H
appy New Year! I feel duty bound to begin this week’s Editor’s Note like this. It’s like a tic. How was your break? Good thanks. The conversation flows almost without thinking, much as the months and years roll on slowly and then, apparently, oh-so-quickly. Isn’t 2026 supposed to be some strange time in the future? And yet, here we are, with no flying cars to be seen.
My Christmas gift this year, in contrast, was a kidney stone, which felt positively medieval. I will spare you the details, but I can confirm the A&E doctor’s declaration that it was “ten out of ten pain” with little by way of treatment. My advice: don’t get one. The only person who seemed to be having a worse time than me at this point was Keir Starmer, who had tweeted his delight that the Egyptian prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah had been reunited with his family in Britain, sparking a storm that ruined his Christmas – and that of his staff, who were dragged from their breaks to deal with it.
“In the life of any government, however safe its majority,” observed the journalist and author Christopher Booker, “there comes a moment when the social movements of which it had once been the expression turn inexorably against it.” This does indeed seem to be the case with this government, which cannot catch a break.
Sorrows such as these do not tend to come in single spies. The furore over El-Fattah only seemed to pass when another crisis pushed it to the side: Donald Trump’s invasion and abduction of the Venezuelan president, Nicholás Maduro, on Saturday 3 January. Then Trump declared, once again, that his sights were set on Greenland. By Monday there was open speculation over the end of Nato. The single sorrow had turned into a battalion.
It was in the midst of the opening abduction crisis on Saturday that we decided – once I had picked the marmalade off the floor – the only thing to do was to rip up the original plan for this week’s edition. This 80-page special edition is the result. In it, we have tried to cover as many of the angles of this developing crisis as we can, from the threat to Greenland to the consequences for Britain, the European Union and even the Maga movement itself.
This week’s bumper edition coincides with a few small changes to the magazine, intended to bring a little light – and humour – into our lives, as the world outside gets a little darker. The front pages, renamed The Staggers, now include a new weekly feature: a revamped This England, brought forward from the back pages, celebrating the overlooked and unreported eccentricities of this strange sceptred isle. The This England column is replaced by a new feature delving into that eccentric national institution: the pub. We intend this little feature, Beer and Sandwiches, to celebrate the best public houses in the land, the less well-known the better.
A quick nod here to Brian Cunningham of Norwich, who wrote in to recommend Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”. My favourite of all Hemingway’s stories, it is set in a little café in Spain that has just the right ambiance for a depressed and blind old man to spend his time. One evening, however, a hurried, impatient waiter refuses to give him a final drink and sends him home early.
“Why didn’t you let him stay and drink?” an older, unhurried waiter asks.
“I want to go home to bed… he can buy a bottle and drink at home,” replies the younger, married man.
“It’s not the same,” the older one replies.
“No, it is not,” agrees the other, who has a wife at home.
What the blind old man wanted was the ambience of “a clean and pleasant café”. As with cafés, some pubs are better than others because of things like the light being just right, or there being shadows on the leaves outside. We want to know which pubs these are. Please send in your recommendations!
And with that, as the snow falls outside the office window here in Farringdon, I bid you adieu for another week, parting with the wise words of Robert Browning: “Since life fleets, all is change; the past gone, seize today!” With the polls as they are – and events continuing their remorseless churn – here is reason for the government to hope: all really is change, perhaps even the polls.
[Further reading: America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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