Leader: Two years of Boris Johnson
The UK needs a prime minister of diligence, strategic vision and moral integrity. We have Boris Johnson.
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
The Chinese century
Letter of the week: If Shakespeare did sport
Email letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.
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The government relies on Boris Johnson’s infectious optimism – but good cheer alone cannot sustain it
The Prime Minister’s preference for warm reassurance may work in lockdown, but it is less effective out of it.
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Armando Iannucci’s Diary: Reasoning with a pandemic, Boris Johnson’s word soup, and how to fix our broken politics
In England, we’re not so much sleep-walking as screaming-while-fully-awake into Covid disaster.
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The values divide between Labour and the Tories isn’t a culture war. It’s a battle for the soul of England
Boris Johnson and Priti Patel tried to create a “hostile environment” for our footballers – but modern Britain is…
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Regret, distress, low self-esteem: Why today’s hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women
I propose a solution to the sexuality gap based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than…
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Boris Johnson is a liar and a chancer, but popular. Why?
Two years after he entered No 10, Johnson’s shtick still seems to be working. But no politician can really take the…
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The chaos of the Tokyo Games shows what the Olympics is really about – money
If the International Olympic Committee had cancelled the Games, they would have had to refund roughly £2.9bn to broadcasters.
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Why the UK’s new Covid-19 strategy is uniquely dangerous
The government’s policy of standing back and letting the virus reproduce freely is an invitation to disaster.
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Commons Confidential: The Jenrick Test
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster.
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David Lidington: “Remainers need to move on from grieving about Brexit”
The former Conservative cabinet minister discusses how pro-European Tories can rebuild.
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First Thoughts: The classroom culture wars, GB News founders, and cricket gets an update
Boris Johnson’s government has opened a new front in its culture wars: teacher training.
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Why there is no solution to our age of crisis without China
For decades, the West has ignored the significance of China's rise – but we must recognise that it will be…
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The politics of lies: Boris Johnson and the erosion of the rule of law
The London bureau chief for Germany’s public broadcaster reflects on Britain’s government.
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Shades of gold: Why California is a bellwether of the world to come
Devastating wildfires are reshaping California, a state that has always been both a wild frontier and a bastion of progress.
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The courage of Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu has died aged 90. In this recent piece, Rowan Williams reflected on how his life was a…
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Reviewed in Short: New books by Jon Yates, Lucy Ellmann, Denton Welch and Brandon Taylor
Fractured by Yates, Things Are Against Us by Ellmann, In Youth is Pleasure by Welch and Filthy Animals by…
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The pain and shame of girlhood
In a collection of eight essays, the writer Melissa Febos uses her own adolescence as a departure point for…
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How the Strokes’ Is This It captured the short-lived optimism of the millennium
Whether or not you believe the band “saved rock music”, it’s difficult to imagine what the 2000s would have…
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How Josiah Wedgwood’s Frog Service depicted Britain in chinaware
Commissioned by Catherine the Great, this was both an extraordinary example of Georgian soft power and a pictorial record…
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How Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends influenced a generation of film-makers
This timeless story of two New York roommates is adored by Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
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ITV’s Professor T is a lockdown nightmare gone wrong
Ben Miller stars as an unnervingly observant Cambridge don with OCD called Jasper Tempest. It’s all incredibly strange.
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Alun Cochrane asks: since when was “centrist dad” an insult?
The comedian’s new BBC show is part foray into modern politics, part midlife identity crisis.
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The seeming nothingness of fog speaks to the mystery in all things
As busy as this world seems, there is more of nothing in it than we usually care to notice.
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Looking at the smashed teapot lid, I thought: there, in a nutshell, is my life
Journalists are rarely paid what they're worth, and so my plans to buy a new teapot will have to…
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It’s been a month since my break-up, and I thought my heart would have started to heal by now – but it hasn’t
I am coming to accept that not everything can be explained away – that closure might not exist for the…
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Subscriber of the Week: Ludmilla Jordanova
Email ellys.woodhouse@newstatesman.co.uk if you would like to be the New Statesman's subscriber of the week.
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This England: The tusk at hand
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, refers to the whole of Britain…
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Neil Kinnock Q&A: “I should get out more, I know“
The Labour peer on the golden era of Welsh rugby and why enlightened values will prevail.
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