The Caretaker prime minister: Keir Starmer goes on, but for how much longer?
Angela Rayner’s next move has the Labour Party on tenterhooks
December 7 2025 / The Sunday Times
The paranoid style
With every reset and reversal, the prime minister sends his party deeper into confusion and anxiety
November 16 2025 / The Sunday Times
The Permacrisis
Since the so-called botched reset in early September, Starmer has been presiding over a state of perma-crisis, debilitating for the government and for the country
November 8 2025 / The Sunday Times
Progressivism and the politics of a dead era
As the old order crumbles in Europe something new, dangerous and more volatile replaces it
October 26 2025 / The Sunday Times
Tony Blair: a Machiavellian prince hustling for influence in the court of King Donald
Gaza, Trump and a former prime minister relishing his second act on the world stage
October 18 2025 / The Sunday Times
Andy Burnham: blowback against the king of the north
How the mayor of Manchester became Labour’s enemy within
September 28 2025 / The Sunday Times
A disastrous reset for Keir Starmer
Perhaps Angela Rayner’s fall - and the sweeping reshuffle it provoked – will, in retrospect, mark the moment Starmer finally changed direction and grasped the full scale of the problems facing the country in this new political era. Or perhaps not…
September 7 2025 / The Sunday Times
Ministers are calling asylum a national emergency
The zeitgesit, or spirit of the age, determines a nation’s politics. The zeitgeist is not with Starmer’s Labour
August 23 2025 / The Sunday Times
Letter from Epping: How one town became a "powder keg"
The protests in Epping about an “asylum hotel” reveal something fundamental about what Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country
July 26 2025 / The Sunday Times
What Keir Starmer can learn from Wimbledon
Telling a story and long-term thinking
July 9 2025 / The New Statesman
The Loneliness of Rachel Reeves
Tears are not enough
July 5 2025 / The Sunday Times
"Forgotten Man" holds the keys to the country. Will the PM use Blair to find him?
The row over net zero is a sign of how damaging to the party is the divide between urban progressives and its traditional voters
May 3 2025 / The Sunday Times
Nigel Farage: why his rivals rightly fear him
Denouncing Reform UK as a racist party will only mobilise the people’s army
April 19 2025 / The Sunday Times
The rise of Hard Labour
For better or worse, Keir Starmer leads a security government
April 13 2025 / The Sunday Times
Notebook: As the literary novel fades from relevance, James Graham is the writer for our era
The triumph of the screen and disappearance of the serious reader
March 26 2025 / The New Statesman
The two faces of Labour
The tension between soft left progressivism and a harder-edged, more conservative politics of security which defines this new emerging era, runs like a fault line through Labour
March 23 2025 / The Sunday Times
The runaway state
The world is in a Seventies-style flux, but can Labour “think the unthinkable” as the Thatcherites did?
March 15 2025 / The Sunday Times
The New Realism: rearmanent in an age of raw power
The era of progressive hegemony is over
March 2 2025 / The Sunday Times
Angela Rayner: Out of nowhere
The deputy prime minister is, unlike many of her senior colleagues, not a working class Oxbridge meritocrat. Her rise is much more interesting than that
February 16 2025 / The Sunday Times
Power play: Cummings, McSweeney and the Wizard of the Kremlin
Has Labour arrived in power at exactly the wrong time for its brand of progressive centre-left politics?
February 10 2025 / The New Statesman
Labour's Trump problem
The energy in western politics is with the populist right
December 29 2024 / The Sunday Times
Editor's Note: My Farewell to the New Statesman
A key challenge for any NS editor: what to do about the Labour Party?
December 4 2024 / The New Statesman
Like Thatcherism, Trumpism is here to stay
The Trumpist MAGA movement has cultural roots that the left failed to understand or confront
November 6 2024 / The New Statesman
Gareth Southgate: The Quiet Englishman
The Southgate era is over but the spirit of Southgatism will endure
July 17 2024 / The New Statesman
Editor's Note: All changed, changed utterly
The Conservatives and SNP routed: the kingdom is more stable than at any time since the Scottish independence referendum of 2014
July 10 2024 / The New Statesman
Letter from Taipei: The Taiwan conundrum
Rereading JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, from 1984, I understood that he had already anticipated the rise of China and the world to come
July 2 2024 / The New Statesman
The Age of Distrust: the country is restive
There is a deeper political tide turning beneath this approaching election result
June 16 2024 / The Sunday Times
The Seismic Radicalism of Nigel Farage
Liberals and mainstream Conservatives loathe him. But he understands something important about the fractious mood in the country
June 5 2024 / The New Statesman
Letter from Washington: David Lammy: inside the Beltway
Republican senators like the realism but not the progressive part of the Lammy Doctrine
May 15 2024 / The New Statesman
Angela Rayner: The Wounded Lioness
Rayner is used to be being misunderstood and underestimated - but she is a politician for all Labour factions and has undoubted star quality
April 21 2024 / The Sunday Times
Salman Rushdie: After the knife attack
Even today Rushdie remains reviled by some as an anti-Islamic heretic but by others, rightly, as a heroic champion of free speech and the open society
April 20 2024 / The Saturday Read
Letter from Jerusalem: Why the two-state solution looks doomed
“Nothing is personally OK for anyone”
March 20 2024 / The New Statesman
Rachel Reeves: is securonomics really Bidenism but without the money?
At the end of the 1970s, as the post-war order crumbled, the Thatcherites had a radical solution to the political and economic crisis in which Britain was mired. Can Reeves, with her talk of new orthodoxies, effect a similar transformation today?
March 17 2024 / The Sunday Times
Labour has a Palestinian problem
The Arab Street and the politics of Israel-Palestine have arrived in British cities
February 4 2024 / The Sunday Times
Rachel Reeves: is she trapped?
Haunted by the traumatic defeat of 1992, Labour is boxed in on tax-and-spend
November 26 2023 / The Sunday Times
Caution and fear define Labour
After a long party civil war, the moderates are in control. But what will they do with power?
October 8 2023 / The Sunday Times
The SNP in retreat: the forward march of the nationalists halted
Scottish showdown is a seminal moment for Starmer
September 24 2023 / The Sunday Times
The Green Wars
Will divisive net zero politics become the new Brexit?
August 13 2023 / The Sunday Times
Labour are analysing how centre-left parties lose from winning positions
Why is Keir Starmer so anxious? It’s because Labour are used to losing. Defeat defines the party
July 16 2023 / The Sunday Times
The Humbling of the SNP
The nationalists believe their interests and those of the Scottish people are coterminous. They are not.
April 12 2023 / The New Statesman
A Darkening World
In 2013, few could have predicted the political convulsions to come
April 12 2023 / The New Statesman
The Iraq War catastrophe: twenty years later
The liberal delusion of remaking the world
March 15 2023 / The New Statesman
Keir Stramer: what he has learnt from the German Social Democrats
The search for security and respect in an age of disorder
March 1 2023 / The New Statesman
The Undoing of Nicola Sturgeon
Her fall offers little reason for unionist triumphalism
February 22 2023 / The New Statesman
Keir Starmer: the unbinding of Britain
Will breaking up the United Kingdom bring us closer together?
Plus, Eric Ravilious and deep England
December 8 2022 / The New Statesman
The Truss Debacle
A broken and humiliated Conservative party turns back to Jeremy Hunt
October 19 2022 / The New Statesman
The Next Prime Minister
What Sunak and Truss are getting wrong about Brexit
July 27 2022 / The New Statesman
Boris Johnson: Downfall
In 2019, Boris Johnson had everything he wanted after winning the general election. But the gods were waiting for him
July 13 2022 / The New Statesman
Jason Cowley in conversation with Andy Haldane
Jason Cowley on an era of extraordinary politics
July 7 2022 / The Royal Society of Arts (RSA)
Jason Cowley, Book
The English Question: Who are we now, after Brexit, in these pandemic times?
December 8 2021 / The New Statesman
Afghanistan: The Cost of War
Twenty years after the US invasion, the Taliban are preparing to retake control of the country
July 28 2021 / The New Statesman
Gareth Southgate and the art of leadership
Why the England manager understands the real meaning of glory
June 8 2021 / The New Statesman
Boris Johnson and the Clercs
The fallen intellectuals
November 18 2020 / New Statesman
The Great University funding crisis
Sub-prime degrees and elite overproduction
July 22 2020 / New Statesman
Why Boris Johnson is trapped
The prime minister stokes the flames of the culture wars
June 17 2020 / New Statesman
The Tragedy of Tye Green Lodge
People are dying at the Essex care home
May 20 2020 / New Statesman
Keir Starmer's Labour
The party is unifying behind its new leader
May 13 2020 / New Statesman
Boris Johnson's near-death expereience
What does it mean to live a good life?
April 22 2020 / New Statesman
Jim McMahon: The Politics of Place and Belonging
Rebuilding the fabric of place
April 22 2020 / New Statesman
Jason Cowley: Covid-19 New Statesman blog
Essential analysis of the defining crisis of our times
April 14 2020 / New Statesman
The Night of the Great Applause
A public coming together of a kind one seldom if ever experiences
April 2020 / New Statesman
Boris Johnson: can he speak to and for the nation?
The burdens of leadership during national crisis
March 24 2020 / New Statesman
Visiting JG Ballard at home
Life as a stage set that can be cleared away at any moment
March 2020 / New Statesman
The Great Railways Debacle
No other major Western country has allowed so many of its strategic industries, assets and pre-eminent companies to fall into foreign ownership
February 2020 / New Statesman
The Gift of Statesmanship
In defence of free-thinking and against “orthodoxy-sniffing”
December 19 2019 / New Statesman
Jeremy Corbyn: Labour's epic 2019 defeat
Years of dogma have left the party a rotten shell - loathed and distrusted by voters
December 15 2019 / The Sunday Times
Britain deserves better
2019 General Election Leader
December 4 2019 / new Statesman
David Cameron: the moderniser who blundered
The prime minister who gambled and lost Europe
September 11 2019 / New Statesman
Boris Johnson: the myth of greatness
The crown of laughter
July 24 2019 / New Statesman
The Know-nothing Right
Boris Johnson is heading for Downing Street
June 12 2019 / New Statesman
The End of May
The last days of Theresa May’s premiership
May 29 2019 / New Statesman
The Masochism Premiership (redux)
Plus - our national novelist ...
March 27 2019 / New Statesman
Charles Masterman and the condition of England
Power leaks from Corbyn and May
March 1 2019 / New Statesman
Ten Years as Editor of the New Statesman
Getting the balance right
December 6 2018 / New Statesman
England Dreaming
A World Cup summer stirs a deep nostalgia in the English
June 20 2018 / New Statesman
Crumbling Britain
The age of austerity and the decay of the public realm
April 19 2018 / New Statesman
The struggles of Theresa May
What happened to the politics of the common good?
October 12 2017 / New Staesman
Smiley, Brexit and Europe
John le Carré and the citizen of nowhere
September 7 2017 / New Statesman
The masochism premiership of Theresa May
An epic tale of hubris and humiliation
July 13 2017 / New Statesman
The Guilty Men of Brexit
Churchill, Boris Johnson and the “bullseye of disaster”
July 6 2017 / New Statesman
Corbyn at Glastonbury
More Brexit variations
June 29 2017 / New Statesman
The Brexit Debacle
Theresa May’s Britain is in one hell of a mess
June 22 2017 / New Statesman
Corbyn: revenge of the rebel
Why Labour can win again
June 15 2017 / New Statesman
The Tories aim to take down an SNP star
The strange rebirth of Tory Scotland
June 1 2017 / New Statesman
The rise and fall of Ukip
Nigel Farage and the revenge of the fruitcakes
May 11 2017 / New York Times
Wanted: an Opposition
The stench of decay and failure coming from the Labour Party is now overwhelming
March 30 2017 / New Statesman
George Osborne: The austerity editor
The former chancellor’s new London power base
March 23 2017 / New Statesman
Macron in London
The French presidency and a populist eruption from the liberal centre
February 22 2017 / New Statesman
What makes us human?
The accumulated wisdom of past generations
December 1 2016 / New Statesman
Trump World
Donald Trump and the new nationalism sweeping the West
November 17 2016 / New Statesman
Donald Trump and the age of reaction
America in shock as Trump takes the White House
November 9 2016 / New Statesman
The New Times
Brexit, globalisation and the future of the Left
September 22 2016 / New Statesman
The Labour wars
Jeremy Corbyn is the symptom of the party’s critical malaise - not its cause
August 22 2016 / The Daily Telegraph
David Cameron's epic failure
The former prime minister is one of the guilty men of Brexit
July 13 2016 / New Statesman
The steely resolve of Mrs May
David Cameron’s doomed European wager
July 7 2016 / New Statesman
Brexit, betrayal and English football
What Nietzsche knew
June 30 2016 / New Statesman
The New Young Fogeys
Are we entering a period of social repair?
June 19 2016 / BBC Radio 4, Analysis
The "left behind" want out of Europe
Labour MPs are spooked by Brexit fears
June 16 2016 / New Statesman
The rise of the New Young Fogeys
Why millennials are the best behaved generation since the 1960s
June 9 2016 / New Statesman
The triumph of Sadiq Khan
A warning for Labour, our zombie opposition: London is not England, and England is not Britain