Li Keqiang’s death at the age of 68 on Friday morning (27 October) was so sudden and unexpected that it caught China’s usually unflappable state media outlets by surprise. The former Chinese premier, who stepped down in March after a decade in office, died from a heart attack in Shanghai shortly after midnight, the official Xinhua news agency reported in a short statement. No obituary had been prepared. When it finally appeared later in the day, Li was described as a hard-working official who implemented the government’s economic policies and demonstrated unfailing loyalty to Xi Jinping. But that is not how everyone will remember him. In one sense, Li’s demise makes little difference to Chinese politics. While he was once seen ...

The pressure on Keir Starmer over his response to the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza is intensifying after Andy Burnham, Sadiq Khan and Anas Sarwar became the latest senior Labour politicians to publicly call for a ceasefire. The opposition leader is grappling with growing discontent among the party, with around a quarter of MPs backing an immediate ceasefire and dozens of councillors resigning from Labour in protest. On Wednesday (25 October), Starmer called for “humanitarian pauses” to allow aid into Gaza amid a developing humanitarian disaster in the Middle East. But he maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself following the 7 October Hamas terrorist attack. The softening of Labour’s position followed a meeting between Starmer, his aides and the party’s ...

Seventeen years ago, a Labour leader was confronted by an internal revolt after refusing to call for a ceasefire in the Middle East. In his memoir A Journey, Tony Blair later wrote of his stance on the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war: “[It] probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq. It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people.” Keir Starmer’s position is not analogous to Blair’s. By 2006, Blair had been Labour leader for 12 years and the party trailed the Conservatives by four points in the polls. Starmer has been leader for three years and the party leads the Conservatives by 20 points. But the fractures exposed within Labour ...

The fastest growing belief system in the UK is not atheism, but shamanism. Between 2011 and 2021, the census tells us, its followers increased tenfold. Shamanists believe in the existence of a cosmic world inhabited by spirits, accessible through altered states of consciousness (by consuming, say, the psychedelic ayahuasca). Think Jacob Angeli, the topless man who became the defining image of the US Capitol riot, wearing a horned fur hat with dangling ear-warmers. Paganism (which sees holiness in nature) grew to 74,000 followers, and wicca (which involves witchcraft) is expanding too. In the US it’s common for those without a religion to describe themselves as “spiritual”, rather than agnostic or atheist – to believe there is something beyond the material world ...

Carl von Clausewitz wrote of the fog of war. In the latest iteration of the forever war of Israel-Palestine, rarely has this fog seemed thicker. Misinformation (always a tool of conflict) is everywhere. In both Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, total war has met the phenomenon of total coverage, or totalising online coverage. Every second is charted, documented and narrated, conceived and counter-conceived by governments, journalists, experts and punters alike. Knowledge and narrative become almost as important as bombs and bullets. It’s sometimes easy to forget how new this is. At the time of the last major Western interventions – during the “war on terror” – neither Twitter, nor Facebook, yet existed. The flow of information in war zones was still largely restricted and mediated ...

Rishi Sunak marked exactly one year as Prime Minister when he rose to take questions at the despatch box today (25 October). Any party the beleaguered premier might have planned was abruptly cancelled, however, as Keir Starmer welcomed two new Labour MPs, winners of the recent by-elections in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, to the opposition benches. The Labour leader also took a dig at the Liberal Democrats when he introduced Alistair Strathern, Labour’s winning candidate in Mid Bedfordshire. “He defied the odds, history and, of course, the fantasy of Lib Dem bar charts.” But it was claims about the defeated Conservative Tamworth candidate, Andrew Cooper, which supplied Starmer with his first question in a session dominated not by the Israel-Hamas conflict but ...

Keir Starmer faces mounting pressure in the Labour Party over his response to the Israel-Hamas conflict, with councillors rebelling and some insiders estimating that a majority of MPs may now support a humanitarian pause in hostilities. The Palestinian health ministry said yesterday (24 October) that since Hamas’s terror attack on 7 October, 5,791 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombardments in Gaza, including 2,360 children. The crisis in the Middle East has reverberated across the UK, particularly in Muslim and Jewish communities, many of which are represented by Labour MPs. Downing Street has said five British citizens are believed to be among hundreds of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and that the terror group killed “at least” a dozen British citizens ...

There aren’t many advisers who make an obviously visible mark on the ministers and government they’re paid to help. For good or ill, depending on your starting point, Dominic Cummings would be one, Alastair Campbell another. Kevin Pringle, who was the SNP’s director of communications from 2012-15 (and senior special adviser to Alex Salmond from 2007-12), looks to be one of those rare flowers. Since Pringle became Humza Yousaf’s official spokesman and strategic adviser in June, the First Minister has sharpened up his act, refocused his administration, and begun, as David Cameron once almost put it, to get rid of the crap. I’ve known Pringle for nearly three decades, and though he has always been passionately committed to the independence cause and ...