SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
THERAPISTS of the mind often try to trace pathological delusions back to repressed trauma.
Both the trauma, and the delusions arising from an unhealthy refusal to ackowledge it, were on display in the House of Commons this week. The emergency sitting to discuss the Afghanistan crisis was a portrait of a governing class in decline and denial.
First, the trauma. The scale, speed and chaos of the collapse of the Western presence and of its preferred government in Afghanistan have produced a profound shock throughout the governing classes of the Nato states. All of them. “The West’s Shipwreck In Afghanistan” splashed the Greek equivalent of the Times.
ANDREW MURRAY looks back on the ignominious career of the former US vice-president, who died earlier this week
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
As US hegemony crumbles and Trump becomes ever more unpredictable, European powers cling to the pact’s militarist agenda in a bid to disguise their own increasing irrelevance, writes CHRIS NINEHAM



