Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the best of the New Statesman, in print and online this week. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.
1—“Demands of the counter-revolution”
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And here is Starmer as Martin Luther… accompanied by Andrew’s analysis on the Prime Minister’s Reformation. The child of progressive legalism is abandoning his heritage, and nailing his new hard-nosed theses to the door of Number 10. FMcR
Let’s take, instead, a step back. Starmer still has a huge majority and more than four years to play with. There is a reshuffle coming but both he and Reeves know that, though she has made some serious political mistakes, no Prime Minister can sack his Chancellor this early. He has largely purged his party of the left. He is also doing quite well in handling the unpredictable Trump, emphasising personal friendliness, avoiding confrontations. There is no single obvious alternative leader within Labour. The most active organisers on the back benches – the Blue Labour and Red Wall people – are essentially on Starmer’s side. So when we say, “It can’t go on like this,” the honest response is: but it probably will.
2—“Sweeping action, punctilious detail”
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It is a delight, of course, to have Tom Holland in these pages, and on such a seminal text! He contends that Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars offers the true blueprint for writing about power. I contend that these 12 biographies are a mandatory read for a basic political education. FMcR
And so they remain to this day. That Rome tends to live more vividly in people’s imaginings than other ancient empires owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Pharaohs and shahs may have presided over civilisations as brilliant and influential, but no one ever wrote about them as Suetonius wrote about the Caesars. His subjects seem familiar to us as few other rulers from antiquity do. They wrestle with funding shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals. We are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities. The chilly marble of their portrait busts is transfigured into flesh and blood.
3—“The pretence is over”
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Via Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, America wrote itself into existence; it has an above average sense of self-definition. But it is no beacon of freedom, writes Hans Kundnani. Thanks to the Trump presidency, the imperial realpolitik that really drives the country is visible to all. NH
Franz Kafka never visited America. But at the beginning of his unfinished novel Amerika, Karl Rossmann, a 17-year-old German boy, is exiled after being seduced by a maid and getting her pregnant. Arriving in New York Harbor, “he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.” It is not clear if Kafka knew the Statue of Liberty holds a torch, not a sword. But the image of the statue with a sword is evocative and resonant – especially since Donald Trump became president again last month. Like Kafka’s protagonist, we seem to be seeing the US in an “intenser sunlight” – and what we see is an America that threatens rather than offers hope.
4—“Nasty rich people”
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Are there any better or more durable subjects for satire? In recent years, television has taken up some of the slack literary fiction has left behind in this field – Succession, but also The White Lotus. Rachel Cooke relishes another glorious dose of emptiness and greed. NH
After two triumphant series, we know what to expect from The White Lotus’s sharp-eyed puppetmaster, Mike White. Another group of rich and obnoxious Americans will arrive by boat at an island resort whose waving staff proffer first garlands, and then the golf buggies in which they’ll be transported to their adult playgrounds (believe me when I tell you that the words en suite hardly touch the sides of the bathrooms here) – cue more trouble in paradise. Somehow, though, this has surprisingly little effect on one’s relish for what lies ahead. As I watched, I caught myself gleefully rubbing my hands together. Part of the show’s intense satisfaction has to do with schadenfreude, and having just shelled out for a new boiler, I can hardly wait for them all to get it.
5—“Schemed to destroy”
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Since Brexit, no silhouette has so dominated Westminster’s imagination as the strategist Spad with the PM’s ear. Cummings and now McSweeney have had even their “most gnomic utterance studied for significance”. Jason shines light on dark arts. GM
It’s never wise for a special adviser to become the story but this happened to Cummings, whose defining role in the Vote Leave campaign was reimagined by James Graham in the TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War – and is now happening to McSweeney, the principal character of Get In. Through his work at Labour Together, then as head of Starmer’s leadership campaign and, later, the party’s election strategist, “the Irishman”, as Maguire and Pogrund call him, did more than any elected politician to create the conditions for Labour’s victory.
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