No End in Sight for the Shutdown

The current government shutdown will enter its third week tonight at 12:01 a.m., and there is no particular reason to believe that either side is ready to come to the negotiating table (much less BOTH sides).

There was something of a pressure point that was supposed to arrive tomorrow, namely that members of the military are paid twice a month, and one of those paydays is the 15th. Letting active-duty soldiers go without pay is not only the third rail of American politics, it's probably the fourth and fifth rail as well. So, the Democrats proposed a bill on Friday that would have addressed the issue. This bill was a huge problem for Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) for at least two, and maybe three, reasons:

1. Trump and Johnson do not want anyone to get the message that the Democrats care about the troops, and Republicans don't.
   
   
2. To consider the bill, the House would have to be called back into session. That would mean that Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D) would have to be sworn in, which in turn would mean 218 signatures on the discharge petition, and thus the return of the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and Johnson do not want that, either.
   
   
3. This one's the maybe. If the House is in session, then there will be much coverage of what members of the House think about all the things that are going on right now. The Republicans' party discipline is showing serious cracks right now, and in particular, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has gone apostate on three or four key issues. If you think she's getting a lot of attention from her home base in Georgia, just wait and see how much attention she gets when she is once again roaming the halls of Congress. Trump and Johnson definitely do not want that.

So, the Democrats' bill was scuttled. Then, Trump had his underlings come up with a "solution" to the problem, and that solution was that his administration "found" $8 billion that was just lying around, so that the government could make payroll. That money was appropriated for a research project, so using it for military salaries is not in line with what Congress intended. Needless to say, this business of Trump doing whatever he wants with the government's money is not legal. But it is rather improbable that the Democrats will make a stink, because nobody wants to appear to be taking the side of "No! Don't pay the troops!" So, as is so often the case, Trump will get away with it.

The resolution of this particular matter means that what might have otherwise motivated the two sides to start talking turkey (well, talking sausage) will no longer provide that motivation. The White House has endeavored to provide a different "motivation," with threats to fire large numbers of government employees. However, the 4,000 or so layoffs that have happened thus far don't particularly match up to the grandiose threats that were made, and aren't enough to really make the blue team sweat. It also looks like there may not be any more layoffs, perhaps because the administration can't get by without those staffers, or perhaps because it knows it would lose in court. Josh Marshall, at TPM, has a few inside sources, and his belief is that the layoffs were mostly for show, so as to avoid claims that Trump, once again, chickened out.

So, what is the next pressure point? Well, there are a few possibilities. Broadly speaking, both the federal courts and the nation's air traffic control system are now badly strained, and are operating at much less than full capacity. That could generate some heat, particularly if there is a near-miss at an airport, or—and we obviously hope this doesn't happen—an actual accident. Beyond that, the next military payday is October 31. Is the $8 billion that Trump found in the White House couch cushions enough to cover that? The government spends about $200 billion on military pay and benefits each year, and $200 billion divided by 24 paydays is $8.1 billion, so presumably Trump would have to do some more scrounging next time around, or a stopgap bill would have to be passed.

The day that Democrats have circled on their calendars is November 1, as that is when people who are covered under the Affordable Care Act will start shopping for health care plans for next year, and many of those people will discover that their subsidies are gone and/or their premiums are going to go through the roof. We are not sure how many people jump on their health care paperwork the very first day they might possibly do so. Maybe it's a lot.

There is one new poll on the shutdown, and it is... instructive, we would say. It's from Reuters/Ipsos, and it reports two different sets of numbers that are worth noting. First, when respondents were asked who deserves the most blame for the shutdown, 37% of them said Congressional Democrats, 37% of them said Donald Trump, 19% said Congressional Republicans, and 9% didn't know. That means that close to two-thirds of respondents are pointing the finger in the direction of the GOP. Not good for the red team.

The other set of numbers tells a different story, however. When respondents were not forced to choose, and could assign blame to any entity they saw fit, then 63% assigned "a fair amount" of the blame to Trump, the same percentage assigned "a fair amount" of the blame to Congressional Democrats, and 67% assigned "a fair amount" of the blame to Congressional Republicans. That's pretty even, and it stays pretty even if you also add in the respondents who assign "a little" blame to each entity (then it's 80% for Trump, 83% for Congressional Republicans, 84% for Congressional Democrats).

The upshot is that the vast majority of voters are unhappy about the shutdown, and blame basically everyone in Washington, at least some. When push comes to shove, the Democrats get less blame than Trump and the Republicans (and people do like the cause that the blue team is fighting for). But the margin between the two sides is not huge, and it would not take much to shift it in the red team's favor.

Again, at the moment, it's Republicans who are showing cracks in the armor. If you are looking for early signs of Democratic cracks, the canary in the coal mine is probably Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA). He's the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate next year, and so he's the one most likely to pay a price if this goes south for the blue team. That means he's paying very close attention to the political winds, and if he sees signs he does not like, he could very well decide to declare that he's going to start voting with John Fetterman (D-PA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Angus King (I-ME) to support a continuing resolution. That's not quite enough for cloture, but it would potentially give cover to Democrats who are thinking about doing the same, and it would certainly create some momentum in the Republicans' direction. (Z)

Israel Peace Deal Is Signed

Donald Trump traveled to Israel yesterday, so that he could personally affix his signature to the ceasefire agreement that his administration played a part in negotiating. He was given a hero's welcome as the gathered crowd cheered him lustily. He was also informed that he has been awarded Israel's Presidential Medal of Honor, which is that nation's highest civilian award. Trump loves, loves, loves adoration and awards, and so yesterday was likely the happiest day of his second presidential term, right?

Or... maybe not. He was Mr. Frowny Face through the entire signing ceremony, so it's not like the photographer just happened to catch him at a bad moment. Maybe he was having trouble adjusting to the time difference. Maybe the Presidential Medal of Honor is nice and all, but it's not a Nobel. Maybe he was very hungry for a bacon cheeseburger and was angry he couldn't get one. Who knows?

The good news is that all sides are (apparently) observing the ceasefire, and that all the hostages have (apparently) been released. Many Democrats offered congratulations to Trump, most notably Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, who know a thing or two about the challenges of diplomacy in that region of the world. Barack Obama didn't weigh in, but only because he offered his congratulations last week. Trump accepted their kind words with gratitude and humility, and modestly noted that he couldn't have done it without the groundwork that the three of them laid during their time in the Oval Office.

Wait, no. That is not what happened at all. Our mistake. Instead, Trump's underlings did much carping that Obama's message did not mention Trump by name. Meanwhile, during his speech to the Israeli Knesset, Trump took some potshots at Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, referring to Biden as "the worst president in the history of our country by far, and Barack Obama was not far behind," and then complaining that Clinton was not nice enough to him during one of their debates in 2016. Oh, well, that's just how it is—Trump gotta Trump.

Now that he's had his photo-op, Trump will hold a few more meetings, and then will head home. At that point, the hard work actually begins. The same thing that was true when we wrote this story up on Friday—newsworthy, but not newsworthy enough to be the lead story—held yesterday, as pretty much no outlet made this their 1A story. It's great that the hostages are released, and it's great that the killing and the suffering have stopped, at least for now. But some really thorny problems still exist, and it's hard to see a way through. Last week, for example, we pointed out that the plans for the future governance of Gaza were made without input from Hamas, and without input from the Palestinians. This is not a good starting point (has nobody studied their World War I/Treaty of Versailles history?).

Now let's talk about another problem, on the other side of the conflict. PM Benjamin Netanyahu really needs to stay in power, or else he has a high probability of going to prison for the rest of his days. To keep his razor-thin governing coalition together, he needs hardliners Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who don't want to end this war until Gaza is Israeli territory, and there is no Hamas (and maybe no Palestinians). So, can the current Israeli regime actually accept peace, and stay together? That seems... dubious. Oh, and Israel's Minister of Defense Israel Katz has already announced that once the hostages are all returned (and, again, they apparently have been), the Israeli military will begin bombing Gaza again to try to get rid of the Hamas "terror tunnels." That's not how a ceasefire is supposed to work, obviously, and if Israel follows through (and they seem very likely to do so), it could easily shatter the very fragile peace. (Z)

The Ministry of Information Is... Closed?

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind," the musician Jim Morrison once observed. On that point, and as we have noted a couple of times, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced strict new rules for journalists who cover the Pentagon. In short, the various outlets were given until 5:00 p.m. today to sign a pledge by which they promised that they would not gather, or publish, any information that has not been vetted by a Department of Defense official. That kind of military oversight of the press was tolerated on the warfront, during the world wars, in the interest of keeping the enemy from getting information about troop movements. By the time of the Korean, Vietnam, and subsequent conflicts, the journalists said "Uh, maybe not." Certainly, such a policy cannot be justified for reporters who are domestic, and in a country that is not currently at war. Especially since Hegseth didn't even offer the TV journalists access to his $10,000 makeup room.

So, quite correctly, the various outlets began telling Hegseth to take his pledge and shove it. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who gets lots of good information from Signal chats in which he has been accidentally included, was the first to say, "No, thanks." That outlet was followed by numerous others, including The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and several military-focused publications like The Military Times and The Armed Forces Journal. Even Newsmax took a pass. Who knew they even had journalistic standards? But apparently they do.

The only outlet to accept the deal was OANN. Current OANN staffer, and noted journalist, Matt Gaetz sent this message out on eX-Twitter:

Frankly I'm shocked these weren't already the rules.

It's the PENTAGON!

@oann is happy to follow these reasonable conditions, grounded in care for our national security.

Hard to imagine what event in Gaetz' past might have caused him to conclude that the less information the press has, the better.

Anyhow, today is D-Day, and nobody's signing. Will Hegseth back down? He's certainly not the type, and he might very much enjoy the thought of having no reporters (except the fawning lackeys from OANN) roaming the Pentagon. On the other hand, Hegseth is almost as much of a publicity whore as Donald Trump, and it's much harder to get publicity without anyone to do the publicizing. Further, it's not like all the information (or even most of the information) about the military is stored within the five walls of that one building in Virginia. If Hegseth actually had the power to unilaterally end coverage of the Department of Defense, he wouldn't have bothered with silly pledges. So, the probable result here is that he's just reduced the extent to which he can influence the narrative and get his version of events out there. After all, if the press can't talk to anyone in the Pentagon, then they don't need to call Hegseth for comments anytime there's any news of, well, any sort. Looks to us like Example #328 of "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." (Z)

North Carolina Doesn't Want to Be Left out of the Gerrymandering Party

If there is a state that is a better poster child for the abuses of gerrymandering than North Carolina, we can't imagine what state that might be. By PVI, the Tar Heel State is R+1. In last year's presidential election, Donald Trump took 51% of the vote to 48% for Kamala Harris. And yet, the state's U.S. House delegation is 10R, 4D (i.e., 71% Republican), its state Senate is 30R, 20D (i.e., 60% Republican) and its state Legislature is 71R, 49D (i.e., 59.1% Republican).

Under these circumstances, and with the national gerrymandering derby well underway, North Carolina Republicans have decided that when it comes to those 14 House seats, they want more, more, more. And so yesterday, the leaders of the state legislature announced that they will soon vote to adopt new district maps. Speaker of the North Carolina House Destin Hall (R) explained:

President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat. Our state won't stand by while Democrats like Gavin Newsom redraw districts to aid in their effort to obtain a majority in the U.S. House. We will not allow them to undermine the will of the voters and President Trump's agenda.

Hmmm... Trump won North Carolina by 3 points. He won the popular vote nationally by 1.5 points. Hall's dictionary must have a different definition of "mandate" than ours does.

Hall & Co. have not provided specifics as to what they hope to achieve with the new maps. However, a quick gander at the state's four Democratic districts pretty much tells the tale. NC-02 is D+17, NC-04 is D+23 and NC-12 is D+24. Those three would appear to be beyond reach; there are only two double-digit Republican districts in the state (NC-03 and NC-08), and both of those are just barely double-digit, at R+10. If Democratic voters were moved out of the three deep-blue districts, they would have to go somewhere, and anywhere they went, they would put one or more of the red districts at greater risk.

This means that there's only one real target, and that is NC-01. It covers northeastern North Carolina, meaning it's got a fair number of rural, Black voters, and also some portions of the research triangle. It is R+1, and is currently represented by Don Davis (D), who is Black. North Carolina is 20% Black overall, which implies there should be three districts that are plausibly winnable by Black candidates. Right now, there are. If NC-01 gets whitened, then there will presumably be only two. How that might play out in court, when the inevitable lawsuits come, we do not know, because we have no idea how the current rules established by the Supreme Court work. We're not sure even the Supreme Court understands.

To make NC-01 red enough to put an incumbent member of Congress at risk, the NC legislature will need to get it to R+5 or R+6. It's directly north of NC-03—i.e., one of the R+10 districts—so some of the Republicans can come from there. But again, the state's district map is already aggressively gerrymandered, and with little protection against a blue wave. Trying to lay claim to NC-01 will make the GOP even more vulnerable to that possibility, and in a year with a key U.S. Senate contest, when Democrats are going to be out in force. We wonder if, once cooler heads take a look at the lay of the land, the Republicans in the state House might think better of their plan.

Meanwhile, one can only hope that all of these gerrymandering shenanigans, in red states and in blue, will lead to national, bipartisan sentiment for some sort of Congress-mandated, nonpartisan map-drawing process. Recall that Democratic voters are generally anti-gerrymandering, and many Republican voters are, too. So, it's not impossible. Not likely, but not impossible. (Z)

Are the Tories Becoming the Never-Trump Republicans?

Tip O'Neill's famous remark that "all politics is local" is certainly not true anymore. In fact, it is closer to "all politics is global." The U.S. has a populist wannabe strongman, but so do Hungary, Turkey, Slovakia and other countries. Future club members could be the U.K., France, and Germany. Politico's Jonathan Martin has taken a closer look at the U.K., in particular.

The political tides in the U.S. and the U.K. have often run in parallel. Ronald "Call me Ronnie" Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were best buddies. So were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Brexit presaged Donald Trump's first win by only 5 months. Maybe there is something in the water, even though there is a lot of it in the British Isles.

Martin went to the sparsely attended Conservative Party conference last week in Manchester. He wrote that it could have been the CPAC conference, if Trump didn't exist. There was nostalgia for Thatcher and disbelief at a recent poll showing the Tories in fourth place in a hypothetical election. If they were in the U.S., these pathetic souls would be never-Trump Republicans.

The main difference with the U.S. is that the populist far right in the U.K., now led by Nigel Farage, didn't attempt to take over the Conservative Party. Instead, they formed their own party, now called "Reform UK." Its slogan is: "Britain is broken. Britain needs reform." Recent polling now has it in first place, ahead of Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories don't know what to do (like the never-Trump Republicans). Despite being almost entirely white, they elected a Black woman, Kemi Badenoch, as their leader in an attempt to attract new voters and stop Reform UK. Similarly, some never-Trumpers are hoping Nikki Haley will be their savior, but it probably won't work any better in the U.S. than in the U.K. If current trends play out, by 2030, the U.K., France, and Germany could all have their local Trumpists in power. While the U.S. won't have the original as president then, it could have an imitator living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Needless to say, we could be in for tough times globally. (V)

The View from the Other Side of the Pond

Because all politics is global these days (see above), we've been wanting to get to some of the developments worldwide over the past month or so. We decided to do Britain today, and tomorrow we'll do a few more countries, like France and Japan. To further understand what's going on in the U.K. we asked our three British correspondents to do an update. Without further ado:

S.T. in Worcestershire, England, UK, starts us off... The June 2024 British election seems a long time ago and the question U.K. political watchers are asking now is whether a fundamental realignment in U.K. politics is taking place.

A reminder: In the 2024 election, Labour won an overall majority with 412 seats, out of 650 seats and 34% of the vote. Comparable figures for the other main parties were Conservatives 121 and 24%, Reform just 5 and 14% and the Liberal Democrats 72 and 12%. The wide disparity between seats and votes demonstrates what happens when a first-past-the-post system collides with a multi-party electorate.

The fact that Labour has lost popularity in the last 16 months is not a surprise; most U.K. governments become less popular after a honeymoon period. The size and speed of the decline has, however, been unprecedented. And even more astonishing is the fact that the main opposition party has not been the beneficiary of the decline. In fact, having posted their worst performance in nigh-on 200 years at the general election, the Conservatives have continued to head downwards. The main beneficiary has been the right-wing populist Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage.

Looking at the current opinion polls, Reform appear to be attracting on average around 30% of the vote, Labour just above 20%, the Conservatives in the high teens and the Liberal Democrats in the mid teens. This seems broadly in line with what is happening on the ground. Readers may remember that the local elections which took place in parts of England in May saw huge gains by Reform, and local by-elections since have seen the trend continue, with both Labour and Conservatives losing seats week in, week out (though it's worth noting that the Lib Dems and the Greens have to date been far more successful at retaining their wards, with the former also picking up seats). There has only been one parliamentary by-election this Parliament, which is rather hard to read—the sitting Labour MP resigned after a late-night fracas—but for what it's worth, that safe Labour seat was gained by Reform by all of 6 votes.

What do these figures say about parliamentary representation? Given so many diverse results in individual constituencies, it's often difficult to say, but MRP polls, which use a large poll sample and use sophisticated techniques to try to assess how each seat would vote, had an impressive performance at the general election. YouGov's most recent MRP poll suggests that with a 6% lead over Labour, Reform would be close to an overall majority. There are, of course, lots of caveats: no general election has to be held till mid 2029, MRP polls tend to be less accurate further out from an election, a lot of the seat by seat projections show very tight contests, and there is a strong possibility of tactical voting, particularly where there is a clear challenger.

Yet a right-wing populist party going from 5 seats to the verge of government in a single election, previously unheard of, appears to be a possibility. How on earth did we get here... and what happens next? G.S. in Basingstoke, England, UK takes up the story...

The Conservative MP (and grandson of Winston Churchill) Nicholas Soames once described former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as "the unchallenged master of the self-inflicted wound." That statement, however, was given in 2016, and so does not account for current Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's Herculean efforts to seize this title. A selection of such events might include:

1. After cancelling it in July 2024, Sir Keir was forced to reinstate the winter fuel allowance (a payment given to poorer pensioners to help with the rising cost of fuel) after a furious reaction and a concerted campaign over the elderly having to choose either "eating or heating."
   
   
2. After (justifiably) berating the Tories over sleaze and incompetence for so many years (parties in Downing Street during lockdown, Liz Truss' disastrous premiership, sexual misconduct allegations against MPs, etc), Sir Keir promptly marched into his own scandal when it became clear the Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli was providing undeclared gifts of high-end clothing for Starmer and his wife, as well as a personalized shopping service.
   
   
3. After taking office, Labour "discovered" and announced a £22 billion black hole in the public finances, to the fury of the Tories, who declared that government finances were open for all to see during the election run up. After promising taxes would not be increased "on working people" or on the main corporate rates, Chancellor Rachel Reeves then sidestepped these promises by increasing National Insurance contributions (a form of social security payments)... on employers, not employees. Britain now enjoys the highest tax burden in history.
   
   
4. This one is complicated but important, so please bear with your correspondent... Labour promised that if elected they would "smash the gangs"—this being a reference to the organized criminals using small inflatable boats to bring undocumented migrants to U.K. shores from France. Sir Keir's approach has not worked; there has been a 38% increase in such crossings since the same time last year. In the absence of any Florida-style holding camps, these migrants are often held in local hotels until their cases can be heard, at a huge cost to the taxpayer. Predictably, this has led to an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment.
   
   Meanwhile, in July 2024, there was a tragic mass stabbing of young children by a U.K. national at a dance school in Southport. The police arrested the culprit almost immediately, but failed to release any information about him (a policy since changed). Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and the Internet was rife with conspiracy theories about the culprit being an undocumented immigrant, perhaps exacerbated by the killer being born in Wales to Rwandan parents. This unfounded speculation led to multiple anti-immigration riots up and down the country, which were put down through massive police force and rapidly accelerated trials for the culprits. In the background, however, were several prosecutions about Internet postings. The most infamous of these was the wife of a Tory Councillor, who received 31 months in jail for calling for the asylum hotels to be set on fire, a sentence that even some of her detractors considered harsh.
   
   On the immigration backlash, Britain has recently seen an exponential increase in the number of Union Jacks and St. George's crosses displayed publicly in "Operation Raise the Colours"—the author can attest to literally hundreds being put up in the last 24 hours on a roundabout not half a mile from his house. While this may not seem unusual to our American friends, displaying our flag so publicly is not really the British way (some royal events excepted), and has been associated with nationalism and/or racism for some time now. The debate is polarizing and Labour seem stuck between a rock and a hard place, unsure about whether to embrace or distance themselves from the protests.
   
   On the free speech issue, the debate has been skewed recently by the proscribing of the group Palestinian Action (making it a criminal offense to express support for the group), after members broke into a Royal Air Force base in June 2025 and sprayed various aircraft with red paint. Since that proscribing, hundreds of people have been arrested for wearing T-shirts with "I oppose genocide. I support Palestinian Action," including blind wheelchair users, 83-year-old priests and disabled RAF veterans. The Home Secretary's response has been to propose the tightening of rules on protest, including giving the police power to arrest those protesting repeatedly in one area. This intersection between the debates on immigration, free speech, patriotism and protest has become a real problem for the government.
   
   
5. Finally, in the hope of a "reset" and a focus back on Labour policy, Labour had their annual conference at the end of September. Unfortunately, this event was somewhat overshadowed by the then-Deputy Prime Minister and party Deputy Leader, Angela Raynor, being forced to resign two weeks prior to the event, after mistakenly paying too little tax on a second property she had bought. It did not help that she was, at the time, also the Housing Minister. The story was complicated, but suffice to say she had referred herself to the independent advisor on ministerial standards, who concluded that her oversights had broken the ministerial code. Angela Raynor at least remains an MP; perhaps she could have taken advice from former PM Boris Johnson, who resigned as an MP in a fit of pique and went off to join the lucrative lecturing circuit after being found to break a similar code.

All of these woes have added to a sense of a government that is unmoored and drifting, contributing to those opinion polls outlined by my compatriot S.T. The final irony, your correspondent wryly notes, is that if Sir Keir had taken the suggestion of one Donald Trump in 2016 and made Farage the next U.K. ambassador to the U.S., he'd be 3,000 miles away and not causing him such headaches. 3-D chess, anyone?

The upshot, concludes A.B. in Lichfield, England, UK, is that some opinion polls now show Keir Starmer as having the lowest approval ratings of any U.K. Prime Minister in modern history, lower even than 50-day wonder Liz Truss as her catastrophic period in office came to its conclusion. But... But... despite everything S.T. and G.S. have just outlined, it could be worse. Because if his approval ratings as PM are dismal, Sir Keir does much better in head-to-head polls against other U.K. party leaders. Starmer beats Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch in most head-to-head preferred Prime Minister polls by around 9-10%. Nigel Farage has led Starmer in seven of the ten similar polls taken since August of this year, but generally by very small margins, and the two that Starmer led in (another was tied) had the Prime Minister leading Farage by healthier 8% margins (Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey is rarely included in this type of poll, but he led Starmer in the only relevant poll taken since August, and crushes both Badenoch and Farage when a pollster remembers to ask the question.) A recent Ipsos poll, meanwhile, showed that Starmer was the most-trusted senior politician in the U.K.—that because 23% of those polled consider him trustworthy.

The latter poll shows the scale of the problem for our political class. Our Prime Minister is simultaneously the least popular Prime Minister in modern history and the most trusted senior politician in the country—as less than a quarter of voters trust him. Meanwhile, Farage's Reform UK party is leading in opinion polls with only 30% support, while another recent Ipsos poll showed that 62% of British voters see Reform as extreme. The upshot is that almost all of our current political leaders are unpopular and/or are considered untrustworthy.

The problem therefore isn't necessarily that the Prime Minister is suffering from catastrophic approval ratings just over a year after winning a massive landslide election, but that almost all of our parties and leaders are held in something approaching contempt by voters. Labour is widely held to have let voters down since winning election, and in any case won that landslide due to disgust with a Conservative Party that had given us Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, as opposed to enthusiasm for Labour. For all the gains they've recently made, the Liberal Democrats have never quite recovered from the reputational hit they took for going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010-2015. The majority of voters believe that Reform UK is extremist and racist, though the party still leads in polls because the other parties are themselves so unpopular. The English and Welsh Greens are meanwhile led by a man who once told a reporter that he could enlarge women's breasts through hypnotherapy. No wonder nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales are looking attractive to many voters in those two U.K. nations (though the SNP in Scotland has had its own problems with scandals). The upshot is that deeply unpopular party leaders are slugging it out to try and win votes from a disenchanted electorate. These are not ideal conditions for a thriving democracy.

Thanks, gents! Ripping good stuff!

If any reader has insight into the situation in France, or in Japan, or in Argentina, we would welcome those. (Z)

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