There is a comparative history to be written of Hollande, Scholz, Biden and Starmer, last gasps of centre left politics who had done their time in their respective organisations only to reach the top and face a historic rightwing surge with zero aptitude or urgency

Is it possible that Emerald Fennell might not actually be very good and has got to where she is by knowing the right people?

Keir Starmer is NOT interested in communication Keir Starmer is NOT interested in vision Keir Starmer is NOT interested in policy Keir Starmer is NOT interested in politics Keir Starmer is ONLY interested in destroying alpacas

The flaw in the McSweeney/Starmer project can be summed up with "the people whose pitch to the electorate was they were serious also had no interest in policy", and when stated that bluntly it seems extraordinary it got this far

Unfortunately the lesson here would appear to be "only appoint a chief of staff you went to school with"

In a world of depressing democratic outcomes nothing so consistently depresses me as the Japanese dutifully voting for the LDP because they just sort of feel they have to

The case for governing for the voters you have - a few discrete policies for the left-liberal 30% - is one of actually proving anyone can still *govern*. The paralysis of May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer all start from the grasp for the election-winning 40% coalition that may now be impossible anyway.

The through-line of Starmer's problems, whether not realising Mandelson might be a bit off or not realising that he was accidentally echoing the Rivers of Blood speech, is that he just isn't very interested in politics

The idea that unimaginable wealth is every bit as tedious a life as the one you currently have, that there is no higher plane of experience waiting over the rainbow, must be genuinely existentially terrifying to the multitudes for whom wealth acquisition is the Dream

I really have become convinced by the "It's All Content" theory of American politics. Everything the Administration does is about producing content. Arresting Don Lemon may seem like transparently clumsy authoritarianism which will backfire - but think of the likes they'll get! More content! More!

I do get the feeling that Brexit for a certain generation of liberals has just become a more polite excuse for saying "things ain't what they used to be"

The reason I don't buy "liberals annoyed people into right-wing backlash" is that the entire world is shifting to the right and you need to be quite credulous to believe that this is a result of liberals suddenly being equally annoying everywhere all at the same time

I don't think the US Left has fully clocked that previous leftists could reject "America" because there was an alternative. With the departure of any meaningful socialist identity, they have to be pro-"American" because it literally the only flag you could plausibly get people to rally round.

I hate to be back on the "everything bad can be traced back to Angela Merkel" train but there is a particular pernicious influence she has had in making Boring Competence (tm) into an appealing brand to people who should know better

Watching Lutnick reminds me of the moment in Paths of Glory where Kirk Douglas listens to the WWI general explain that shooting your own men is a good idea and simply replies "do you believe anything you have just said"

Don't mess with Flemish nationalists I guess. Those guys have to be *dedicated*

- a local thegn, as Heretog Sceaphierde tries to raise the alarm about events in Lindisfarne

I consider myself someone who listens to podcasts but feel like I must be missing out on the real deal because I have no idea what these kinds of sketches are parodying

I'm not sure the people who want authentic arms and armour in Homeric adaptations have clocked that would mean men just literally hitting each other with rocks

"The weapons, armor, and tactics make no sense here; they're from a bunch of different eras!" is something people realized about the ACTUAL HOMER like a century ago. At least.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point however is to fail to change it.

The European welfare state is more a Christian Democratic achievement than a socialist one! I beg her to read a single book!

People across the democratic world keep coming up with the "left on economics right on culture" wheeze until they all realise the same thing: those voters absolutely exist, they just hate political parties

A big day for ctrl-F in commentary world today

Thing is, there are countries like Germany that have gone down the route of technical education and manufacturing that Blue Labour wants for us and a. they still ended up with the same progressive middle class we do and b. that economic model is doing *terribly* right now

I have been on Twitter's "for you" feed recently and discovered that just about every post can best be responded to with this

The problem with these AI plans is that they all rely on "what if *thing I remember* met *other thing I remember*" which basically means all culture just becomes those terrible Scary Movie knockoffs from the 00s

Alternatively: one person does not have a class. A million people do.

The debates also bring home what an achievement the emancipation proclamation was. The fact that only five years after the caution Lincoln expresses here the same guy would enact a step even his radical fringe would not have dreamed of is, I think, instructive.

Isaac Chotiner: it's interesting you don't use wireless earphones Me: I actually save a lot of money this way. IC: Because wired headphones are cheaper. Me: Right. IC: how much have you spent replacing cheap broken headphones? Me: *laughs* I mean a lot right, probably a lot but -

Next time, we absolutely promise, we won't devolve into factional bickering

Increasingly convinced that the conversation in the USA about whether you can ever again get a civil political discourse is just a proxy for "can the USA ever get proportional representation"

"It's the institutions stupid" can replace most political commentary, most of the the time

Bayrou's short tenure reminds me just how impossible it must have been in the Third Republic to remember who was French PM. 50 years of saying "I thought it was Ribot, no, Herriot, no that was in October" etc

I feel like people online have a very different idea of Ezra Klein to the one that actually exists

Presumably someone at these things always says "let's not what we always do and what everyone expects us to do and collapse into factional bickering" and everyone in the room agrees and then they just immediately do so anyway

It is crazy to me that in one lifetime you could plausibly have seen Shakespeare perform, Rembrandt and Velazquez paint, read a first edition Paradise Lost and Don Quixote, heard Allegri's Miserere, and met Spinoza, Descartes and Galileo.

The sheer number of gambling ads I am seeing right now either says something very worrying about the country or very worrying about me

The connecting thread of my political beliefs is increasingly that life should be harder: children should learn poetry, voting should be compulsory, takeaway food should be restricted to a luxury, tiktok should be banned. A kind of puritan/high Tory virtue leftism with absolutely zero constituency.

- Richard Dawkins, first draft of the God Delusion

It's a simple line but I think back to Steve Carrell in the Big Short saying that for 15,000 years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never worked

I get very annoyed by this because Christianity is not a culture, it is a very specific claim about the divinity of Christ. You may as well claim to be "culturally" a tuna sandwich.

Tom Lehrer could as a throwaway gag write a Gilbert and Sullivan parody of "Clementine" with better lyrics than all of actual G&S The mister resisted/The sister persisted/I kissed her, all loyalty slipped/When she said I could have her/Her sister's cadaver/Must surely have turned in its crypt

Both Change UK and this new left party seem to originate in a laudable impulse: that one should stop sitting around complaining and Do Something. Until you actually Do Something and realise oh god this is what Something is going to be

I love reviews of Nile Rogers at Glastonbury which are like "yeah of course it was great, what do you expect, the man has written 50% of all good music ever, which is somehow Cheating"

Reading this piece you get the sense Starmer must be furious with whoever sold him a career in politics by telling him he wouldn't need to be political observer.co.uk/news/politic...