In deep red Hanover County, Virginia, just north of Richmond, Donald Trump won 62 percent of the vote in 2024. It might have followed that the voters there supported his administration’s immigration agenda. And yet, in January, Hanover County’s board of supervisors opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to purchase and retrofit a local…
Though it has yet to become front-page news in the UK, you should know about the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros merger. It threatens to inflict immense harm on the British public. As actors and public figures who have spent our careers in the arts in Britain – working with British crews, on British stages and sets…
The US military campaign to protect merchant shipping from Iranian attacks by asserting direct maritime control in the strait of Hormuz is not an idea unique to Donald Trump’s administration. Almost exactly 200 years ago, in the period 1825-27, a powerful US naval squadron led by Commodore John Rodgers was sent to the Mediterranean to…
In a 1950 essay, the critic AA Phillips wrote of a “cultural cringe” in which insecure Australians looked to Britain for instruction. Today, some Australians are championing far-right British actors and importing their visions of doom to Australia. In June, the former Australian Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship…
I recently got into a row on X about the unlikely subject of salad. I want to acknowledge that arguing with strangers on social media is definitely for babies and I should know better by now, but I’m a work in progress. And so I mentioned that I had enjoyed how readily available salads had…
Appropriately enough, Andy Burnham ended a week of political signalling and first impressions back in Manchester on Friday. At the offices of the new No 10 North – where the prime minister hopes to work at least one day a week – regional mayors sat alongside ministers in an example of Burnhamism at work. It was…
Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a…
On Monday, while the cameras were fixed on that famous black door in Downing Street, something important was happening 165 miles away. A small team of officials and advisers were walking into an office building in Manchester to set about the remaking of the British state. This was the beginning of No 10 North: the…
Thanks for an inspiring and timely article (The rave secret: why middle-aged women are larging it – and seeing big health benefits, 20 July). My 37-year-old daughter recently invited me to a festival to celebrate my 80th birthday. There were raves each night for three nights in a row. I learned to dance in the…
Before entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham cited the overcentralisation of power as a cause of Britain’s social and economic malaise. In his first week, the new prime minister has signalled his intent to bolster No 10 as an organ of executive power. The apparent contradiction – fortifying the centre to pursue an agenda of decentralisation…
