• Ellen Halliday on the cost of net zero

• Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and a big literary scandal

• What to read this September

• And more…
  

In Tuesday’s edition, Ben Ansell considered how Andy Burnham has grabbed the nation’s attention through constant communication. In doing so, he has deprived the once ubiquitous Green leader Zack Polanski of media oxygen. But today he’s back in the headlines, announcing he will run for Keir Starmer’s soon-to-be-vacated seat of Holborn and St Pancras in central London.

We had plenty on Polanski in Prospect’s pages earlier this year—from Alan Rusbridger defending him against the right-wing press to revealing his celebrity crush in our Hinterland column. But perhaps most presciently, Tim Smedley asked whether the Greens are underemphasising their traditional climate message in favour of economic populism. In recent weeks, Polanski has tried to ride both horses, decrying “big money” in politics and what he sees as Burnham’s “dereliction of duty” during the nation’s latest heatwave.

It’s clear Labour cannot count the Greens out, particularly on climate issues where the government remains vexed. Because on their opposite flank, the British right is increasingly emphasising the purported costs of net zero. But what are those costs and how do they compare to the costs of inaction?

In our latest issue, Ellen Halliday tallies them up. “The best estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility put the cost to the public purse [of pursuing net zero] at about £70 per person, per year,” she writes. “That’s a little less than the price of a print and digital subscription to Prospect.” So, a bargain. Indeed, you can and should afford both. Furthermore, we will avoid additional costs by being less reliant on fossil fuels...

For this reason, our latest editorial takes a strong stand in favour of climate action: “it is impossible, after a summer of extreme-heat-related wildfires [...] to say that the climate crisis is a distant prospect. The question is not whether to make the case for action; the question is how to act,” we write.

Elsewhere, the literary world and celebrity gossip columns are simultaneously abuzz with the news that acclaimed novelist Rachel Cusk has written a thinly veiled fictional portrait of actress Natalie Portman. Alex Peake-Tomkinson explains the drama and the mixed reviews of the book behind it.

If Cusk’s book doesn’t take your fancy, we have plenty more to choose from in our latest Books in Brief section. One is Spinoza, Atheist by Steven Nadler, which considers the philosopher’s relationship to religion. Our former colleague Alex Dean also examined this question back in 2021—and it has since become one of Prospect’s most-read online articles. (The nature of Polanski’s Jewishness has also been a topic of recent media controversy.)

What do you make of Polanski’s environmentalism, Cusk’s fiction and Spinoza’s beliefs? Email your thoughts to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

From our new issue

The real cost of net zero

Increasing numbers of people are concerned about the affordability of climate action. Are they right?

Editorial: The high cost of living—like this

Tackling the cost-of-living can’t mean compromising on climate policies

From our Culture newsletter

When Rachel Cusk met Natalie Portman…

The novelist’s thinly veiled fictional memoir of the actor has provoked one of the literary scandals of the year

Also from our new issue

Books in Brief: what to read this September

From Spinoza’s relationship with God to the eerie, violent worlds of Leonora Carrington, here are this month’s short reviews from the magazine

From the archive

How green are Zack Polanski’s Greens?

The party now has other concerns besides the environment

Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

The Enlightenment thinker was branded a heretic, but his philosophy overflows with subtle religious insights

• COVER STORY: Burnham’s power struggle

• Prospect Podcast: Who really runs the United Kingdom?

• Daron Acemoglu’s case for ‘working-class liberalism’

• And more...

When Andy Burnham addressed the crowd in Downing Street on his first day as prime minister, he vowed to “take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land.” It’s a noble idea. But does Burnham have a clear theory of what power is and how it might be marshalled to achieve his ambitious agenda?

For the cover story of our new issue (out today), Phil Tinline argues that, while devolution is certainly needed in some areas, central government capacity needs to be beefed up in others. Power in British politics is often “concentrated when it should be devolved, and dispersed when it should be centralised,” he writes.

And while Burnham has a ready-made villain in the Treasury bean-counters controlling investment in far-flung places, Tinline argues he needs to also call out the equally malign forces of big business. The prime minister, writes Tinline, “decries the Post Office scandal, but doesn’t focus on the company that made the defective software, Fujitsu. He lambasts the dumping of sewage in our rivers, the chaos on our railways, and the parlous state of privatised social care for the elderly, but there is little mention of the shareholders who benefit, in the short term at least, from cost-cutting and a lack of new investment [...] There is no private-sector villain in his narrative to stand beside the Machiavellian Whitehall mandarin.”

To flesh out his ideas, Tinline also joins Ellen Halliday and Alona Ferber today’s episode of the Prospect Podcast.

In other news, Iceland has rejected its government’s proposal to resume talks on joining the European Union. The results were close, with 52.8% rejecting the proposal and 47.2% backing it. In his analysis, Andrew Adonis writes: “My best explanation for the narrow ‘no’ vote is that the threat to the fish loomed larger than the threat from Trump.” Adonis argues that the result of the referendum isn’t an “immediate concern”, even for those, like him, who value European solidarity. Instead, the real “red flag”, he argues, is that “there will inevitably be more EU-related referendums before long, including mega important ones akin to Brexit in 2016.”

Iceland’s referendum results suggest some scepticism towards the EU as a governmental institution. This phenomenon may not be unique to the people of Iceland. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu identifies a “general governability crisis, with trust in bedrock institutions, support for democracy and electoral turnout in decline.” According to Acemoglu, the root causes of this crisis are the struggling legitimacy of liberal democracies and cultural politics.

“Liberal democracy needs a new governing philosophy” to overcome this crisis, Acemoglu argues. You can hear more about his case for “working-class liberalism” on last week’s episode of the Prospect Podcast, where he spoke to Ellen and Alona about how technology and a shift away from industry has contributed to the erosion of trust in democratic institutions.

Enjoy flicking through our new issue and get in touch with any thoughts on today’s Lightbulb at ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk or kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark & Kathryn Schoon
Prospect’s audience team

From our new issue—out today

Andy Burnham’s great power struggle

The prime minister has a theory of power, its abuses and imbalances. But there is a major gap in his analysis

Andy Burnham’s theory of power

In the latest episode of the Prospect Podcast, Phil Tinline argues the prime minister has misunderstood the nature of entrenched power

New online

The EU’s failure over Iceland—and Brexit

So long, and thanks for all the fish

The case for ‘working-class liberalism’

To remake a politics that works for all, liberal democracy needs a new governing philosophy

But right there at his premiership’s launch, Starmer was throwing his compass and charts overboard. By promising to take the doctrine out of government, he was left offering mere administration. His only North Star would be to stick to the rules. This, it turned out, was not what people wanted from a government elected on a promise of “change”.

And so, just over two years later, a new prime minister stood on the same spot, and said something very different. Andy Burnham charged that in the 1980s, “political power was centralised, economic power privatised”. This had had terrible consequences for places like Merseyside, near where he grew up, and Greater Manchester, which he went on to lead as mayor. He vowed that, “We will take power out of here and carry it into every postcode in the land.”

Earlier this year, in a report called Power Failure: A New Theory of Power for the Future Governance Forum thinktank (), I argued that British politics desperately needed a clearer conception of power, and how, over the last few decades, it has come to be so badly -misallocated—concentrated when it should be devolved, and dispersed when it should be centralised. So our new premier’s focus on this theme was very welcome. But the need for a doctrine—or what we might call a theory of power—remains: who has too much power, who has too little, and how do we fix that?

One or two of our many recent premiers have offered such a theory.

Theresa May had one about “burning injustices”, but it was unmoored from the priorities of her party. Liz Truss espoused a kind of zombie Thatcherism, but it was unmoored from reality. And in fairness, even Starmer’s government did talk about this subject, sometimes. Its Pride in Place programme was billed as “the largest transfer of power from Whitehall to communities in history”. But his administration never thought about what that actually meant through to its logical conclusion and then acted on it. As one of Starmer’s advisers reportedly told the Times late last year, “I don’t think he has a theory of power… I don’t think he has ever sat down and read any history, or has any idea of how power works.”

But now, we have a prime minister who does have such a theory, leading a party that appears to agree with it. And not before time. Because, judging by the polls, the public has developed its own rough-and-ready theory of power, too—and it is driving many of them into the arms of hard-right populists. As I argued in my report, that theory goes something like this:

Everything is expensive. Nothing works. The people who are supposedly in charge are either useless or just don’t care. They say what they think we want to hear, but really, they just help their mates, and themselves. They don’t play by the rules, so why should we?

Burnham has evidently been worrying for a while about how Labour can respond constructively to this disaffection, and start to persuade people that mainstream, non-populist politics can act radically enough to improve their lives. In May last year, he warned that the rising threat from Reform UK “means the left will now have to make changes that we should have made many years ago… something new is going to break through”.

That sounds like a willingness to try to do the sort of thing that has driven transformative change in British politics before. In the 1940s, Clement Attlee led Labour to break from the old interwar fears of inflation and borrowing that had entrenched the interests of the City, and so shifted power towards working people. And in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher faced down the old fears of mass unemployment that had underpinned the power of the unions, and thus shifted power back the other way. So what’s Burnham’s version of that story?

In 2024, he published Head North—“a book about power and how unevenly it is distributed across Britain”—written with the mayor of the Liverpool City Region combined authority, Steve Rotheram. The theory of power Burnham sets out goes roughly like this:

Britain inherited its existing political system from the feudal past. It leaves MPs and much of the country disempowered. Power remains concentrated—hoarded—by around 50 mostly unelected people who effectively run the country in the interests of the south-east and the City of London. Senior civil servants effectively control much of government. Potential opposition is neutralised by the whipping system, which coerces MPs to support the executive regardless of their beliefs, effectively “transferring power from elected representatives to Whitehall mandarins”.

This shares the public’s suspicion that those in power do not put ordinary people’s interests first. But crucially, Burnham’s theory differs from the public’s in focusing blame on the Whitehall machine, much more than on MPs, and in offering a solution—pretty much the one Burnham has been deploying as prime minister. That is, a strengthening of political control to pull power back from an overdominant Treasury. And, crucially, devolution.

At Manchester’s People’s History Museum on 29th June, even before he took office, Burnham announced that he would create a new Number 10 North in Manchester, designed to effect both of these changes. It would have responsibility for regeneration and reindustrialisation; it would “make power flow” into the regions. On 23rd July, just three days after he had become prime minister, Number 10 North was ready for a delighted Burnham to open. A week later, a statement from his new cabinet titled “Rewiring the State” announced “a major transfer of powers, resources and functions from central government to elected mayors and local authorities in regions across England”. This will include control over some elements of taxation.

But does the theory of power he is now rapidly putting into practice have a clear sense of how some forces acquired too much power—of the fears and ideas that underpin our current skewed settlement? Only then can he hope to break despairing voters’ attraction to Nigel Farage. To find out, we first need to examine why Burnham thinks this way at all…

This was an excerpt from Phil Tinline’s cover essay in Prospect’s latest issue. To read the full article, click the button below.

Read the full essay

• Ben Ansell on Andy Burnham’s urgency

• Carlo Rovelli: the Doomsday clock is ticking

• Imogen West-Knights on the best streaming services

• And more...
  

Andy Burnham is here, there and everywhere. Today he will address MPs in the Commons for the first time since becoming prime minister and he is tipped to emphasise “positivity”. No wonder the PM is feeling positive—after a flurry of announcements over the summer, YouGov shows Burnham’s personal favourability has risen since he entered office, with particular favourability among Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens voters. Even Tory supporters like him much more than they did Keir Starmer. The positivity and hyperactivity recall Zohran Mamdani’s smiley digital ubiquity—perhaps they teach this in Mayor School?

Today, Prospect’s political columnist Ben Ansell examines the mixed record of such “always on” politicians from Tony Blair to Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. Burnham’s approach suits the times, Ansell writes—and stands him in stark contrast to his “deliberating” and “tacking and jibing” predecessor, who just announced he is standing down as an MP.

“Burnhamism, it seems, is about urgency,” Ansell writes. “Sometimes just acting for acting’s sake [...] If populism has risen because of a lack of trust in politicians and a cynicism that government can do anything, then its antidote is to do stuff and tell people about it.” The phone alert we all received about wildfire risks was the canonical example. And if you didn’t like that, “get used to it,” Ansell writes, “because if there’s one thing we’ll need to get used to [...] it’s nonstop, in-your-face communication.”

Another government policy expected to land shortly is a sanctions package targeting Israeli settlements, after the Israeli government issued tenders to build a new settlement containing more than 1,200 units in the occupied West Bank. Sebastian Faulks’s new novel Farewell to Eden follows a soldier sent to Palestine in the last days of the British mandate. He has been “appalled” by the escalating violence in the region, telling Ellie Jay he is “surprised by how little people here [in Britain], especially younger people, seemed to know about the history of Israel’s creation”.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli has not one but two books coming out this year: a “short, furious” history of nuclear weapons titled 85 Seconds to Midnight, published in June; and a “serene” tour of his scientific philosophy titled On the Equality of All Things, out in September. Our books and culture editor Peter Hoskin spoke to Rovelli at Prospect HQ about science, ethics and how to turn back the Doomsday clock.

We’ve had fiction, science... and now, science-fiction. Prospect’s TV critic Imogen West-Knights considers Apple TV+’s spate of quality sci-fi shows. This gets her thinking about the increasing product differentiation of the big streaming companies. Finally, for a bit of offline culture, Alan Rusbridger recounts his recent trip to Austria’s Schubertiade, which made him consider the purpose of classical festivals.

What were your thoughts on the government phone alert, and on Burnham’s summer media strategy? Email them to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

From our forthcoming issue

Andy Burnham, phone alert prime minister

It might feel like he has been in power forever, but I promise you, it really has only been a few weeks

Sebastian Faulks: ‘Britain has made terrible errors’

The novelist on our violent times—and literature’s lack of faith

Carlo Rovelli’s romantic pragmatism

The Doomsday clock is ticking. The physicist believes it’s not too late to turn it back

Apple’s big bang

The tech company’s streaming service is majoring on space and science-fiction—with earth-shattering results

New online

What is the future of the classical festival?

A trip to Austria’s Schubertiade put the question into stark relief. Are they a form of conservation? Or can they aspire to new creation?

• David Allen Green on Meta’s legal settlement

• Nicola Cutcher on Big Chicken’s lobbying

• Satirist Henry Morris on Burnam’s North Sea dilemma

• And more...
  

Today’s newsletter is primarily concerned with three “bigs”: Big Tech, Big Chicken and Big Oil. Let’s dive in.

First up, Meta settled a major legal case in California on Wednesday. The tech giant will now have to pay up to $18bn and establish additional safeguards for teenage users on Facebook and Instagram—including daily usage limits and blocks on night-time use in the US. Meta had been sued by multiple US states over the alleged harms its platforms cause to children.

While our legal columnist David Allen Green agrees that these concessions are “surely good things”, he stresses an important caveat: “the implementation of public policy by means of settlement agreements is problematic and even arguably undemocratic.” Because companies are adept at lobbying and making political donations, the courts can sometimes seem like “the only way to get things done”. But that should only remind us that the main avenues for regulating companies (i.e. executive government and parliaments) are dysfunctional. “What is significant here is not so much that Meta may have broken the law (which it denies), but that the democratic system is itself broken,” Green writes.

Nicola Cutcher has been tuning into a different tech giant, Netflix, for the new documentary Big Chicken, about the health and environmental impacts of industrial-scale chicken farming. Given these dangers, she can’t believe the UK government is proceeding with an industry-backed “growth plan” for the poultry sector. “If we leave the poultry industry in charge of our poultry strategy, it could grow as bloated and unhealthy as a Frankenchicken,” she argues.

Our satirist Henry Morris has also been sitting in on (imaginary) government meetings with industry stakeholders, this time on the question of whether to approve more drilling licenses in the North Sea. In Morris’s piece, Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband clash over what to do, while two “Big Oil CEOs” take notes. Meanwhile, smoke from the Peak District wildfires drifts in through the windows...

Smoke also clouded Newquay in Cornwall this month due to two nearby wildfires. But Prospect’s Sarah Collins has still been getting to the beach. Learning to surf over the last decade has taught her some valuable lessons. “If you want to improve your mental health, I recommend starting a hobby that you want to master but allowing yourself to be a permanent beginner,” she writes.

As usual, email your thoughts to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk and have a great weekend!

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

New online

Litigation means and policy ends

Why public administration should not be done by means of settlement agreements

Big Chicken is running our food strategy. Why?

Eating less meat would be good for the climate and our health. Industry is involved in plans for us to consume more

From our forthcoming issue

Embedded with Burnham: As Britain burns…

Common sense correspondent Henry Morris reports from a Cobra meeting during the sixth heatwave of the year

Mindful life: Why you should embrace a beginner’s mindset

It has taken me a decade to learn to surf, but I have loved every minute of it

• Laura Barton on Dolly Parton’s special gift

• The final episode of Media Confidential

• Benjamin Netanyahu’s devoted supporters

• And more...

When a significant public figure dies, there’s often far ranging opinions which rise to the surface—or perhaps even an eyebrow raised over any skeletons in the closet. With Dolly Parton, however, there has just been love and adoration.

It seems the country singer, who died aged 80 this week after a brief battle with cancer, was one of the most universally liked celebrities—no small feat indeed. Parton was also extremely successful. Growing up poor in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains without running water, she went on to achieve 25 number ones on the Billboard country charts, 11 Grammys and a net worth of some $450m. Still, music critic Laura Barton writes, “there was always something in the way that she lived that carried an air of stitching together”.

Part of the singer’s “stitched-together greatness” came from her philanthropy and commitment to political causes and campaigns (although she insisted she was not “political” herself). She did much to destigmatise HIV/Aids and was an LGBTQ+ ally, yet she remained popular with religious and conservative communities in the south. Barton writes that Parton’s 1971 single “Coat of Many Colors” reflects her multifaceted nature perfectly and “makes something magical out of thin mountain air”.

We are also saying a bittersweet goodbye today to Prospect’s Media Confidential podcast which has been hosted by the brilliant Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber for the last three years. In the final episode, the pair reflect on the revelations throughout the show—from powerful interviews about Trump’s attacks on press freedoms, to the journalists killed in Gaza and the future of the BBC. From a restaurant in London they also discuss some of their favourite and most controversial guests, and finally settle a long-standing bet... It really is the end of an era! Please do send me any well wishes or favourite moments for our beloved hosts.

Elsewhere in Prospect, Yonatan Touval writes on Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics of saturation and the unwavering loyalty of his supporters. Touval explores Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and compares it to a patriarchal household where loyalty to the leader is rewarded above all—much like what the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar calls an “adopted political family”. Even men he has humiliated return, writes Touval, and while a successor may inherit his party, they cannot inherit his pull. All in all, “Netanyahu has cultivated in his political base the conviction that he is the nation and the nation is him”, argues Touval.

Finally, in today’s culture newsletter, my colleague Isabel Hilton looks at why the Edinburgh TV Festival (ETF), after celebrating its 50th birthday, is now moving to Manchester. I suppose this marks the third goodbye to something in today’s edition...

The character of the festival has undoubtedly evolved over the years, alongside the TV industry itself, she writes. But for Hilton, it’s a shame that the festival will move out of its birthplace. For one thing, proximity to the world’s biggest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, led to the creation of TV hits Fleabag and Baby Reindeer as they were discovered by executives attending the ETF. That type of crossover may now be lost.

Get in touch with your thoughts on today’s bittersweet goodbyes at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

Dolly Parton’s stitched-together greatness

The country singer, who died this week, could turn any old scraps into something wondrous

The final episode of Media Confidential

Hasta la vista, baby!

At the end of an era, Alan and Lionel reflect on three years of the podcast

Also new online

Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics of saturation

His right-wing Likud party is like a patriarchal household where loyalty to the leader is rewarded above all

The festival leaving Edinburgh

After 50 years, the TV Festival will not be renewed for another season—but there will be a reboot in Manchester. The true cost of the move is about more than money

• Back in the news: the Iran war and energy prices

• Prospect Podcast: Daron Acemoglu on how to save liberal democracy

• Andrew Adonis: Trump threatens all-out war—but he doesn’t deliver

As the hot summer winds down and the shorter days draw in, I’m feeling excited for autumn. But sadly, the falling leaves and cosy nights will only provide a brief reprieve before consumers are once again dreading their energy bills in winter. With the news this morning that household energy prices will hit a three-year high—driven by higher wholesale gas prices due to the Iran war—it’s only apt to talk about the country’s ongoing transition to renewables.

Back in April, when the Iran war first brought “havoc on global gas markets”, energy expert Michael Grubb wrote about the great cost-saving possibilities that could be achieved if the UK fully invested in renewable energy infrastructure. Not only could this save households in the long-term, it could also make us less bound to unpredictable global markets, he argued. “The desperation to keep bills down in the face of yet another gas crisis, might—just might—open a brief Overton window for audacity”, Grubb concluded.

Rising energy costs are just one reason many people globally are feeling the pinch. Nobel prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, who joins Ellen and Alona on today’s episode of the Prospect Podcast, believes that the economic insecurity that’s impacting households has been fuelled by the disappearance of traditional industry. Instead, he argues, digital advancements and automation dominate our labour markets, creating a billionaire elite, and further polarising the working-class.

On the podcast he makes the case for “working-class liberalism” as a philosophy that can overcome this crisis, and discusses the economic effect of developments in artificial intelligence. His ideas come together in his new book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity.

Prospect columnist Andrew Adonis is also concerned about what has happened to liberal democracy. Today he writes on how Donald Trump’s constant war-starting threatens the stability of modern democracies. But with all these threats, nothing much ever follows—making them “half-wars” compared to Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, Adonis argues. “It is classic Trump that the ‘D-Day’ he has just announced is nothing of the kind”, he adds.

Are you concerned about the rise in energy prices? Email me at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

From the archive—back in the news

The Iran war’s silver lining

The conflict has had many disastrous effects—but it is a powerful reminder of the case against fossil fuels

The latest episode of the Prospect Podcast

Daron Acemoglu: How to save liberal democracy

The Nobel prize-winning economist on why political renewal requires a new philosophy

New online

Trump is losing the half-wars he has started

Whether on Iran or Canada, the US president threatens all-out war—but he doesn’t deliver

• A lawyer’s lonely fight for democracy in Hong Kong

• Artist Richard Dadd’s messages from bedlam

• Rupert Lowe: part-time MP, full-time X poster
  

Of the many disruptions caused by Covid-19, its impact on the pro-democracy protest movement in Hong Kong was one of the most tragic. In 2019 and 2020, the largest series of demonstrations in the region’s history had forced then-chief executive Carrie Lam to withdraw her controversial extradition bill with mainland China. But then Lam ordered a violent crackdown, and the pandemic made further demonstrations impossible.

Since then, the authorities have further expanded national security laws and, as Frankie Vetch writes, “most of the democracy movement within Hong Kong has been dismantled or driven underground.” But for some time afterwards, one woman remained “a rare voice of open defiance”: lawyer Chow Hang-tung. After being held in prison without trial for five years, she was sentenced last week for up to 10 years in prison. In the days before her conviction, she told Vetch through an intermediary that “we should not lose our confidence in the people, who are where hope lies.”

Chow is not the only Hong Konger to be featured in our People section this year. In March, Prospect’s Imaan Irfan interviewed author Dorothy Tse, whose novella City Like Water “paints an unsettling, dreamlike picture of a city overtaken by authoritarianism.”

Nineteenth-century artist Richard Dadd was institutionalised in a very different manner, but it also inspired him to produce “dreamlike” works. After developing symptoms of psychosis and killing his father, Dadd was admitted to Bethlem Hospital (better known as “Bedlam”) at just 27 years old. The goal of the Royal Academy’s new exhibition about the man is clear, writes Prospect’s David McAllister: “to get us to consider the merits of Dadd’s work as the output of an artist rather than mere Victorian curio, as it was in the past. All the same, it is impossible to separate our judgement of his work from the circumstances that gave rise to it...”

Elsewhere, the Guardian reports today that Rupert Lowe is on course to earn as much from Elon Musk’s X as he does from his parliamentary salary. I wrote about Lowe’s domination of X in June, and considered whether Musk may have tipped the algorithmic scales in favour of his favourite Brit.

Finally, Lightbulbers have weighed in in favour of sovereign wealth funds, despite Ethan Zuckerman’s reservations about the AI-based proposals from Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. With Andy Burnham facing questions today about his plans for North Sea drilling (an idea Sam Alvis and Simon Sharpe have critiqued in in Prospect), reader Derek argues that “the UK missed the chance” to copy Norway and use North Sea revenue to establish a sovereign wealth fund, “because Margaret Thatcher chose to let private interests pocket the money.” What do you think? Email me at ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk with your thoughts.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

From our forthcoming issue

A lawyer’s lonely fight for democracy inside Hong Kong

Recently convicted of ‘subversion’ in Hong Kong, Chow Hang-tung is still fighting for freedom

New online

Richard Dadd’s messages from bedlam

A new exhibition of the artist’s work is a revelation. Could he have produced these paintings without his institutionalisation?

From the archive

Dorothy Tse’s lost city

The Hong Kong of the past is being torn apart. Can literature rebuild it?

Rupert Lowe: the new star of Elon Musk’s X

The Restore leader and Maga favourite is challenging Nigel Farage on his right flank, and could block Reform’s route to power

• Ethan Zuckerman: Should Trump build an AI wealth fund?

• Podcast: Sarah O’Connor on the AI revolution (replay)

• Isabel Hilton on building solar panels in space
  And more…

It is extremely rare to find a policy on which Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Sam Altman can all agree. But this summer, these odd bedfellows coalesced around a radical proposal: to tax artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the form of shares, and to use the stake the government would accumulate in this booming industry to establish a sovereign wealth fund for the United States. Norway built one from its petroleum sector, as did multiple Gulf states. Why shouldn’t the US use its leverage over Silicon Valley to get in on the action?

Prospect’s tech columnist Ethan Zuckerman suspects AI companies might stand to gain more from the proposal than it first seems. “If the US government held hundreds of billions in shares in AI companies, it would have a strong incentive to ensure those companies succeed, and a strong disincentive to aggressively regulate them,” he writes. “Maybe it is best understood as a way for AI companies to fend off regulation, maybe even as a bribe.”

Zuckerman also calculates that the revenue gained would represent only a small fraction of the cost of supporting and retraining workers that could lose their jobs to AI. But we don’t need to wonder how the technology will affect workers—we can simply look at offices and factory floors today. That’s exactly what Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor does in her new book, which she recently joined the Prospect Podcast to discuss.

Alan and Lionel are returning for the final episode of Media Confidential on Thursday, so we’re resurfacing O’Connor’s episode for you today. Plus, while Washington is considering how to regulate the AI industry, many tech bros are focused on their own quests to live forever. Katherine Stewart also recently joined the podcast to discuss their vain mission.

Back in January, Zuckerman wrote about his scepticism of another idea being touted in Silicon Valley: launching data centres into orbit. As Isabel Hilton writes in our forthcoming issue, we could soon be building solar panels in space instead. This innovation has greater utility than many competing moonshots, and is closer to fruition than you might think.

Space solar could also have significant military applications. But today, Andy Burnham has just touched down in Kyiv to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky about more near-term defence matters. As Ukraine braces for another wave of Russian missile attacks, Burnham will announce multiple policies to help Britain’s ally manufacture more of its own long-range missiles. To catch you up on the threats posed by Russian drones, re-read Katia Glod and Jen Stout’s recent dispatches.

Is an AI sovereign wealth fund a good idea? Email me at ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk with your thoughts.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

From our forthcoming issue

Should Trump create an AI sovereign wealth fund?

A fund could merely enable AI companies to insure against regulation, competition and their struggle for profitability

Have scientists found the secret to eternal power?

Plans to build solar panels in space are now tantalisingly close to fruition

Recent episodes of the Prospect Podcast

Sarah O’Connor: Should we fight the AI revolution?

New technologies are transforming the workplace. But we are not powerless bystanders

Eternal youth and billionaire biohacking: The politics of longevity

From Jeffrey Epstein to Elon Musk, extending life has preoccupied the super-rich. But at what cost?

In case you missed it

Why tech billionaires dream of servers in the sky

Behind the hopes for artificial general intelligence is the desire for a world without obligations to governments, workers or fellow citizens

Russian drone threats obscure the real danger to Britain

Drones could do serious damage in Poland and the Baltic states—but Moscow has other tactics to undermine western Europe

Ukraine is under attack—but defiant

Drones have given the country military strength and renewed hope. But in Kyiv, the war feels closer than ever

• Should we take Russia’s drone threats seriously?

• David Allen Green: how to apply the law to media pile-ons

• Reverand Alice Goodman insists she is just Alice

Sabotage. Cyber operations. Espionage. Are these the most serious threats to the United Kingdom?

Today’s top story looks at how the UK and its Nato allies should respond drone strike threats from Russia. The Kremlin is warning of grave consequences for Nato countries, and the UK in particular, for providing support to Ukraine—and developments in drone technologies have given Russia a new way to attack. But on our website today, Katia Glod argues that we should not get too focused on these threats, because over-emphasising them will obscure other real dangers to Britain.

Rather than drones, “the more credible route for Russian retaliation [is] sabotage, cyber operations, espionage, electronic interference, pressure on British interests overseas and increasingly aggressive military activity around British and Nato territory”, writes Glod, deputy head of foreign policy and the New Eurasian Strategies Centre thinktank. Such routes already allow Moscow to “inflict damage and create uncertainty”, blurring what the proportionate response should be.

Elsewhere, our legal columnist David Allen Green asks: how should the law be used to prevent mainstream media and social media pile-ons? In direct human relationships, the law can impose sanctions for wrongdoings. But on social media, people are more removed from one another—often too far for legal action to be taken.

In his piece this week, he compares mainstream and social media frenzies to stochastic violence or even terrorism. “Here each individual contribution can be justifiable, at least in the view of that contributor. They will see what they have to say as legitimate and, if challenged, they will invariably assert the righteousness of being able to say what they want to say….But in the aggregate, something quite ferocious, overwhelming and even lethal is created,” writes Green. Agree or disagree? Let us know.

Finally, in today’s Clerical life column, Reverand Alice Goodman wants you to call her by her name (no Timothée Chalamet jokes here please). Alice—as she insists to be called—writes that she used to enjoy addressing someone in Holy Orders like “My Lord Bishop” or “Your Grace,” but now she won’t call anyone anything beyond their Christian name.

Get in touch with your thoughts on today’s Lightbulb at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk and have a wonderful weekend!

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

Russian drone threats obscure the real danger to Britain

Drones could do serious damage in Poland and the Baltic states—but Moscow has other tactics to undermine support of Ukraine

How do you regulate media frenzies?

Why the law cannot easily be used to stop mainstream and social media pile-ons

Clerical life: Call me by my name

I subversively allow schoolchildren to drop the honorifics

• Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber discuss Jason Arday

• Kathryn Schoon: Ariana Grande’s weight loss signals to a wider issue

• Peter Hoskin interviews the owner of Green Man festival

It’s been almost a week since Cambridge professor Jason Arday took his own life. History will not judge the British press well for what ensued in the weeks leading up to his death—something which Alan Rusbridger called a “pile-on” in his latest column.

Head honcho at left-wing news outlet Novara Media, Aaron Bastani, has apologised for comments he made on X before Arday’s death, including calling him a “conman”. While on the other end of the political spectrum, the Telegraph’s Charles Moore defended the press, writing that their “basic job... is to find out the truth”.

The problem lies, however, somewhere between the pursuit of truth and the likely racially motivated harassment of a vulnerable individual. In today’s episode of Media Confidential, Alan and Lionel discuss how Arday’s tragic story panned out in what they call “a modern media morality play”. The pair also analyse how a story about plagiarism turned into a Fleet Street crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion, and discuss the ethics involved when a vulnerable person is at the centre of public scrutiny.

Pop star and actress Ariana Grande also faces relentless public scrutiny, though for different reasons. As a young, female celebrity in the age of the internet, Grande has faced online hate since forever. But in 2023, when she began filming for the blockbusting Wicked movies, her significant weight loss became an obsession for the trolls. Since releasing the music video to her latest single “petal”, in which she appears underweight and potentially unwell, commentary from both the press and social media accounts has ramped up, ultimately leading to her “stepping back from public visibility”.

In today’s culture newsletter, I write on why Grande is not the problem—and that the obsession with her body, genuine concern or not, wrongly feeds into the idea that celebrities (particularly female ones) should be seen as role models to our children. Instead, I explore what her weight loss can tell us about a wider issue.

On the more “twee” side of culture, my colleague Peter Hoskin interviews the owner of Green Man—an independent festival set in the Welsh hills of the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, and taking place this weekend. Fiona Stewart is the only female owner of an independent music festival in Europe. The line-up is split 50:50 by gender and Welsh identity is at its core. “We are a fundamentally Welsh festival, but outward-looking,” Stewart says. “Not only are we talking to people in Wales, we’re talking about Wales to people outside of Wales.”

And as Pete writes, “with Glastonbury taking its traditional fallow year—Worthy Farm belongs to the cows until June 2027—[Green Man] is the closest thing this British summer has to a centre of gravity.”

Share your thoughts on today’s Lightbulb at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

The latest episode of Media Confidential

The death of Jason Arday: A modern media morality play

Alan and Lionel on why Fleet Street’s crusade against DEI went so wrong

New online

Ariana Grande is not the problem

By focusing relentlessly on the pop star, we’re neglecting the structural issues that lead her—and millions of other women—to keep losing weight

Behind every Green Man…

…there’s an especially hardworking woman. We speak to Fiona Stewart about running Wales’s biggest music festival in a year without Glastonbury

• Foreign aid cuts have left Afghanistan starving

• Andrew Adonis on early elections

• The Prospect Podcast comes to you from the back of a taxi

Suffering is relative and so on, but today I had a bad morning and so all rationality went out of the window. I texted my friends: “Is Mercury in retrograde or something??”, which is gen Z speak for “is anyone else having a bad day?” The answer was no but appropriate sympathy was given.

I might be becoming a Londoner, though, because on hearing that my connecting tube line was closed due to a casualty, my first response was frustration (should’ve just e-biked—see yesterday’s edition). Am I evil or do our daily routines just make us lack perspective from time to time?

With this question buzzing in my mind, I arrived at my desk and was immediately served a slice of humble pie in the form of today’s top story, in which, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) Afghanistan country director for, John Aylieff, sheds light on the diabolical situation in Afghanistan as the Taliban mark five years in control. From parents selling their 12-year-old daughter into an early marriage with a 40-year-old in order to feed their other children, to flash floods wiping out entire villages, what Aylieff has witnessed in Afghanistan is tragedy after tragedy.

WFP funding has experienced huge cuts lately, including a 39 per cent reduction in support from the United Kingdom. “We are now having to stop life-saving initiatives... There is no doubt about it: children in Afghanistan are already dying as a result of aid cuts”, writes Aylieff. The UK cut its aid budget primarily to fund greater spending on defence. Tom Clark wrote about the defence debate back in June, raising the point that, even beyond humanitarian issues, foreign aid spending actually helps “nurture stability and alliances through development assistance as opposed to military hardware”.

Instead of discussions around foreign aid and defence, the early weeks of Andy Burnham’s premiership have predominantly focused on domestic issues, like the economy, cost-of-living, and greater devolution. If he succeeds in these domains, he will be more electable when the time comes. But while some are hoping for Burnham to call an early election, Andrew Adonis argues that Reform UK’s unpredictability would make this a risky move.

However, if Burnham would like a national mood-check of the country, perhaps he should start by taking a taxi. My colleague Sarah Collins interviewed cabbies around England to hear how everyday people feel about the state of the country. Her reporting was in partnership with an immersive documentary created by Dante or Die. Today’s Prospect Podcast is recorded from inside a cab, alongside the documentary makers, to discuss what the interviews can tell us about life in the UK.

Let me know if you’ve had a bad morning too, or how you tend to gain a bit of perspective at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

Afghanistan is starving and the world is looking away

Amid aid cuts and extreme weather, we are turning away everybody that comes to our centres for help because we have no food to give them

Should Andy Burnham call an early election?

History tells us when new prime ministers go early they usually win. But it takes courage, especially when you already have a big majority

The latest episode of the Prospect Podcast

How cabbies see England

Sarah Collins takes a revealing taxi ride with the artistic directors of Dante or Die

From the archive

Rearmament and the absence of war

The case for defence must be defendable. As things stand, it isn’t being tested

• Ellen Halliday on pregnancy and pollution

• A new translation of Victor Hugo’s final novel

• Why are UK universities in decline?

I’ve recently become obsessed with using London’s rental e-bikes to get around the city. These are electric bikes, provided by private companies like Lime and Forest, which you can find near your house, scan via an app to ride, and then drop-off almost anywhere. They get bad press due to blocked pavements and some terrible injuries—but these bikes keep me above ground with the wind in my hair and fresh air in my lungs.

I’d recommend that most able people give these bikes a go. Except, perhaps, if you are pregnant, and therefore remain bound to the dirty, polluted Underground, which leaves black gunk in your nose, and can result in turning up to an antenatal appointment with dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide in your breath. Before you know it, you’re being referred to a programme on how to quit smoking. You don’t smoke.

This cautionary tale comes from Prospect’s deputy editor Ellen Halliday, who is expecting a baby in the autumn. She experienced this scary carbon monoxide reading, and is now “rethinking” the cost of her daily commute. In her diary piece, Ellen writes that beyond the effects of pollution, commuting through London during numerous heatwaves doesn’t create the ideal conditions for pregnancy—“on public transport the line of civilisation is thin”, she writes.

One thing I am missing out on during my e-bike commutes is the chance to dig into a good book. But today’s book review from Oliver Soden is so compelling that I might even hop on the tube after work, squeeze onto a carriage like a sweaty sardine, and forfeit any attempt of not falling over so that I can use both hands to read the first few pages of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three in its new translation.

That sounds dramatic, but “until this year, Anglophone readers had access mainly to long-out-of-print translations from the 19th century”, writes Soden. The translator, David Bellos, who died shortly after completing the work last year, “so thrillingly conveys the novel’s humanism, and the simplicity and directness of its expression”, adds Soden.

In case you missed it, the latest Weekend Read was a piece from our 2024 archive on the decline of UK universities by Glen O’Hara. As a new wave of students received their A level results last Thursday, we thought it was time to reflect on why, if the nation’s universities are among the best in the world, so many appear to be on the brink of collapse.

Let me know your thoughts on commuting via tube or e-bike, or on the state of UK universities at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

Ellen Halliday’s diary: Pregnancy in a polluted city

An unusual result at an antenatal appointment and a once-in-a-generation eclipse show Prospect’s deputy editor two sides of a city

The capacious humanism of Victor Hugo

Penguin has recently installed the French author’s last novel, ‘Ninety-Three’, in its line of Classics. The new translation is revelatory

In case you missed our Weekend Read

Crash course

The UK’s universities are among the best in the world. So why do many appear close to collapse?

• Alan Rusbridger on Jason Arday and the British media

• Sasha Mudd on a lesser-discussed question arising from The Odyssey

• Equator’s Jonathan Shainin joins Alan and Lionel on Media Confidential
  

The death of Jason Arday is a reminder that journalism as practised by some sections of the British press is nothing less than a bloodsport, subjecting an individual to a near-psychotic frenzy of intrusion, withering criticism, ridicule and performative moral outrage. This is bullying of the kind that very few could withstand, often predicated on flimsy public-interest defences (see also Caroline Flack), while the fact that beneath the acres of newsprint there exists a real human being, with real flaws and vulnerabilities, is tossed aside.

Few people are more expert on the most nefarious excesses of the fourth estate than Prospect’s former editor Alan Rusbridger. In a powerful new column, Alan writes that Arday was subjected to the worst kind of media pile-on: “Torrents of verbiage cascaded from the pens of those who couldn’t believe their luck. A young academic who’d been given a prestigious Cambridge professorship turned out to be a probable plagiarist and something of a fabulist. And he was black!”

Rather less attention was paid to the credentials of Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “racial realist” who helped expose Arday, and who himself left Cambridge under a cloud in 2024. Worse than that, the narrative that Arday’s story was being made to serve—that an elite university had compromised its principles and standards by pursuing DEI and wokery—is at odds with reality. The latest figures show that of Cambridge’s professors a tiny 0.4 per cent are black, along with 4.6 per cent of students.

A much more benign and edifying pile of commentary has accumulated in response to Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey. As our in-house philosopher Sasha Mudd observes, “everyone with an X account has had their turn at the oar, finding in Nolan’s film a referendum on everything from adaptation and masculinity to empire and the future of western civilisation”.

In her new column, Sasha focuses on one of the lesser-discussed but more interesting questions raised by the film: whether an ancient tale that celebrates warfare, violence and conventional ideas about heroism can also be a convincing vehicle for liberal-humanist values.

Ezra Klein of the New York Times thinks this is the film’s “finest trick”. But Emily Wilson, the classicist and acclaimed translator of The Odyssey, finds it morally incoherent. “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”

Sasha believes that this seeming incoherence raises a more profound and troubling question: “What if many of us are liberal humanists by conviction but rather more Homeric in our feelings and impulses?”

This may be true, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to change for the better. In the latest episode of Media Confidential, Alan and Lionel speak to Jonathan Shainin, founding editor at Equator, on challenging inherited assumptions about journalism, and why he believes independent media is the future.

Wherever you’re coming from, after the tragic and all too predictable end to the Jason Arday story, a change in how many in our industry do business seems overdue.

Send me your thoughts on how media might change for the better, and on The Odyssey, to peter.williams@prospect-magazine.co.uk

Peter Williams
Managing editor

New online

Jason Arday was the victim of the worst kind of media pile-on

The ex-Cambridge professor suffered a relentless campaign against him, writes Alan Rusbridger

The Odyssey’s moral maze

Christopher Nolan’s film transplants modern liberal values into Homer. Is it a masterstroke, or incoherent?

On the podcast

Jonathan Shainin: Legacy media no longer explains the world

Equator, a new longform publication, wants to challenge assumptions about journalism and the world

• David Allen Green on early prisoner releases

• Sarah Collins defends Spain’s migration policy after Ceuta

• Alice Garnett on ‘friction-maxxing’

• And more...
  

When Keir Starmer was in office, 72 per cent of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded. To prevent total collapse of the system, he introduced an early release scheme for certain prisoners, which is now due to start in October. But when it emerged that two of the killers of police constable Andrew Harper could benefit from the plan, public backlash ensued.

Nigel Farage, fresh from a successful byelection win against Count Binface, has a novel suggestion on this matter. This week he announced he’d scrap the early release scheme and instead rent space for British prisoners in overseas facilities—including, controversially, in El Salvador, where Donald Trump has been sending his country’s immigration detainees.

Andy Burnham, conversely, has exempted those guilty of rape, serious child sex and other grooming offences from his predecessor’s policy, and speculation abounds as to whether manslaughter (or manslaughter of an emergency worker) could also be excluded to prevent the release of Harper’s killers.

Our legal columnist David Allen Green argues that “if politicians decide for early release, then all prisoners in that category should be treated similarly, with no regard to media notoriety or other factors... There should not be an approach of pick-and-choose, depending on what will avoid the front pages of newspapers.” The whole mess, in his view, is “of the politicians’ own making, aided and abetted by a news media that will demand ‘tougher’ sentences with no regard for how such punishments should be financed.”

On migration, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has taken a notably different approach than Farage and Trump. He has “bucked Europe’s punitive trend on migration by regularising the status of 500,000 undocumented migrants”, as Prospect’s Sarah Collins explains. But the recent images of 78,000 people arriving on the shores of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, provided ammunition to more hardline European leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

But as one of Europe’s longest-serving leaders, Sánchez knows how to weather a storm. “When I first saw the scenes in Ceuta, I feared they would ring the death knell for Sánchez’s progressive migration policy in Europe,” Sarah writes. “He has, however, stood strong.” But his real reckoning may be yet to come...

When she’s not columnising, Sarah edits Prospect’s Lives section, in which Alice Garnett today reflects on how her—and her generation—are falling out of love with “convenience culture”. From walking to the shops instead of ordering delivery, or thinking for themselves instead of using AI, the youth are increasingly “friction-maxxing”. It seems Farage has hopped on the trend, what with instigating a completely pointless byelection and all. Life isn’t meant to be easy, I suppose. Email your thoughts on today’s news to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk and have a great weekend!

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

New online

Public justice vs private justice?

Why sentencing and prisoner release is properly a matter for the state, writes David Allen Green

Spain’s migration policy must survive the Ceuta crisis

The arrival of 78,000 migrants has tested Pedro Sánchez’s outlier approach. For Europe’s and humanity’s sakes, he must stand firm

From our forthcoming issue

Young life: The art of ‘friction-maxxing’

I am trying to ditch convenience culture and start learning patience

• Did Rod Liddle ‘tickle your belly’?

• Isabel Hilton: getting climate into culture

• For your ears: Andy Burnham v his predecessor

• And more...
  

CORRECTION: A previous version of this email misspelt Rod Liddle’s name. Our sincere apologies. Here is the corrected email:

It’s only human to love to laugh. But of course it’s preferable to laugh knowing that you have a better sense of humour than everyone else around you. This parody of a Radio 4 listener springs to mind, and I suspect that, if we’re honest, many Prospect readers might have indulged in this exact pretentious chortle before.

Political satire plays an important role in fulfilling the desire for intellectualised humour. And in the eyes of the Spectator, no one did that better than the late Rod Liddle. The function of satire, my colleague Peter Williams writes, is “to reassure [readers] that, whatever their foibles and prejudices, they [stand] on the side of common sense and humanity”. Compared to proper comedy, which Peter argues can enact a change in your thoughts and perspectives, Liddle’s satire, like many others, “was nothing more radical than tickling his readers’ bellies”.

Peter maintains that Liddle was still good at what he did—“he could weight a phrase, land a punchline and switch between registers.” But his excessive posthumous veneration is representative of a lacklustre modern Conservative party: “a movement that defines itself by what it is not. Not woke. Not net zero. Not in the EU”, writes Peter.

A fan of the late satirist might say that today’s culture newsletter, on getting climate into culture, would have been better written in a Liddle-esque tone. That sincerity is a bore, especially on a woke-nonsense topic like climate AND culture. But actually, citing Gramsci, Isabel Hilton writes that culture is an essential way in which we understand the world around us, and is therefore crucial in enacting political change. Isabel speaks to the creators of Hot Mess, a play currently on at the Other Palace theatre in London, about an absurdist love story between Earth and humanity.

Finally, with everyone rightfully enjoying a summer break, you might recognise today’s Media Confidential episode—it is a re-run of our Prospect Podcast episode from last week. Tom Clark chats to Ellen and Imaan about the “Burnham bounce” and compares the new PM to his predecessor. If you didn’t catch it the first time around, it’s well worth a listen.

Share your thoughts on humour, satire and Rod Liddle at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

The veneration of Rod Liddle shows the emptiness of modern conservatism

Far from being a fearless free-speech warrior, the late columnist did little more than tickle his readers’ bellies

Getting climate into culture

It hasn’t happened very often, and when it has happened it’s often been a bore. We talk to the makers of ‘Hot Mess’ about how to make art out of a crisis

Today’s recommended podcast episode

How long will the ‘Burnham bounce’ last?

Ellen and Imaan spoke to Tom Clark about the PM’s first few weeks in office. Will the honeymoon hold?

• Juliette Bretan: To defend against Russia, listen to Eastern Europe

• Imaan Irfan: Lifting the lid on Count Binface (2024)

• Prospect Podcast: Katherine Stewart on billionaire biohacking

• And more...
  

Western Europeans and Brits have often failed to listen to their Eastern European neighbours. As Juliette Bretan writes in today’s edition, many western leaders were still dismissing warnings from Poland and the Baltic states about Russia’s imperial ambitions as “products of historical trauma” right up until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“The countries beyond the old Iron Curtain are still widely viewed as the continent’s vulnerable frontier—poorer, less developed and perpetually catching up,” Bretan writes. But that picture “no longer reflects reality.” In particular, it is often us who need to learn from them—particularly from Ukrainians, whose practical defence knowledge is now invaluable. Britain’s Defence Investment Plan has finally made that explicit.

On the domestic front, all eyes are on Clacton for tomorrow’s byelection in which Nigel Farage will face off against Count Binface and 32 other candidates. Though perhaps “face off” isn’t the best electoral cliché when one of the candidates is famously faceless. Back in 2024, Prospect’s Imaan Irfan interviewed the intergalactic space warrior, who was then vying to unseat Rishi Sunak. His answer to European integration was somewhat different to Bretan’s: he suggested inviting European countries to join the United Kingdom, “creating a new ‘Union of Europe’, if you will.”

The issues facing Clacton and other seaside towns are no laughing matter, however. In lieu of Andrew Adonis’s usual Insider column (he is taking a week off), we’re revisiting a 2023 article by Madeleine Bunting on the deindustrialisation of England’s seaside resorts. “You could call it a salt fringe rather than a rust belt,” she wrote—and “austerity, the pandemic and now the cost-of-living crisis have exacerbated their plight.”

Binface claims to be over 5700 years old—though, like many of us, he seems to claim different ages in different interviews. But what if you could extend your own life into the distant future? Many super-rich individuals have become obsessed by this question. But at what cost? On today’s episode of the Prospect Podcast, Katherine Stewart discusses her essay in our latest issue on the “longevity movement”. She discusses key figures like Bryan Johnson, who measured his own erections and tried to inject himself with his young son’s blood in the hopes of living longer. I’d personally sacrifice a few years if it meant not having to do those things.

Have thoughts on Eastern Europe, Count Binface or living forever? Email me at ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

New online

To defend against Russia, the UK must reimagine Europe

Eastern Europeans are the experts in modern defence, but are still underestimated

From the archive

How England’s impoverished seaside towns became both a trap and a refuge

Coastal towns are home to some of the highest levels of deprivation in Britain. Their decline is far from inevitable

Lifting the lid on Count Binface

Political rogue, intergalactic space warrior...Prospect reader?

The latest episode of the Prospect Podcast

Eternal youth and billionaire biohacking: The politics of longevity

From Jeffrey Epstein to Elon Musk, extending life has preoccupied the super-rich. But at what cost?

From our latest issue

The time I tried to live forever

Millionaires and regular folk are plying themselves with supplements and consulting AI to extend their lives. Why not give it a go?

Want to see more of Prospect in your Google search results?

Add us as a preferred source

• Claudia Rankine on white supremacy

• Barbara Hepworth’s blues

• How to rebel against Big Tech

• And more...

Yesterday evening over dinner, my housemate, an avid reader, revealed that the book she just finished on holiday might be her new favourite book. I was, and still am, intrigued by this, because for reasons I am now trying to determine, favourites to me are something which are established predominantly through a process of reflection, rather than a feeling in the moment. Maybe it’s something to do with wearing rose tinted glasses, but most of my cultural favourites have only truly resonated with me a while later. Yet, I’m sort of envious—how exciting, the prospect of opening up a new book on the beach, completely unaware of the impact it’s about to have on you. Perhaps I need a rethink.

All that waffle was my way of introducing today’s culture-heavy Lightbulb, which, who knows, could even introduce you to a new favourite! To begin, Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican-American poet and essayist whose latest book Triage asks how to best effect change in the world. She tells Franklin Nelson: “This book won’t be for everybody. It is asking a lot of the reader.”

All of Rankine’s books have raised mirrors to racial hierarchies and have documented what she calls “the takeover of white supremacy”. “The only thing that [Donald] Trump has done is give white supremacy an overt leader, not an overt reality. The reality was always there,” she tells Nelson.

Next, theatre. Fiammetta Rocco reviews the opener of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, A Trial–after An Enemy of the People. Born under the Brazilian military dictatorship of the late 1960s, director Christiane Jatahy has reworked Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama into something different. Adding her own twist, Jatahy has weaved in an audience-based jury, video elements, and includes some onstage drama in Portuguese.

Not necessarily a favourite, but someone I do have an affection for is sculptor and fellow Yorkshire lass Barbara Hepworth. In our latest issue, Saffron Swire details Hepworth’s life, from Wakefield to Florence. She writes that Hepworth in Colour, an exhibition currently on at the Courtauld, “reveals an artist who transformed sculpture from a solid mass into something living, where polished stone and pools of colour could call forth the sea and the sky”.

Finally, in case you missed our latest Weekend Read, Heather Brooke discusses how to rebel against Big Tech and take back your attention through the lens of two books: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by The Friends of Attention, and Overwhelmed: Ways to Take the Pressure Off by BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind presenter Claudia Hammond. There’s analysis of how tech companies have monetised and exploited our attention, as well as practical tips on finding healthy attention practices which are not engineered to maximise digital advertising revenue.

Have you recently discovered a new cultural favourite? Let me know at kathryn.schoon@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Kathryn Schoon
Assistant audience editor

New online

Claudia Rankine: White supremacy has overrun America

The poet on the rise of hate under Trump and seeking refuge in Marseilles

Putting Ibsen’s characters on trial

The big production at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival is a Brazilian sequel to ‘An Enemy of the People’—complete with its own jury

From our latest issue

Barbara Hepworth’s blues

The sculptor is known for her mastery of shape and movement—but colour was just as essential a part of her art

In case you missed it: Weekend Read

Pay attention to something else

Big Tech has quantified, monetised and exploited our attention. Can we dare to rebel and engage with the world in different ways?

• Alan Rusbridger: why did Badenoch back a former neo-Nazi?

• Patrick Radden Keefe: ‘I’m not your therapist’

• David Goldblatt: Fifa needs more than a new president

• And more...
  

It was an odd hill for Kemi Badenoch to die on. Joshua Bonehill-Paine has served two jail sentences for antisemitism, harassed a Jewish MP, founded a neo-Nazi party, and has also been convicted for assaulting a police officer and the burglary of a police station. Nonetheless, Bonehill-Paine was selected by the Conservatives last week to contest a council election in Somerset. Badenoch backed him. After intense backlash, Bonehill-Paine pulled out of the race, but announced that he would instead take up a new role advising Badenoch on combating extremism.

Combine this with her moratorium on candidates who don’t pledge to scrap net zero, and Badenoch’s party looks increasingly narrow and brittle. “The Conservative party, which used to pride itself on being a broad church, has become rather addicted to cancel culture,” writes Alan Rusbridger.

Badenoch has also controversially committed to withdrawing the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). But as our legal columnist David Allen Green writes, a new Supreme Court decision suggests the courts may be “proofing the law against any repeal of human rights legislation.” In a rare criminal appeal, “Animal Rebellion” activists, who blocked a private access road at a Midlands dairy works, were acquitted based on common law and statutory construction.

Speaking of judicial matters, I am hardly alone in having devoured Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book London Falling, which tells the true story of the mysterious death of a teenage faux riche fabulist. Many readers have since criticised the Metropolitan Police for their questionable approach to the investigation. On today’s episode of Media Confidential, Radden Keefe speaks to Alan and Lionel about investigative non-fiction, navigating ethical and legal obstacles, and how he gained the trust of his sources—including two grieving parents. Samuel Stephen also profiled Radden Keefe for our July issue—his piece is well worth revisiting. And in case you missed last week’s Media Confidential, Alan and Lionel’s interview with Mehdi Hasan is now available on our YouTube channel.

Radden Keefe is a masterful investigator of money, power and corruption. Perhaps his next book, then, should focus on Fifa. As David Goldblatt explains, the football federation has long been mired in corruption allegations and political controversy. The latest flare up—a plan to hive off its tournament-organising work to a new company and sell off 20 per cent of that to an American venture capital company run by Jared Kushner’s brother—has led to calls for president Gianni Infantino’s resignation. But a new leader won’t fix things, Goldblatt argues—only structural change will.

Finally, a quick correction: on Friday, I wrote that “our oceans have absorbed 90 per cent of the heat generated by anthropogenic climate change. That’s equivalent to pouring 7.6bn mugs of tea into the ocean.” It’s actually 7.6bn mugs of tea per second (source here). Regardless, just stop pouring your tea into the ocean, people. It’s hot enough already. Send your thoughts on today’s stories to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

New online

Kemi Badenoch is creating a new—and very odd—type of Conservative party

In her upside-down leadership, former neo-Nazis can run as councillors, but anyone hoping to stop the world from burning is banned

Protest, freedom of expression and the public-private law divide

How the UK Supreme Court decided a fundamental rights case without using human rights law

Fixing Fifa will take more than a new president

Gianni Infantino is just the latest in a line of poor leaders. Real change means structural reform

The latest episode of Media Confidential

Patrick Radden Keefe: ‘I’m not your therapist. I’m not your PR person. I’m a journalist’

The bestselling author on how to gain the trust of sources—and craft a killer story

From our July issue

Patrick Radden Keefe: Telling the truth doesn’t always make life better

The acclaimed American writer explains why he is drawn to roguish characters—and what they’ve taught him about morality

• Tim Smedley: 2027 might be hotter than 2026

• Ellen Halliday: Is a deep freeze coming?

• Tilly Lawless: how to handle rejection
  

It’s a warm-but-pleasant 25° today in London, though the forecast suggests we’re at the start of another uncomfortable heatwave. By Wednesday, it will be approximately 32°. We’ve already bought a second fan for our non-air-conditioned apartment, and I’m contemplating a third.

If you’re already sick of the heat, Prospect’s climate columnist Tim Smedley is the bearer of bad news: next year’s summer is likely to be even hotter. 2025 was the third warmest year on record, but it may have been kept cooler than possible due to La Niña—the cooler of the two major weather cycles. But as occurs every two to seven years, we’re now entering El Niño—La Niña’s warmer brother.

This is happening after our oceans have absorbed 90 per cent of the heat generated by anthropogenic climate change. That’s equivalent to pouring 7.6bn mugs of tea into the ocean per second. No wonder House of Commons researchers are worrying about a “Godzilla El Niño”. Yet the parliamentarians up the hall don’t seem prepared. Smedley writes: “El Niño arrives finding not just hot oceans, but also a hot mess of geopolitics.”

Conversely, when I speak to friends and relatives from my hometown of Melbourne, they complain about how freezing their current winter is. But the coexistence of such extremes might be increasing common. As Prospect’s Ellen Halliday wrote in March, “scientists are warning with increasing urgency that global heating could soon tip us into a very different future” where summers are hotter but many winters are also freezing. To understand why, you need to wrap your head around another key global weather system involving our oceans: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Elsewhere, Tilly Lawless reflects on how being a sex worker—and a single woman—has made her accustomed to rejection. This is healthy, she argues, and too many young people are so used to the frictionless experiences of online porn and artificial intelligence that they are lacking in romantic resilience.

Also in our Lives section, Anglican priest Alice Goodman details the ailing finances of many local parishes and their difficulty paying their “Parish Share” to the diocese each year. Whether you’re going to mass, hitting on someone at a nightclub or trying to cool off at your local lido, enjoy your weekend and send your thoughts on today’s stories to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk.

Benjamin Clark
Head of digital audience

New online

Call this a hot summer? This phenomenon explains why next year may be worse

El Niño is yet to peak, bringing more heat to an already burning planet

From our April issue

Is a deep freeze coming?

The Atlantic ocean current that keeps northern Europe warm is in danger of collapsing. Compared with threats of war and disease, it is given relatively little attention

Also new online

Sex life: Working in parlours taught me how to handle rejection

My ability to withstand being turned down has allowed me to live boldly

From our latest issue

Clerical life: The Church hasn’t moved beyond the ballad of the Tithe pig

The financing of parishes and their churches still remains unfair

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