New transparency data from the Cabinet Office shows that it took Rishi Sunak less than two months to find some time in his busy prime ministerial schedule for Rupert Murdoch. Quelle surprise. On 21 December Sunak had a dinner with Murdoch. The meeting's purpose? "To discuss the PM's priorities." They were joined by other senior figure's from Murdoch's media businesses: Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, Rebekah Brooks, head of News UK, and the editors of the Times (Tony Gallagher), Sunday Times (Emma Tucker, who has since taken charge of Murdoch's Wall Street Journal) and the Sun (Victoria Newton). During his first few months in the job Sunak also met journalists and executives from Channel 4, the Spectator, the Daily Mail, ...

Ideologues can become centrists without changing their views. The paradigm shifts – a Labour member who was a party loyalist in the 1970s can find themselves a Corbynite pariah in the 2020s. Take Liz Truss. In the UK, she sits on an ideological island. The public oppose her infatuation with the free market, as do much of her party. But in the US, the 49-day PM stands comfortably alongside many Republicans.  In a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC yesterday, Truss flaunted her commitment to “Anglo-American capitalism” with a series of sentences that contained the word “freedom”. She warned that the libertarian economic model was being “strangled into stagnation”, and called for the forces of freedom to push back. The ...

It’s hard to know what to make of Elon Musk’s bravura interview with the BBC on Tuesday night (11 April), after the enigmatic entrepreneur invited the corporation’s Silicon Valley correspondent to Twitter’s offices. The BBC is presenting it as a fillip (though it's worth noting that in the last week, which marks a year since Musk first announced he had taken a stake in Twitter, Musk has been engaging more with reporters). Musk, meanwhile, is using it as a way to make light of the staid old ways of journalism. We learned little: Musk waved away criticism of hate speech on Twitter by asking the BBC to identify a single example of it, which didn’t happen. He ducked questions about when he’d ...

Today, 12 April, Liz Truss – the Liz Truss who crashed the economy; the Liz Truss who broke the cardinal rule of modern Tory politics and let old people feel poorer – is giving a speech. In front of the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington DC – an audience that is far enough from Westminster that it may not have noticed what she did – Truss will argue that “stagnation, redistributionism and woke culture” have been “taking hold in businesses and the economy in the UK and the US”. This, she will say, has meant “more tax, more subsidies, more regulation”, as she delivers the annual Margaret Thatcher memorial lecture. There are so many incredible things there that it makes ...

For the last item of my Editor’s Note in our centenary edition, I returned to something Kingsley Martin, the New Statesman editor from 1930 to 1960, wrote in the “paper”, as he always called it, following the declaration of war in September 1939: “We have watched the degradation of standards in Europe, the growth of barbarism and the systematic use of cruelty as a political weapon.” Much worse was to follow during the years of the Second World War. Reflecting in 2013 on what Martin had written in 1939, I wrote that, even as austerity hardened in the long aftermath of the financial crisis, we “sometimes too easily forget how fortunate we are in western Europe to live in peace and ...

Clearly nobody at the Daily Mail is familiar with the concept of a spoiler alert. The front page of Wednesday’s newspaper included a huge plotline from HBO’s media business drama Succession. Spoiler alert: do not read on if you haven’t already seen episode three, season four, of Succession.  At the top of the Mail’s front page is a picture of Logan Roy, Succession’s lead character, alongside the headline: “Farewell to the foul-mouthed tyrant whose life (and death) were so explosively dramatic you couldn’t make it up!” (Of course, being a television drama, somebody did make it up.) As if that headline weren’t clear enough, the Mail helpfully added: “Logan Roy, 1938-2023.”  The Chatterer isn’t usually one for scouring through Twitter to find negative ...

The US president, Joe Biden, last night arrived in Belfast for a four-day visit to the island of Ireland. He has come to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and to celebrate his Irish roots. Biden wants to "make sure the Irish accords and Windsor agreements stay in place", he said when asked what his priorities for the trip were. "Keep the peace and that's the main thing. It looks like we're going to keep our fingers crossed." Biden's visit comes at a delicate moment. The Stormont Assembly has been suspended since February last year when the DUP pulled out of power-sharing in opposition to the Northern Ireland protocol, the post-Brexit trading rules between the UK and EU. Sunak ...

In the X-Men comic-book series (and the movies and animated show spun off it), “mutants” are humans with a genetic mutation that gives them special abilities, who face constant prejudice in wider society. Parents that learn their child is a mutant disown them or force them to hide their true nature. Politicians argue about “mutant rights”, and the media demonises them as they become the centre of a culture war. High-profile mutants become hate figures and spokespeople. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s meant to: X-Men’s mutants are a proxy for every “othered” group in society – black people, Muslims, people with disabilities, Jews, gay people, the Latinx community. Take your pick. The allegory is entirely intentional, and it ...