The art of the political profile
Capturing the essence of people in power requires a different approach every time
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
“Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
Nick Clegg saves the internet
He’s not the hero we want, or the hero we deserve. Not a hero at all actually
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Nick Thomas-Symonds: Labour’s Brexit repair man
The EU relations minister on Keir Starmer’s determination to cling on, and the UK’s changing relationship to Europe
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My hair-raising deputy leadership race
Also this week: A ticking off from Mum, and all aboard the Man City bus
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No 10 escalates Operation Save Bridget
Your weekly dose of gossip from around Westminster
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Letter of the week: Backbenchers vs backbone
Write to letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine
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Why Starmer believes he can defy Farage and Burnham
The Prime Minister will use Labour’s conference to frame himself as the only serious choice
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Has Donald Trump become woke?
The tactics and techniques of yesterday’s progressives have been turned against them
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Can Shabana Mahmood save Labour?
If the Home Secretary solves the small-boats crisis, the party has a fighting chance of winning the next election
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Is there any hope for the British high street?
Even London’s Oxford Street is succumbing to decline
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Keir Starmer must forge a future-facing nationalism
Criteria for belonging can be based on the common good
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No one will escape Reform’s immigration plans
Faced with the prospect of being deported, I feel a need to justify my existence in the UK
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Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
Inside his Manchester kingdom, Labour’s prince across the water outlines his radical blueprint
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The supreme folly of a Labour civil war
A leadership battle could hand No 10 to Nigel Farage
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Labour vs the left
Is Keir Starmer’s real problem a resurgent progressive politics?
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Inside the Tony Blair Institute
Who really benefits from the former PM’s tech evangelism?
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Ian McEwan and fiction’s problem with climate change
In What We Can Know, Britain has sunk beneath the waves – but literature remains buoyant
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How much is that doggy worth to No 10?
A new non-fiction book reveals the fascinating forays into how pets shape politics
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How Richard Holmes humanised Tennyson
The biographer of England’s great poets reveals the secrets of inhabiting his subjects’ lives
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Patricia Lockwood’s dispatches from the brain fog
The author’s autofictional account of Covid and its after-effects, Will There Ever Be Another You, confirms her place as…
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The manosphere’s literary muscle men
Two novels explore the crippling solitude of a pair of ripped English professors
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Kerry James Marshall’s nuanced vision of black lives
The painter’s retrospective at the Royal Academy presents a sweeping challenge to Western art’s exclusion of African-American figures
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One Battle After Another is serious about racial politics
Behind the silliness and relentless action of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest thriller is a timely statement about America’s rightward…
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House of Guinness’s sinister, sepia world
The new drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight expertly depicts the ruthless origins of Dublin’s brewing dynasty
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The Lady from the Sea drowns out the Ibsen
Simon Stone’s contemporary take on the Victorian-era family drama is witty but struggles against its rain-soaked staging
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How eating organs became cool
Meet the hipsters who want tripe for dinner
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After three glorious decades, it’s full-time for The Fan
As the final whistle blows for this column, I look back on an era in which football has grown…
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The people I’ve been seeing
Some have been real, like Richard Coles, and others ghosts from my past – like Debbie, the barmaid I…
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Wake me up, now September’s here
I am no clearer as to what kind of normal might exist in a world without my dad. But…
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This England: Skipping the protocol
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: Politics and the pound
August 1931: The Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald forms his National Government with Tories and Liberals
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