Mask-off outbursts by Maga insiders and most strikingly, the destruction and reconstruction of the presidential seat, with a huge new $300m ballroom, means Trump isn’t planning to leave the White House when his term ends, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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John Wilkes: the perfect imperfect rebel leader
Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
TALK OF THE TOWN: (L to R) John Wilkes caricatured by William Hogarth, 1763; John Wilkes before the Court of King's Bench, engraving from The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1768
[Public Domain]
BEN CHACKO speaks with Knesset member OFER CASSIF about rising political violence, the prospects for peace and his continuous ‘silencing by suspension’
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The choice between two Blairites to revamp the tepid centrism of our ruling party doesn’t even come as cold comfort as we wander the city streets suffering from their third decade of austerity and the fifth of wage stagnation, writes MATT KERR
ANN HENDERSON looks at the trailblazers of the Women’s Trade Union League and their successful fight for female factory inspectors — a battle that echoes in today’s workplace campaigns
HENRY FOWLER puts the strike of public-sector workers in New Zealand in the wider context of deteriorating employment conditions throughout the world’s major economies
MAT COWARD looks back at a protest 105 years ago this month, whose reporting by the media bears uncomfortable similarities with demos today
IF you were building a perfect rebel leader from a kit, I don’t think you’d end up with John Wilkes. You’d probably prefer someone who wasn’t a member of the orgiastic Hellfire Club, and who hadn’t been expelled from Parliament for writing a libellously pornographic poem. But there you go: history has its whims.
John Wilkes (1725-97) was and is famous for many reasons, not least his celebrated witticisms, which appear in quotation anthologies to this day. (Any reader who has spent time knocking on doors during elections will appreciate Wilkes’s reply to a constituent who told him he’d rather vote for the devil: “But if your friend decides not to stand?”).
For all the colourful gossip fodder with which his life was filled, however, there was one cause to which he stubbornly clung and which was, then and now, of fundamental democratic importance.
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