There is a definite theme to this week’s edition – unavoidable, I’m afraid, given the news lately: the increasing confidence of the far right, both here in the UK and across the Atlantic.
After the murder of Charlie Kirk, the MAGA movement has rallied around an authority higher even than Donald Trump: God.
What we are bearing witness to today, as Matthew d’Ancona puts it, is the “persecution of heresy and blasphemy, a fledgling form of holy inquisition.”
It’s a chilling analysis of how the Trump administration has reacted to Kirk’s death – all the more so since aspects of it are clearly being aped by the far right in the UK.
Sonia Sodha warns that Farage’s Reform is not an end point, but merely a gateway to a much more obvious brand of far-right fascism. Her argument that a Reform government’s inevitable failure will draw voters towards a more extreme form of populism under someone like Tommy Robinson has a clear, disturbing logic.
In his weekly diary, Alastair Campbell gives the Prime Minister some advice for his Labour Party Conference speech next week. Alastair is never one to blow his own trumpet, so I’ll blow it for him – when it comes to political messaging, there is nobody better in the country. So listen up, Keir Starmer.
Back to Kirk. Our political editor James Ball has spent more than two decades immersed in the frankly bizarre (to this middle-aged naïf, at least) world of online subcultures. Much has been written about the coded messages engraved by Kirk’s killer on the bullets – but it is, James writes, almost entirely wrong. The truth is much, much weirder: layer upon layer of meme-style messaging to the point where meaning is lost altogether. James has coined a phrase to describe it: terminal irony.
Elsewhere – John Bleasdale’s tribute to Robert Redford – “the last of the golden gods” – is the best thing you will read about him since his death last week. I promise.
Ros Taylor has watched the first two episodes of The Hack – the ITV drama following The Guardian’s exposé of phone hacking in the UK. There’s something lacking, Ros finds – and not just in inches, as Toby Jones (5ft 5in) plays editor Alan Rusbridger (6ft 2in).
Some other highlights this week:
• Nigel Warburton on the philosophy of poverty
• Tanit Koch in her Germansplaining column (one of my favourite reads each week) on the fascinating rise of Evelyn Palla, the new boss of German railways, dubbed “Queen of Chaos Central”
• Patience Wheatcroft asking why on earth Andy Burnham would want to swap Manchester for Westminster
• Philip Ball on the odds of there having been life on Mars
• Richard Holledge on the artistic response to the original wave of European fascism – under the fantastic headline “When Stalin Went To The Chippy”.
• And Peter Trudgill – whose weekly etymology column is, I know, a subscriber favourite – goes deep into the backstory of tennis terminology. C’est très intéressant!
