A carnival of mediocrity: the year in politics
This has been a 12 months for resignations, disgrace, duplicity and strife in Westminster
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
A time for healing
This Christmas, it’s apparent just how much things have changed – and must change still
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Wes Streeting: “I’m pretty frustrated”
The Health Secretary on Keir Starmer, Labour’s purpose, and his future
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Van Gogh belongs in TK Maxx
Also this week: listening to music like a teenager, and my mortarboard vs the menopause
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Reform fears Zack Polanski
My final dose of gossip from around Westminster
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Letter of the week: No realistic alternative
Write to letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine
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Is Your Party doomed to petty squabbling forever?
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana must decide whether to build a mass movement or a smaller, more radical force
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We need European leaders who can stand up to Trump
His America has given up on our continent – so it’s time to stop appeasing the Maga regime
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We can break the cycle of poverty
The Child Poverty Review represents a bold attempt to reduce the number of children growing up in hardship
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Keir Starmer must control the conversation
How can this inoffensive man have become so viscerally loathed?
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We need hope, not cynicism
The Green Party is ready for the change people are demanding
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My degrading, yet hopeful, journey from Gaza to Britain
“Refugee OK to board” is written on my plane ticket. Cold. Sharp. Humiliating
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I was wrong about Broken Britain
The country can feel divided and lost, but there’s always another side to the story
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Laboozer: the definitive Labour pub crawl
A guide to the haunts that built Britain, pint by pint
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Keir Starmer, the tragic matador
British politics is a test of individuals’ instincts more than a contest between ideologies
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Nigel Farage’s American dream
As prime minister, the Reform leader would take Trump’s America as a blueprint for Britain
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The secret world of joke writers
I can make you funny – but at whose cost?
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The power of print
Britain’s weeklies have always been more than journalism – they are a battleground of ideas
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For the chop: an elegy to London’s Smithfield meat market
Soon, there will be no men left to whizz past you with shopping trolleys full of uncooked ribs
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The strange fate of Flight 2069
Months before 9/11 a passenger seized control of a Boeing 747 and nearly crashed it into the Sahara. Everyone…
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Photo essay: George Orwell’s late sanctuary
Craig Easton’s An Extremely Un-get-atable Place depicts the remote Scottish house where Orwell spent much of his final years
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How the far right co-opted the cross
US-style Christian nationalism is slowly infiltrating Britain. But faith is about much more than restricting citizenship
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Salman Rushdie’s uprooted people
From meeting EM Forster to being called “the Muslim James Joyce”, India’s greatest novelist speaks about his long and…
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Recovering the lost history of Gaza
Decades of conflict and displacement have obliterated the history of one of the world’s oldest human settlements
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NS Poem: A’s B
A poem by John Berryman
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Reluctant Cheats: a story by Anton Chekhov
In this short story, appearing in English for the first time, New Year’s party guests battle against time
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Jane Austen and me
On the 250th anniversary of her birth, the great Regency era novelist still offers perceptive lessons in life
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DH Lawrence and the superiority of fiction
The Goldsmiths Prize Lecture on 100 years of the writer’s seminal essay “Why the Novel Matters”
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The best children’s books for Christmas 2025
Imagination is stirred and laughs are shared in the best books for young readers this winter
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Charlie Mackesy’s rules for life
These stories about a boy and his animal friends reveal the futility of trying to foresee what will happen…
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TS Eliot’s Hollow Men are all around us
The poem, which was published 100 years ago, has beguiled a remarkable array of minds
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Christmas time is for murder
What exactly is the appeal of the festive crime mystery?
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Joy Williams and humanity’s ultimate failure
The author’s new collection of short stories is haunted by animals – and by our failed stewardship of the…
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At the Ministry of Magic
The Palace of Westminster has long been a tourist attraction – but never quite like this
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Why the Shipping Forecast endures
The treasured broadcast seems like a relic from the past, but fractious geopolitics may save it from irrelevance
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The discomforting nostalgia of the American sitcom
New releases are tapping in to the cosy sentimentality of cult classics – and social conservatism
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Goya’s bleak midwinter
How the painter dropped a sliver of ice into his light-hearted tapestry designs for the Spanish royal family
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Sentimental Value is an extraordinary investigation into generational trauma
Stellan Skarsgård is outstanding as a film director trying to mend his family through the camera
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Christmas telly has lost its magic
No one asked for The Great Peep Show Christmas Bake Off but I must begrudgingly admit it might be…
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Who are you in Winnie-the-Pooh?
A cast of children’s authors answer this fundamental question on the enduring character’s centenary
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How to fix Christmas, one weird medieval trick at a time
Just please don’t make me eat goose
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The fascinating subculture of cryptic crosswords
If there’s a bit of mental torture in struggling towards a solution, well, isn’t that the point?
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I am beset by boredom, a rare condition that’s not good for me
I forgot Damon Runyon’s name for the entire time it took me to walk from Waitrose to my flat
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After six years of recording my life in this column, it is time to say goodbye
It will feel strange not to relay my life here, week by week, but it will also be freeing…
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This England: Unscheduled pit stop
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…
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From the archive: Mr Eliot’s poems
1926: How TS Eliot’s “music of ideas” saved a generation
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