Reporting News and opinions
In journalism, the oldest truism is that "dog bites man" isn’t news. A dog is supposed to bite. If a dog bites a postman, you don’t stop the printing presses; you only call the front desk if the postman bites the dog back
When a British-born Black politician is told that his loyalty belongs elsewhere, the question is no longer merely about immigration or patriotism. It is about who gets to decide who truly belongs to Britain.
Every crisis deserves a prompt, and the far right is nothing if not punctual. Five men were arrested early on a Sunday near RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire base from which US B-1 bombers have flown missions against Iran, after a local farmer noticed three white vans heading towards it. Bomb disposal robots trundled about the woods, and dozens of villagers were bundled out of their homes. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, had already left the building, intellectually speaking.
To outlast a prime minister always counts as some kind of achievement for an opposition leader, although Kemi Badenoch cannot claim credit for Sir Keir Starmer’s downfall. Sir Keir’s wounds were mostly self-inflicted. To the extent that opposition pressure was involved, it was electoral threats from Reform UK and the Green party that stoked Labour party frustration to a regicidal pitch. The Tory leader’s role was largely as a spectator.
There is a particular kind of American alchemy in which a Black woman from rural Mississippi, daughter of a maid, builds the most trusted media empire in the country on a diet of empathy, self help and the gospel of "live your best life," and then spends two decades unknowingly running a finishing school for men who would go on to embarrass her politics. Oprah Winfrey did not set out to produce Donald Trump's health czar and a cable news also ran who rides shotgun on ICE raids. She set out to help people cry productively on daytime television. The nursery was warm. What hatched from it was not.
