In the week that Courtney Love called Taylor Swift “not important” (“She might be a safe space for girls,” Love said, “but she’s not interesting as an artist”) comes The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s eleventh album, a self-defence against such critiques. Released alongside monochrome social media posts containing typewritten lyric fragments, this record deliberately positions Swift not as the billion-dollar global pop star of the Eras tour, still making its way around the globe to the UK, but Taylor Swift the prolific songwriter, Taylor Swift the sensitive artiste, Taylor Swift the tortur ..read more

Less than a week after Iran launched an unprecedented drone and missile strike against Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has retaliated. Early on Friday (19 April), Israel hit Iranian soil with a missile, according to unnamed US officials.  There have been early reports of explosions heard in Isfahan, a central city and home to several Iranian military sites and an airbase. It is also, notably, the centre of Iran’s nuclear programme. As Former US assistant secretary of state Mark Kimmitt told the BBC early on Friday, “Isfahan really is to a great extent the centre of the Iranian nuclear programm ..read more

What is the point of Liz Truss? The UK’s shortest-serving prime minister left office having lost the confidence of the financial markets, her parliamentary colleagues and the general public. What possible contribution to public life could she make after all that happened in those turbulent 49 days? Not much of one, you might be tempted to think. A retirement from parliament and a life of unostentatious good works might sound appropriate. Truss, however, has other plans. In Ten Years to Save the West she explains that she got into politics because she believes in “the battle of ideas” and that ..read more

In 1980, at the infamous Labour Party conference of that year, Tony Benn, only a year before Jim Callaghan’s energy secretary, took to the floor. It was a venomous atmosphere, brimming with political bloodlust. It reached its crescendo with Benn’s speech. He proceeded to read out a list of ways in which the government of which he had been a senior member had let down the labour movement. Roy Hattersley, a future Labour deputy leader, later described the speech as a “lie, a poisonous deceit”.  It is not hard to imagine these dynamics at the first post-defeat Conservative Party conference i ..read more

Christopher Hammond is the chief executive of UK100, a network for local authorities who have pledged to lead a rapid transition to net zero. Formerly he was membership and insights director at UK100 and was previously the leader of Southampton City Council. How do you start your working day? I wish I could identify with the 5am LinkedInfluencer/TikTok chief executives, but it’s not how I operate, not least because I’m not a morning person. My day starts with coffee, diary management, news scan and email check-in. All to set me up for the day ahead and get my brain switched on. What has been y ..read more

You couldn’t make it up. Or, rather, you could – but if you did everyone would think you’d been watching too much The Thick of It. After weeks of the Conservatives trying as hard as possible to turn the question of whether Angela Rayner should have paid £1,500-£3,500 in capital gains tax on the sale of her house nine years ago into a major story, a Tory MP comes along and demonstrates what a real political scandal looks like. The tale of Mark Menzies has it all. Money – in the tens of thousands, on multiple occasions – allegedly taken from campaign donations. A 3am phone call to an elderly cam ..read more

This week Liz Truss has embarked on the press tour of a lifetime with her new book, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room. She’s been casting blame from the UN to the Bank of England for the failure of her time in office, but does she really believe what she’s saying? And how might this affect her standing in the next general election? Anoosh and Rachel also ask Freddie about his recent trip to the National Conservatism conference in Brussels with the likes of Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman, Éric Zemmour, Viktor Orbán, and the Belgian police. Submit a ..read more

Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy is quickly falling apart. Her arrest (without charge) during the investigation into the SNP’s finances tarnished her claim to be a beacon for probity in public office. Her flagship self-ID policy for transgender people collapsed following a UK government veto. Her gaffe-ridden successor Humza Yousaf, seen as the continuity candidate, has failed to revive the party’s ailing fortunes in the polls. As the New Statesman’s Scotland editor, Chris Deerin, writes in his excellent column: “All is not well. All is very far from well. The First Minister [Yousaf] has taken to the ..read more

“Power,” said Mao Zedong, “flows from the barrel of a gun.” Yet using power to achieve deterrence (dissuading others from attacking via the threat of punishment or failure) is a more fraught process, even if the “gun” is a nuclear weapon. Iran’s missile strike on Israel on 13 April is a reminder that nuclear deterrence is never guaranteed to work. For those of us who advocate retaining nuclear weapons, it requires explaining. In most instances when nuclear deterrence has failed, adversaries have attacked non-essential peripheries, be they disputed territories (the Falkland Islands in 1982, the ..read more

Politics is a rough game. In few other careers are you subjected to such a level of scrutiny. Your opponents are anxious to expose a mistake; journalists will relish every stumble; social media will be ready to pile in. To survive at the highest levels, politicians need a thick skin. But an imperviousness to criticism is not a natural state of affairs. What is needed are coping mechanisms to help dismiss criticisms that might otherwise be wounding. The easiest, most straightforward coping mechanism is to dismiss the motives or understanding of your critics. This is often an essentially tribal ..read more