Another week, another crisis. Will it ever stop? I suspect a lot of people wish it would, no matter how disappointed they are in this government. I am certainly struck by the number of letters we have received this week from readers in despair about the prospect of yet another prime minister. Patrick Fletcher of Merthyr Tydfil, for example, urged us not to join “the media pack in its enthusiasm to see the Prime Minister’s head on a platter”. There’s no enthusiasm here, even if we are dejected by the state of affairs in Westminster. Mark Blatchly of Felixstowe, meanwhile, argued that changing PM would be to treat the country as if it were “a dyspeptic football club”.
The comparison with football is apt. I was listening to the niche but very good football podcast, Libero, the other day. The hosts were discussing why there is so much negativity about the Premier League, despite the quality having never been higher. How football is now covered online, they thought, encourages whingeing – the endless fan content dissecting every twist and turn of a season, each needing to be heard, to shout ever louder, to provoke greater reaction. The more I write, the more it sounds like much of our national political coverage.
The grumpiness of our national life can feel overwhelming. My social media feeds are full of videos not just of football from the good old days (ie, the 2000s) but also of apparently happier climes elsewhere in the world, where the people seem to look healthier and wealthier than we are. Is this just more rage-bait, like the videos of football fans shouting about their team’s latest failure?
Whatever the reason, how should we interpret this sense of declinist despair? Does this culture of national unhappiness sit upstream of politics, formed online by forces we don’t yet entirely know, shaping our feeling about Keir Starmer and those around him? Or does this cultural ill-temper sit downstream of Westminster, and can best be understood as a kind of emotional reaction to the country’s crisis of governance? Perhaps the New Statesman’s readers can let me know their thoughts.
I wonder whether the sense of dread over yet another political crisis that came through in this week’s letters is more common than many in Westminster realise. While much of the country has made up its mind about the Prime Minister and want him gone, there remains a significant section that is also sick of the chaos and loathes all of those involved in it.
It is a point many of those in my family have been making to me in the last few days. The mother of one of my best friends texted recently after hearing me discuss Starmer’s future on the Today programme. She didn’t want to see him gone and had sent him a “keep-holding-on message” to raise his spirits. “I’m not sure he reads all my messages, but I send them anyway,” she wrote. “It makes me feel better.” Like the shy Tories of old, perhaps there are timid optimists out there quietly getting on with their lives, trying not to let it get the better of them.
This stoic spirit will be hard to maintain this week. Of all the pieces in this week’s issue, I would like to draw attention to Gordon Brown’s intervention on page 30, in which he sets out the appalling institutional failures in Britain that enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic women and girls out of London. It is a difficult but important read.
Before I sign off, I wanted to answer a couple of points raised by readers over the past few weeks. John Knepler from London wrote in to ask what “The Staggers” – the new name of the magazine’s opening news section – meant. It is a good question, and a reminder that the shorthand expressions often used by journalists can read like code to those outside of Fleet Street. The Staggers is the nickname for the New Statesman often used in newsrooms, like the “Graun” for the Guardian.
Finally, Alex Clarke from Birmingham got in touch to praise our “This England” column, but worried that it was too declinist in its instinct, taking less pleasure in the eccentricities of the country than it did in its previous iteration. “A very English trait is our obsession with national decline,” Alex writes. “Our great national myth at the moment is the idea that our sense of decline is something new, when in fact it is a comfortable and natural introspection.” It is an excellent – and comforting – point. I think I might have discovered another of this country’s quiet optimists. I hope this issue does not dampen this mood too much.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s silver lining]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentI’ve never seen “The Staggers” which Tom describes as the name of the opening news section. Nor have I seen “This England” since Tom arrived on board and updated the Newstatesman. Maybe this is because I read the online version? Or have I missed some links somewhere?
As a fellow online reader, I agree. The online edition is akin to Netflix: you must make your way through a confusing set of menus to find what you are looking for. It lacks the opportunity for serendipitous discovery which I imagine the sections in the physical edition might provide.
I’ve found ‘This England’ in this week’s edition – it’s Emily Lawford’s article about Bicester Village. But ‘This England’ is in tiny green type, the same size as the date, above the title, and Shakespeare’s quote has been dumped.
I agree that navigation through the magazine is not easy. It is complicated by always seeming to return to the Features section, which is the one that opens first when the new edition is downloaded. I like to read from front to back.
It is also rather annoying to get pop-up ads. The promo invite to subscribe has become increasingly annoying over the past couple of months. It is so easy for the magazine to determine if the reader is already a subscriber, so they could easily avoid showing that promo to subscribers.