I write this week’s Editor’s Note suitably chastised. A reader, Charles Nettlefold, was in touch, voicing his irritation at me for spending too much time on this page summarising my favourite bits of the magazine, which he thinks is best left to the contents page overleaf. “What we need from you is the penetrating analysis and opinion that you no doubt hold,” he writes, admonishingly and perhaps rather optimistically. I’m not so sure the world needs yet more opinion thrust at it, not least from me, but I will certainly do my best to ensure the New Statesman continues to offer the sharpest analysis about the world as it is today.
In fact, if there is a guiding mission to my editorship, then that definitely comes close to it. Our job at the New Statesman, after all, is to analyse the world as it is: to poke it and prod it until it reveals itself in whatever form it happens to take; at which point we must record it, discuss it, and ultimately fall out about what it all means until we discover something else to argue about. Where there is beauty, we should celebrate it. But where there is moral ugliness – political or social – we should not shy away from it.
“We shall strive to face and examine social and political issues in the same spirit in which the chemist or the biologist faces and examines his test tubes or his specimens,” read the very first leader of this magazine in 1913. The job of the New Statesman was “to find out and spread abroad the truth whatever it may turn out to be”. Quite so, although I must admit my principle aim is to spread the truth at home first.
That was the intention of last week’s Cover Story by Miles Ellingham and Jack Jeffery, “The Truth About Small Boats”, and so it has been heartening to see the huge response from readers since we went to press, as you will be able to see on our new extended letters page. For those who wish to hear more, Miles and Jack were on the New Statesman podcast, where they delved deeper into the reality of life in the migrant camps around Calais. The episode is well worth a listen. (“Available wherever you get your podcasts,” I am duty-bound to add.)
Analysing how the world actually works is also the ambition behind this week’s Cover Story by Freddie Hayward, our US Correspondent. Freddie has spent much of the past week speaking with people in Washington and London about how Donald Trump brokered his deal for Gaza and Israel, including the role played by Tony Blair and his one-time chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, now Keir Starmer’s beleaguered national security adviser.
What is striking about Freddie’s piece is the sense of revolution that hangs over it; the sense of one age passing and another coming into being. A friend of mine who has worked at the heart of the British government for years told me recently that this sense of epochal change helps explain the unseemly diplomatic battles being waged to win the favour of those with the greatest power: Donald Trump, obviously, but also Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and the princely Gulf autocrats recreating the world with their petro-dollars. Into this mix, we must throw the competing oligarchs, despots and diplomats who are battling to shape the future, driven by the extraordinary spoils likely to be available for those who emerge on top.
I am far from the first person to speak in such terms, of course. In fact, I was speaking with a literary agent recently who said it is hard to open a new book proposal these days without coming across the old Gramsci line about an old world dying and a new world struggling to be born. This feeling of revolutionary upheaval clearly hangs in the air; a dream for some and a nightmare for others.
The challenge for those of us who believe there is much to be lost in the collapse of the old world (from human rights to global cooperation) is not to become conservative figures inadvertently pining for a lost world that never truly existed. We must also look squarely at the world as it is in all its complexity – from the squalid migrant camps of Calais to the networks of power forming around the new emperors carving up the world today.
[Further reading: Jonathan Powell and Tony Blair at the court of Donald Trump]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor