On the face of it, it seems counterintuitive that the government has announced, with great fanfare, a new policy that will make it easier for landlords to evict tenants while Michael Gove is still in the process of finalising his plan to make evictions more difficult. But it does, at least in theory, make sense. At present a landlord can evict their tenants at will (albeit with notice) under the terms of the Housing Act 1988 – a so-called section 21 eviction. Gove intends to scrap this. England will therefore shift from a system where flexibility is the default, mediated by specific protections, to a much stickier one subject to certain exemptions. Given that, it would have been grossly negligent of ministers ...

The next time you have a dull workday, spare a thought for the journalist who recently spent 18 hours straight watching GB News. Bron Maher, a reporter at Press Gazette, a sister title to the New Statesman, has recounted his ordeal in detail.  The Chatterer was particularly amused by some of the nuggets of wisdom offered by Eamonn Holmes, who presents GB News’s breakfast show with Isabel Webster. At one moment, Holmes mused: “I look at my dog every day and I think: ‘I wish I could talk to you.’ ” Earlier in the show he had described Rishi Sunak as a “tiny little leprechaun person”. On the subject of inflation/shrinkflation, Holmes claimed to remember Curly Wurly chocolate bars measuring three feet in ...

Typically, when there is a court hearing in which someone is seeking an injunction to protect privacy, the media is arguing against it – in favour of transparency and publication. But yesterday, Monday 27 March, there was a rare exception to that rule, with lawyers working for the parent company of the Daily Mail successfully securing a court order to prevent the naming of 73 of the newspaper and its sister titles' reporters and editors, in connection with legal proceedings about alleged phone hacking at the publication (Associated Newspapers denies wrongdoing). On one level the Mail should be given some credit for trying to protect its staff from what promises to be a high-profile court case. Among those bringing claims against the ...

Rishi Sunak is taking us back to the Noughties, when it was fashionable to scorn teenagers in parks and asylum seekers in the Channel. The Prime Minister’s pitch to the electorate is a combination of competent government and harsh rhetoric on emotive policies such as immigration and crime. His latest gambit is antisocial behaviour (yet another example of Westminster approaching a consensus, on problems if not values). The proposals include giving landlords the power to evict noisy and disruptive tenants within two weeks. One for the youth vote. Will this strategy work? Fight on competence and, as one Labour adviser cautioned recently, the Conservatives have the upper hand. Being in government, they can do more than make promises. They can actually ...

On 14 March, the OpenAI founder Sam Altman unveiled GPT-4, the latest iteration of his laboratory's learning language model, via live stream. Like a Victorian showman demonstrating the powers of his automaton, Altman revealed a machine that could create a working website from a photograph of a badly drawn sketch, then successfully complete a tax return before composing a rhyming poem about the paperwork. Alan Turing would be in awe. Indeed, Altman has described his artificial intelligence creation, GPT – or the more user-friendly chatbot interface ChatGPT – as a benevolent, intelligent companion “helping us be the best version of ourselves”, while solving the world’s problems like cancer and climate change. And when it comes to work, he says, “traditional work, ...

To say Rishi Sunak’s campaign to convince people he is the saviour of the Conservative Party remains a struggle would be something of an understatement. The next election will be fought on the cost-of-living crisis – but voters’ improving circumstances are not the only metrics No 10 should be studying. Research by Edelman released last month showed that trust in government has fallen to a seven-year low at 27 per cent, and that an astonishing 85 per cent of voters think the way politicians behave undermines what faith people do have in them. [See also: Boris Johnson’s last stand] MPs rarely score highly in such polling but the past 48 hours will have done nothing to help. On Friday, the Sun reported that ...

Some people – say, Neil Postman and now possibly the Times’ theatre critic Clive Davis – are afraid, in this age of entertainment, we might amuse ourselves to death. Not me. I live to be amused. I could die happy knowing I devoted my life to the pursuit of amusement.  Which is why I seek out nights at the theatre, specifically the musical kind, that self-restrained sophisticates might tastefully decline. Yes, musicals are very amusing, they say, but where’s the substance, the meat to chew on? Somewhere in our cultural evolution, those on a sugar-free diet have decided musical theatre will rot your teeth; that is nothing but fluff designed to make you stare stupidly like the bourgeoisie with their TV ...

For years, observers have talked of a crisis, even twilight, of the British state in its current form. I’ve been one of them.  It wasn’t a baseless claim. Between 2014 and 2019, a remarkable convergence of destabilising forces gripped British society. In 2014 Labour MPs and other Westminster insiders streamed north of the border to try and halt an alarming popular rebellion. At the 2015 general election, the SNP evicted Scotland’s unionist representatives from the Commons. Months later, Corbynism toppled the austerity consensus by seizing Labour, the second party of British capitalism and a great, dull weight ever-ready to plug the gaps in Tory rule. The deepest cut came in 2016 when people across the UK voted to leave the European Union, against ...