On “the revolution”, “the duel” between Charles Spencer and the Royal Family, and how King Charles lost his virginity

A SENSE OF POWER by @TomMcTague “It is hard to describe, coming into this job when I did and when things were happening,” Andy Burnham explains, “so it’s obviously been hard.” And yet, he believes his father’s death has reaffirmed his priorities. “I’ve also been finding a sense of power in it,” he tells me. “I can hear him and I know his quiet insistence on the things I should do. I’ll be drawing on that when I speak in Liverpool.” The voice Burnham hears is the voice of a traditional Labour man, old-school in some senses, progressive in others, but always resolute and clear-eyed about his beliefs. Burnham tells me the quiet voice he can hear from his father is both moral and political. He was a lifelong advocate of proportional representation, an important part of his son’s conversion. He also “didn’t put a foot wrong” personally, Burnham says. “He treated people just wonderfully – he barely ever fell out with anybody,” as he puts it. “You asked what I took from him. I’ve tried to treat people like that myself, always.” If there was a “quiet insistence” in the father, it is fair to say there is something similar in the son: an insistence about the things he wants to do and his own ability to do them. “If you can say, ‘I know why I’m doing it and I can see the difference that I’m making,’ then it all comes together and you can rationalise it,” Burnham explains, contemplating the challenge of power ahead of him. So why is he doing it? “It is back to… rewiring the country,” he says. “Life for people in large parts of the country just isn’t good enough, and they don’t have enough power to change things.” I push him on why he thinks only he can fix it and not someone else. “Oh, I don’t want to be arrogant,” he says, again, almost apologetically, hiding the steel of his conviction. He has been beating this drum for years, he says. He saw the injustice of the Hillsborough disaster and then in government was given the chance to change things. He tried to speak for the north in Westminster for 16 years but found he was “shouting into the wind” until he moved back home. It sounds as though he believes there was a destiny to his journey. “I’m a believer that you get better at things through life if you do learn from things that happen, because they happen for a reason,” he replies, carefully. “So, you know, I do think things happen for a reason: the question is, what do you then do with that situation and how do you process it?” Does he believe in fate, then? “Fate is a bit of a mystical thing to believe in, and all that, so I’m not sure I quite believe in that, but I am a believer in that, you know, you learn and you change.” His mind is drawn to the weeks ahead: speaking to the Labour Party Conference for the first time as leader – back home, in the area he was born and shaped, where his family still live and where his father died. “The one thing I would want to sort of say is… how Liverpool will be a big thing, going to Liverpool for conference. When you talk about fate and all of that, that does feel a bit, you know, major in my life.” Burnham believes his speech to the conference is the moment he will define the purpose of his premiership in ways that will leave no one in doubt of his intent. “It’s a moment to weave all of these threads together and to lay out the path, I think, and say, ‘Look, Britain’s here, we can be there’ – a much better place – ‘but we’re going to have to be honest with ourselves about what it takes to get from where we are right now to where we should be.’” Being honest with the country: this is the bar the Prime Minister has set for himself. “This has to be a point where the country says, ‘Right, we can’t carry on like this, we need to set a new, clear direction, a new clear path.’” Cover art by Craig Fleming

These long profiles of political power are so interesting - loved this!

With Lincoln ticked off, that’s one-third of all the cathedrals visited!

Such a fun read on such a sudden and interesting new fame!

RUPERT LOWE CONFRONTS, DISSECTS AND DESTROYS Since his election to Public Accounts (achieved with the curious support of Conservative Party MPs last October), Lowe has become a rare social media crossover event for the committee. “Rupert Lowe DISSECTS civil servant over FAILED plans to drive economic growth”; “Rupert Lowe CONFRONTS ‘WOKE’ NHS boss for hiring ‘foreign doctors’”; “Rupert Lowe UNLEASHES on ‘UNFIT’ civil servant: ‘I WANT YOU FIRED!’” – these are just three of the highest-viewed YouTube adaptations from the otherwise humdrum activities of the committee, once only observed by hare-eyed clerks and Hansard reporters. Lowe’s exploitation of the committee’s camera set-up is a useful reminder of just how right-wing parts of the English public are – loathing state overreach, civil servants and public waste with a fervour you’d normally expect to find in rural New Hampshire. Read @nickpaulharris on the new political style of Rupert Lowe: newstatesman.com/politics/th…

I watched Rupert Lowe's face for two hours

🚨EXCL - here is the most comprehensive picture yet of the Green Party’s radical new economic policy under Zack Polanski Motion C05, titled “Fiscal Referees: A New Economic Framework for People and Planet” and seen by the New Statesman, proposes to overhaul the party’s approach to the economy for the first time in years and is supported by the party leadership It will be voted on at Green conference next month and is expected to pass. There are hopes it will draw a clear dividing line with Andy Burnham's Labour C05 includes a range of proposals that would mark a sharp break with the fiscal and monetary policy of Labour and Conservative governments: Interest rates dropped as the main means of controlling inflation - replaced by price controls, buffer stocks, “strategic taxation”, credit regulation and public investment GDP junked as a measure of economic policy success because it overrates “environmentally destructive, socially harmful or economically wasteful” parts of the economy Gov’t “progressively restricting resource use in sectors that generate pollution, ecological degradation or socially harmful outcomes.” E.g. banning banks from creating credit for fossil fuel extraction/potential human rights abuses abroad Enshrines a proposal already floated by Zack Polanski to throw out fiscal rules and replace them with fiscal referees - OBR to be replaced by “Office of Fiscal Transparency” And the creation of a Fiscal Policy Committee to mirror the Bank’s MPC - would oversee government spending and work toward the party's three main economic goals: full employment, “a social foundation” and keeping the economy “within planetary boundaries”

Pleased to win best soundbite -- but wish they had included my top tip for success: publish the best writers in the world. Stay tuned re NS newsletters folks, hot stuff coming.

WILL AI KILL US ALL? by @willydunn What can we say we actually know in this fast-moving and contentious story? Having spoken to more than 20 AI experts, government officials and advisers, politicians and researchers, I suggest we know the following: a lot of highly intelligent people believe that there is an unacceptably high chance that AI might kill us all. We can only guess at how that would happen, or what the probability of it happening is. But we also know that whatever these people say about the danger of what they are building, they will not stop building it. They can’t. They are locked into the most expensive competition in history. Spending on AI infrastructure this year alone is expected to exceed $1trn; this is more than three times what it cost America (in today’s money) to develop a nuclear weapon and put a person on the Moon. AI spending is now the main driver of US economic growth. About 80 per cent of all gains in US stock markets last year were from AI companies and related enterprises. No one will deliberately puncture this bubble, and even if they did, the geopolitical importance of AI means the US government – which has always aggressively advanced the interests of domestic companies – would probably not let them. This is not only a race between tech companies, but between superpowers. The only option for a company such as Anthropic is to run through capitalism at breakneck speed, raising and spending titanic sums, to build a world-changing technology and, hopefully, prevent it from wiping us off the face of the Earth. There has never been so much money in the apocalypse business. Cover art by Sam Green.

TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE ARSE: UNIQLO'S JW ANDERSON COLLABORATION VICTORY "There is an earth-shattering moment in every white boy’s life when he discovers UNIQLO,” tweeted the prolific shitposter Donald Boat in April 2022. When I read it, I retweeted it unhesitatingly, because it was profound and true – not just for white boys, but for us all, though particularly for white boys. We must now acknowledge another earth-shattering moment. There is BU, before Uniqlo; AU, after Uniqlo; and AJWAXU, after JW Anderson X Uniqlo. We are now in the year 9AJWAXU, because – if you for some reason adhere to a different lord and saviour to Jonathan William Anderson – it was in 2017AD that the Northern Irish fashion designer launched his collaboration with Uniqlo, the Japanese Godzilla which makes unbranded clothes just expensive enough, and just high-quality enough, to escape the stain of “fast fashion”. You’re probably wearing Uniqlo socks, or Uniqlo pants, or a Uniqlo T-shirt, right now. The brand is fashion’s Coca-Cola or Mini, beloved by both people who care a lot and people who don’t care at all about how they dress. The fashion chain's hegemony is no accident, writes @josiahgogarty: newstatesman.com/politics/so…

This is so cool!

Wrote about the denim wars and the incredibly icky and strange reaction to Sadie Sink in the @NewStatesman

I wrote about Charlie Kirk’s afterlife for the @NewStatesman, with thoughts from @hasanthehun newstatesman.com/world/ameri…

This is pungent and brilliant - phwoar!

What to make of what has been made of Charlie Kirk? Electrifying here by @alexbronzini ft @hasanthehun. Very glad to have in the NS.

This is classic Lawford, don't miss it

I went to Eton to see Prince George's first day

My debut in the print edition of @NewStatesman

So I know you've all been waiting for @lola_seaton to weigh in: here's our @NewStatesman review of Rachel Cusk's novel Life of M newstatesman.com/culture/boo…