first announced at party conference in 2021 – given the reluctance with which the party has announced policy, it’s remarkable this vast spending commitment came so early. But when the fund is discussed in the press now, it’s heavily caveated with a reminder that all of Labour’s policies must comply with the party’s fiscal rules, which constrain a government’s finances. Jason writes: "Starmer and Reeves have not explained how they would fund the proposed £28bn a year for capital spending on green growth. Would it come ...