When Lucian Freud convinced the late Queen Elizabeth II to sit for a portrait in 2000, her reaction to the final piece, after 18 months of meetings with him at St James’s Palace, was to say, “I've very much enjoyed watching you mix your colours.” If you’ve seen the portrait, you’d know that that reply was a prime example of her inimitable grace. The painting, by an artist who was then considered the greatest living British painter, is 9 inches in height, and less than flattering. Robin Simon, the editor of the British Art Journal, wrote in the Sun: “It makes her look like one of her corgis who has suffered a stroke.” Or, as the newspaper’s front page declared: ...

Hopefully this is the most depressing statistic you will read today: in 2022-23, people in the UK spent a cumulative total of seven million hours, or 798 years, on hold to HMRC, according to a report published this week by the National Audit Office (NAO). This is a torment Dante could not have imagined. Eight centuries of hot-eared boredom, an epoch of chirpy jazz riffs that would, laid end to end, stretch back to the time of Genghis Khan. HMRC’s hold music was created from samples in 2007 by the Telephony Standards Team, a group that has since disbanded. Its members remain anonymous but they are, according to some estimates I made using Spotify, now a larger part of the UK’s ...

With all the tension in the run-up to the local elections and the anti-climax that followed, you’d be forgiven for thinking the shadow Tory leadership contest was on pause. All sorts of names were floated as potential replacements for Rishi Sunak in the weeks leading up to 2 May – Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat – but speculation fizzled out once it became apparent that, though the results had been dire for the Conservatives, they would not be switching leaders again this side of an election. The Tories may have resigned themselves to fighting the upcoming election with Sunak at the helm, but the fight to succeed him after the fact continues. And the candidate in the spotlight right now ...

One thing that defines Keir Starmer is an aversion to navel-gazing. At present, journalists introspecting on Labour’s behalf seem captured by the idea that Starmerism is a repudiation of Blairism. As the director of a “Starmerite” think tank, I think that idea is misguided and self-defeating. It gets New Labour wrong and it gets Keir Starmer’s Labour wrong. New Labour was about bringing Labour back to working people. Philip Gould was its architect in spirit and temperament. He and his colleagues made Labour reckon with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. This ensured the party lived and breathed the hopes and values of ordinary people. Tony Blair remains Labour’s most electorally successful leader – something that ...

Good maternity care “is the exception rather than the rule” in England, according to today’s report from the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on birth trauma. For the millions of women who have given birth over the past decade and more, this will come as little surprise. When I wrote about my own traumatic birth in a cover story for the New Statesman last month, I was overwhelmed with the responses I received. Strangers – and close friends – were exceptionally kind to me. But I was overwhelmed, too, to learn how many women had received such poor treatment: some had suffered the worst fate imaginable – their babies had died or experienced life-changing harm; others, like me, had suffered appalling birth injuries, and ...

Metro mayors have become an immovable feature of British politics. The vision that George Osborne outlined as part of his Northern Powerhouse project in 2014 is being expanded and entrenched. Labour wants new metro mayors across the country. Despite lower turnouts at this year’s local elections, the incumbents are establishing themselves as a counterbalance to the centralised Westminster system. As one senior Labour aide told me, “The model is here to stay and that devolution agenda is something that Keir feels very strongly about.” Andy Burnham in Manchester took up the anti-Westminster mantle during the Covid-19 pandemic when he theatrically opposed the government’s tiered lockdown system. Andy Street, the former John Lewis CEO and West Midlands mayor, became the flag-bearer for ...

Immigration splits the Labour Party. There are some who think low-skilled immigration suppresses wages, those who fear it’s a gift to the nationalist right and those who value diversity per se. That’s partly why immigration is one of the largest unknowns in Labour’s plans for government: consensus is elusive. Keir Starmer speaks vaguely about bringing net immigration down but does not provide a figure. He has said Britain has an “immigration dependency” but has been unclear about how he will pay people, such as in social care, to do the jobs low-paid migrants currently do. Another reason is that the Conservatives have doggedly pursued the Rwanda scheme as a dividing line with Labour. Starmer’s strategy so far has been to criticise ...

This morning brought that increasingly rare thing: good news for the British economy. GDP was revealed to have grown by 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of this year. This is the joint-fastest rate in the G7 and the strongest growth since 2019 (if we exclude the post-Covid bounceback). GDP per head – a better measure of living standards – rose for the first time in seven quarters by 0.4 per cent.  One quarter, of course, does little to change the UK’s dismal recent history. GDP per head has grown by an average of just 0.3 per cent over the last 16 years, compared to 2.2 per cent over the previous 40. Average real wages remain below their 2008 level ...