Letter of the week: Farage has bitten off more than he can chew

I’m afraid I found the front cover of #470 creepy, disconcerting and deeply disturbing. I have had to remove it and keep it locked in a dark place until November where it will reappear on our Guy for Bonfire Night.

Unpleasant, unsettlingly revolting but brilliant work! Well done.
Martin Griffiths

Re: “Welcome to the even nastier party” by Paul Mason (TNW #470)

As Reform expands thanks to mad, bad, sad defectors from the Conservative Party, there will be inevitable clashes of both personality and the direction that the party should follow. I’m not convinced Farage understands just what he has bitten off by accepting all these miscreants into his fold, nor how he will control the egos of the “bigger beasts”.

But Reform have no policies, just racist and Islamophobic pronouncements, and must surely be subject to increasing scrutiny regarding just how they think they will manage all the levers and controls of government. Governing is far, far more complex than just shouting on the sidelines.

The problems Britain faces, many of which are structural and chronic (dating back several decades) will not be resolved by Reform’s nativist and racist propaganda. 

The party is just another symptom of Britain’s malaise, rather than a solution to it.
Liz Court

Re: Alastair Campbell’s diary on Jeff Bezos (TNW #470)

In a world where time and again you hear “what can I do?” as a response to awful, sometimes hideous news, not buying from Amazon, not using Uber and not staying in an Airbnb is an easy way to wield considerable power.
Keith Brisley

I have cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription, don’t use Facebook, no longer engage with Instagram, sold my Tesla shares when Elon Musk became a fascist, do my internet searches through Ecosia and only use X to publicly support Ukraine. I’m looking for more things to do.
Nick Battersby

Re: “Face it, Trump’s going mad” by Nicky Woolf (TNW #470)

Duty To Warn, an American movement led by noted psychiatrists, psychologists and medical practitioners, has warned about Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism since 2016. 

More recently, Drs John Gartner and Harry Segal, two American clinical psychologists, have spoken repeatedly about Trump’s likely fronto-temporal dementia and decline on their podcast, Shrinking Trump. His gait, phonemic paraphasias, increasingly poor impulse control, paranoia and confabulation have all been noted and charted over at least the last 12 months.

It’s astounding to me, as a mental health professional in the UK, that the world only seems to be waking up to and naming all of this now. He’s going to get worse and the consequences will increase unless he’s removed from office.
Carolyn Hurcom

The problem is not that Trump is “going mad”. It is the fact that he is a deeply damaged person, but up until now the frontal lobes of his brain, which control emotions, have moderated this damage. In dementia, the civilising restraint of the frontal lobes diminishes. In the average person this leads to a loss of impulse control that can be terrifying. 
Catherine Lissett

Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He might have added dementia to his NPD, but he has always been a damaged and damaging human. How on earth did he become president?
Michele Leembruggen

Re: “A visit to the Tory wet room” by Patience Wheatcroft (TNW #470)

Prosper, the new Tory group launched by Andy Street and Ruth Davidson, represents the broad views of many people in this country and it would be a big mistake to disrespect them.

Liberal Toryism has been either expelled or marginalised within the modern Conservative Party, yet politics is crying out for a leader who can develop a big tent that incorporates liberal conservatives with the strategic aim of defeating the reactionary forces of Reform and the Badenoch brand of Conservatism. 
Brian Ronson

What this might signal is a reconfiguration of our established political parties. Prosper might find that their best hope of pushing forward the types of policy positions they want to promote actually lies elsewhere, not inside the Tories.
Kevin Collins

Suggested Reading

Letter of the week: The reality of Trump’s private army

Reader Letters

Re: “When might cannot win the fight” (TNW #470)

Lynne O’Donnell’s casual assertion viz  “Qatar, which also funds groups like Hamas and its mouthpiece, Al Jazeera” should not go unchallenged. Far from being the mouthpiece of Hamas, most Middle East observers regard the objective reporting of Al Jazeera of the Gazan tragedy as far superior to that of the BBC.
Wade Mansell (emeritus professor)
Birchington, Kent

Re: Everyday Philosophy on karma (TNW #470)

Nigel Warburton says car-shelf thieves have no ultimate reason to fear payback or karma in an amoral universe. But around 95% of people have a reasonably well-developed capacity for the pain of guilt.

Even if all thieves in London fall into the no-guilt “psychopathic” 5%, they are at greater risk of poor forensic, mental, and physical health outcomes. This might not be judgment or karma, and may offer no comfort at all, but it is not the unconditional vacuum he suggests.
Andrew Blewett
Exeter

Re: “The death of fun” by Paola Totaro (TNW #470)

Absolutely wonderful –  both Ralph Steadman himself and Paola Totaro’s article.
Eile Gibson

Re: “The expensive boredom of Melania” by James Ball (TNW #470)

I actually think this will do quite well on streaming because nobody is on the fence about her – they’ll either watch it because they love her and are still in hospital after their frontal lobotomy, or they’ll hate-watch it with a bottle of wine and laugh at her.
Alistair Knight

Another documentary that is relevant here is the award-winning Ask E Jean, about Donald Trump’s victim, E Jean Carroll, but no one in the US will show it. It’s not even online as far as I can see.
RSP Zatzen

BELOW THE LINE

Re: Dilettante on hating a classic French movie (TNW 470)

Congratulations to Marie Le Conte, one of your best columnists, in discovering the joy of old movies. May I recommend three of my favourites? Howard Hawks directed in succession Bringing Up Baby (1938), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940).
Terry Weldon 

I agree with Marie. À Bout de Souffle has dated badly in the way some classics do. An amazing revelation at the time perhaps, but now that so many of its innovations have been adopted by the rest of the film world, it doesn’t seem special.
Alexander Blackburn 

À Bout de Souffle – like Citizen Kane (1941) – is a great film that is more to be admired than enjoyed. The jump-cut was one of its many innovations.

But also look at Jean Seberg and the way she dresses and carries herself. She looks like a modern woman and wouldn’t seem out of place in 2026. 
Will Goble

Marie Le Conte writes that she hoped the police in the film À Bout de Souffle would shoot a character “straight in the face”. There is enough violence without your newspaper fantasising about it.
Stephen Pritchard