Pat McFadden, the mild-mannered Scot now orchestrating Downing Street’s message machine, has become the unlikely Zelig of 2024’s global rebrand wars. While Washington rehearses its Biden-to-Trump sequel and Paris polishes Macron’s Jupiter complex for Olympic season, McFadden is quietly exporting a very British product: the art of looking boring while everything burns. International observers—those who…
Harry Styles: The Last British Export That Isn’t a Banking Scandal By the time you finish reading this sentence, another nation has just discovered Harry Styles. Maybe he’s touring the neon shrines of Tokyo, maybe he’s strutting through Mexico City’s Zócalo in a sequined jumpsuit that costs more than the average annual wage, or maybe—God…
The British Pound, a currency once so mighty that it bankrolled half the planet’s railways and gin habits, has recently been doing an uncanny impression of a deflating soufflé—except nobody in Whitehall seems to have remembered to pre-heat the oven. Officially, UK inflation has slipped to 2.3 %, down from the eye-watering 11 % pantomime…
Microsoft to UK: Here’s £2.5 Billion, Please Don’t Look at the Other Tabs By Our London Bureau Chief, Nursing a Flat-White and Existential Dread LONDON—In the same week the British government was busy politely asking its citizens to stop heating soup on radiators, Microsoft swaggered into Westminster with a promise so large it required three…
Rachel Reeves and the Art of Global Fiscal Schadenfreude By Our Man in a Grey Cloud Somewhere over the North Sea There are moments, usually around 3 a.m. in a hotel bar in Frankfurt, when one realises that the entire planet is simply a vast, badly-run hedge fund with mood lighting. Enter Rachel Reeves, the…
