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Why are they rooting for Newt?
In this week’s New Statesman, following the former House Speaker’s win in the South Carolina primary over the front-runner, Mitt Romney — the least likely twist so far in the Republican race to become presidential candidate — Mehdi Hasan profiles Newt Gingrich, new hope of the American right.
In “Why are they rooting for Newt?” Hasan lists the ten things we should all know — but don’t — about the man who could become president of the United States in ten months’ time, including:
Family values aren’t his strongest suit
He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second wife, and on his second wife with his third. According to his former campaign treasurer L H Carter, Newt said of his first wife, Jackie: “She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president. And besides, she has cancer.”He makes George W Bush look like a peacenik
Neoconservative Newt pushed long and hard for a war with Iraq . . . These days his focus is on Iran’s nuclear programme, which he hyperbolically describes as a Nazi-like “mortal threat”.He has issues with ethics
[Whilst Speaker of the House of Representatives, between 1995 and 1999], a record 84 ethics charges were filed against him, and in 1997 he was reprimanded by colleagues on the floor of the House of Representatives and ordered to pay a fine of $300,000. It was the first time in the 208-year history of the House that a Speaker had been disciplined for ethical wrongdoing.
Give a gift subscription to the New Statesman this Christmas from just £49Newt likes to claim that the charges were a partisan attack on him by opposition Democrats; yet the House voted against him by a margin of 395-28.
Also in this Cover Story, Alec MacGillis describes the Gingrich bloodlust that fires up America’s conservative heartlands — but not the Republican Party.
The cover illustration of Newt Gingrich is by Ralph Steadman, one in a continuing series of portraits created exclusively for the NS. Steadman is famed for his illustrations for works by the American gonzo writer Hunter S Thompson.
Scottish Labour leader: Salmond is chauvinist and anti-English
For the Editor’s Note, Jason Cowley travels to Edinburgh to meet Johann Lamont, the new Scottish Labour leader, who denounces First Minister Alex Salmond for his “chauvinism” and for being an anti-English opportunist. She tells Cowley:
“We did not recognise what was happening to the Labour vote nor the way in which the SNP were positioning themselves, being both left, right and centre. And actually, they were putting a triple block virtually on the question of independence. It is their only policy, but that wasn’t their message.”
Of the Scottish National Party, she says:
“So there is no politics there actually. This is all about identity and who is Scottish.”
Of Alex Salmond, the SNP leader:
“Are they a social-democratic party? Some of them are. Alex Salmond isn’t.”
However, according to Lamont, Salmond is anti-English:
“What is my problem with David Cameron? He is a Tory. What is Alex Salmond’s problem with him? He’s English. I don’t mind people being nationalists. I worry when it trips over into chauvinism and I’m frustrated when it becomes a substitute for arguing about real politics.”
The MP Denis MacShane calls for an inquiry into Britain’s offshore press barons
Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham and one of the politicians involved in the high court settlement of phone-hacking cases on 19 January, uses a reflective piece to call for a proper inquiry into the “power and arrogance” of the offshore-owned press in Britain. He writes:
The time has come to insist that ownership of the media should be in the hands of citizens who live and pay taxes in our nation, as is the norm in the US and most other democracies . . . Last summer, Ed Miliband won dividends by taking a huge risk and ditching 15 years of Blair-Brown genuflection before Rupert Murdoch . . . [and] has got David Cameron and Vince Cable dancing to his tune on responsible capitalism and high pay. Can he now make it Labour policy that our press is part of Britain and not the plaything of offshore proprietors?
MacShane describes an intrusive story about his personal life by the offshore-owned Daily Mail. It is just one example of “the tabloids’ culture of destroying the private lives of politicians”, he writes. The invasion of his ministerial privacy by a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper was another matter:
The police showed me details about a confidential government mission I was undertaking as minister for Europe to try to solve a problem that bedevilled relations with an important European state.
In those pre-BlackBerry days ministerial private offices left messages on mobile phones, which Murdoch’s minion hacked. It was as if a Murdoch man had wondered into the Foreign Office and stolen papers off my desk.
Laurie Penny on the end of Occupy
With eviction imminent for the St Paul’s protesters and with the struggle across 102 days spent sleeping rough taking its toll, Laurie Penny reports on whether there is a future for the global Occupy movement:
Many of those who have remained at the camps and squats over the winter cannot or will not return home. Some have been living on the streets for years; others have lost their jobs and homes only recently because of rent hikes and austerity measures . . . Traumatic as they will be, the evictions need not signal the end of Occupy. As the last few camps are forcibly broken up, Occupiers all over the world are moving into indoor spaces and squats, with a particular focus on “dead” real estate owned by big banking firms.
Elsewhere in the New Statesman
All this plus a feature by the Daily Telegraph‘s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, on the Tunisian dissident falsely accused by Interpol and the press of terrorism; Helen Lewis suggests a new way to take on page-three sexism; Sophie Elmhirst has a deep encounter with the actor Ralph Fiennes in the NS Interview; to coincide with his new Hayward Gallery exhibition Brain Activity we print an exclusive new illustration by former NS cartoonist David Shrigley, and the poet Craig Raine considers the work of David Hockney in the first of a series of essays for New Statesman on the visual arts.
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