Our founder and editor-in-chief’s weekly highlights from the magazine
Unusually, I’m going to lead off with a plug for the podcast I do each week with Matthew d’Ancona, our editor-at-large — the imaginatively titled The Two Matts.
I’m still fizzing with anger at the way this Labour government has opened the door for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to take the lead on reducing crime in the UK as an electoral issue.
Farage announced his plans on Monday. In a speech straight out of the MAGA playbook, he pledged to reduce crime by half: deportations, zero tolerance, stop and search, curfews, more prisons etc. “We’ll restore respect for the police and with that will come fear,” his sidekick Laila Cunningham observed. Something to look forward to.
Matt and I pick through the origins of the thinking here (right-wing Tufton Street think tank Policy Exchange) and the coding contained within: presenting racist hate-mongerers as martyrs, à la Trump’s approach to the January 6 insurrectionists; mitigating far-right thugs by pointing to far-left thugs, à la Trump’s approach to Charlottesville; proposing extreme sanctions for petty crime and deportations for serious offenders, à la Trump’s approach to El Salvador. You get the idea.
Simplistic and uncosted as it all may be, it does at least pick up on the clear signals voters are giving about crime in the UK. Instagram is awash with low-level thuggery — shoplifters pilfering with impunity, balaclava thugs with Rambo knives, phone thieves on e-bikes. Anyone promising a zero-tolerance crackdown is going to get people’s attention.
Which brings me to Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. While Farage is promising to crackdown on shoplifters and thugs, what has she chosen as her big focus for the summer? A crackdown on anyone supporting a marginal protest organisation called Palestine Action.
In recent days, more than 100 protesters have been lifted off the streets by cops for the terror crime of waving a placard saying I Support Palestine Action — an offence, now, under the Terrorism Act and punishable by up to 6 months in prison. Some have even been threatened by cops in case they are thinking about supporting Palestine Action.
When public sympathy for the plight of Gazans has never been higher, this tin-eared tough-cop cosplay by Cooper could not be worse in its timing. Legally questionable, morally moronic, electorally catastrophic.
Cooper thought she was shutting the door on Farage when it came to establishing her tough-guy cred. What she’s really done is kick it wide open for him.
Speaking of autocrats — over in Russia, there’s a professional one at large. Can Putin still be beaten? That’s the question Paul Mason answers in our cover story, excellently illustrated by our creative director Martin Nicholls, who has imagined how the diminutive president might appear if Ukrainian heavyweight Oleksandr Usyk got hold of him for a couple of minutes.
The answer is not simple, and it’s contingent on concerted action from European powers, including the UK. But few journalists are as well briefed and insightful as Paul … so his ultimately positive conclusions should be heartening.
Here I am, prattling on about Farage and Putin and the inexorable drift towards authoritarianism, and I haven’t yet mentioned the big story of the week: Coldplay’s Jumbotron. Marie Le Conte, our brilliant Dilettante columnist, makes sense of the extraordinary fallout from what happened when a cheating couple got caught out in the most public way imaginable. If there is a parable for our times, this is it.
Someone who has — so far — escaped any consequence for sexual misconduct is the 47th President of the United States. James Ball, our Pulitzer Prize-winning political editor, reveals his own role in the extraordinary saga of the Epstein Files and, as he always does so brilliantly, makes sense of an incredibly complicated story.
Jo Bartosch makes her debut in our magazine’s pages with a superbly informative article about attempts to change the balance of criminality in the Scottish sex trade. I’ll be honest: the politics of the sex trade have been, until now, one of my blind spots. There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as being brought up to speed and having your eyes opened by an article in your own magazine. I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.