On the train into work, the ping of a text message arrived, interrupting the wittering of whatever podcast I happened to be listening to at the time (probably something to do with football or history, no doubt). “I’m sobbing over my breakfast reading the writing of Hannah Barnes and Sondos Sabra,” read the message, jolting me back into the real world. The sender was a Labour minister, who said the pieces by Hannah and Sondos in last week’s magazine had reminded her that politics was not simply about knowing things, but feeling them too.
I found myself returning to this message throughout the rest of that day. The importance of emotion – of feeling – in politics is something we dismiss too quickly as the preserve of populists and demagogues. But this, surely, is a mistake. It’s all too easy to know that the situation in Gaza is unconscionable by the sheer scale of the human loss, for example. But it’s the small details of daily suffering that lodge in the memory: the pain of a mother’s bereavement, or the bravery of a father struggling to find enough food for his family amid the bombs and bullets of war.
In this week’s edition, Miles Ellingham and Jack Jeffery reveal the painful human reality of what has become known as the “small-boats crisis”. They detail not only what is happening on the ground in Calais but, just as importantly, the hopes, dreams and expectations – the feelings – of those seeking to cross the Channel in search of a better life in Britain. At a time when Nigel Farage appears to be setting the agenda that the rest of Westminster follows, the New Statesman’s duty is to report what is really going on. Please do let us know what you think.
Andrew Marr sets out the high politics shaping the government’s response to the emergence of “small boats” into the national consciousness, with exclusive details of the plans being worked up by the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, to deal with the issue. Elsewhere in this week’s magazine, Will Dunn jumps into the world of GB News to discover how a large slice of the Conservative Party’s prospective audience experienced its annual gathering in Manchester this week; Pippa Bailey meets the chief inspector of Ofsted, Martyn Oliver, and the great Anoosh Chakelian takes a trip to the nicest place in Britain and discovers that all is not well.
I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to Oliver Pickup’s deep dive into the petrifying world of teenage gamers turned international cybercriminals. For all the parents and grandparents out there, including those like me already slightly panicked by the prospect of the next generation being brought up in today’s no-holds-barred online world, here’s a story that will not, I am afraid, calm the nerves.
In the New Society, it is a delight to welcome back Leo Robson, who reviews the latest offering of arguably America’s most distinguished living author, Thomas Pynchon. Our very own Barney Horner recounts the surprising history of revolutionary terrorism in the 1970s (take a deep breath). Moving into lighter territory, Nicholas Harris reviews the latest Alan Partridge show and Biba Kang listens to Taylor Swift’s new album.
As ever, it was a delight to read through this week’s letters, so thank you to all who got in touch. As many of you have spotted, we have extended the Correspondence page to accommodate the increased volume of letters. My favourite this week came from Martin Skerritt, 71, of Dersingham, Norfolk, who was full of admiration for Pippa Bailey’s father’s car, which – as she detailed last week – made it to the grand old age of 27 (should car years be measured like dog years, perhaps?) before being consigned to scrap. Martin has two Citroën Berlingos, he reports – one from 2005 with 140,000 miles on the clock, and another from 2006: “Both in good fettle and still going strong,” he says. “I hope to keep them chugging along for a good few years yet.”
I sympathise with you, Martin. Or at least I did until my own banger of a car broke down over the summer in Brittany. Ever since then, I have thought of returning to my once-trusty C-Max with a sense of dread.
[Further reading: The truth about the small-boats crisis]
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats