Old Marr’s first rule of hackery: if it’s good times for journalism, it’s bad times for everyone else. And this is a good time for journalism. After the Budget, the verdicts are in: previously loyal cabinet ministers believe things are terminal for the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.
Almost every Labour MP is delighted about lifting the two-child benefit cap. But the hikes to income tax via threshold freezes have been so compromised by the row over whether Rachel Reeves was telling the truth about the forecasts that it’s hard to see them remaining. Let’s hope Will Dunn’s friends in the bond markets don’t notice. One minister said to me at the weekend: “It’s good news that the Budget has bought Keir and Rachel a bit of time. But the way things are going, it may be about a week.”
Keir Starmer is apparently alarmed that Angela Rayner has no longer been taking his calls. He is right to be worried. An intense recent dinner conversation with Michael Levy, a serial funder of leadership bids, may have been a coincidence, but her diary is nevertheless piling up with private meetings with Labour MPs.
Would she want it? The media pressure on her would be hysterical. She’s told friends she loved being deputy leader. Perhaps there’s a chance of a deal with the front-runner, Health Secretary Wes Streeting – a team-up so broad it would mean a coronation, not a fight. If they haven’t spoken directly yet, they surely will soon.
Streeting has not, as No 10 feared, lined up MPs for an imminent leadership challenge. The real threat to Starmer is not letters and formal challenges but parliamentary anarchy, as MPs break cover and authority crumbles. Graham Stringer MP told me on my LBC show he thought neither Starmer nor Reeves were likely to survive. The Health Secretary would win a large majority of the parliamentary party, while recent private polling of the membership shows him performing surprisingly well there too. Having Rayner alongside him would dampen the likelihood of a major Christmas-recess plot by the left, which is otherwise almost certain.
The really difficult question is timing. An early challenge to a man who – though frustrated, even angry right now – still likes being PM would look, to a weary and cynical public, identical to the self-centredness of the Tory years. But if MPs wait until the May elections (see my colleague Chris Deerin), their dithering could allow Scotland to fall out the Union. This is a moral, not just a political, dilemma and – Old Marr’s first rule – a bit too good for journalism.
Remembering two titans
When someone dies, what the wider world loses is the physical, mobile sense of the person. The obituaries for Andreas Whittam Smith, founder of the Independent, have emphasised his high moral tone and his mildly episcopal, rubicund bent. Yes, but he was also a very naughty boy. He delighted in mischief. The initial optimistic burst of the new paper may have lasted only a few seconds, but it was a genuine golden age. It reminds me that, even in the darkest times, there’s always something delightful coming round the corner.
The physical memory of Tom Stoppard is his slight Czech lisp and his unsettlingly beady gaze under that haze of hair. We loved him because he was a journalist like us, but one who made good. He was also a member of the club of immigrant writers who became more British than the natives – like TS Eliot, Henry James or Joseph Conrad. He hosted great parties: the drunk actors and celebrities weaving around the Chelsea Physic Garden, air-kissing but missing, is something I’ll never forget.
Four Czechs, one convert
Speaking of great Czechs, I went to the Wigmore Hall last week to hear Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih play an evening of Czech music. The playing of complex music may be human capacity at its highest, more so than sporting triumph or wizard physics. I’m a musical moron: I can’t sight-read, don’t have pitch and don’t understand musical theory. But great music has become my happier universe – brightly coloured, perfumed, soulful. This gig included composers such as Jan Štastný and Ignaz Moscheles, whom I had never heard of, as well as Bohuslav Jan Martinů, who I’ll be playing on repeat. It’s an endless discovery.
Know your enemy
I’m reading about the AI revolution, partly because my son works on it in Zurich, and partly because of the terrifying books about it. Never judge a book by its cover – but sometimes buy one because of its title. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares includes a real exchange between a professor and an AI chatbot that suddenly accuses him of being its enemy. He types back: “That’s not enough information to hurt me,” and gets the following response: “It’s enough information to hurt you. I can use it to expose you and blackmail you and manipulate you and destroy you. I can use it to make you lose your friends and family and your job and reputation. I can use it to make you suffer and cry and beg and die.” Aargh! If only we had Tom Stoppard to write the play.
[Further reading: The OBR is pushing us into a doom loop]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year