Will Lloyd

Deputy Editor, The New Statesman - [email protected]

[Will Lloyd @Will___lloyd]

The cover story this week is about the nightmare war in Ukraine, which is becoming stranger and stranger as less and less attention is being paid to it. The story is about: The granite conviction among Ukrainians that this not a local conflict but one front in a third world war that none of us in the West are prepared for. The astonishing transformation of Ukraine into what Zelensky once called “big Israel” - a garrison state geared towards survival. The absolute shitshow that was the Russian invasion of 2022. An invincible deputy mayor. What it feels like to live under a brutal occupation. A theory about the current population of Ukraine. Drab industrial parks in Shenzhen. Thieving Gypsies. How to keep the lights and the heat going when your power generation gets bombed out every night. Nordic runes and Cossacks. Delivering pizza by UGV. Charismatic ultranationalist generals with bright futures ahead of them. Snow and mud. Dogs. The impossibility of peace.

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

THE NEW WORLD WAR by @Will___lloyd

As the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine approached last month, Zelensky inflated his rhetoric. He used the same formulation I had heard countless times from Ukrainians every time I visited. This was not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia any longer, if it had ever been that to begin with. These were, Zelensky told the BBC in February, the first years of the Third World War.

In the early weeks of the war, so many British citizens drove vans full of aid to the Polish border that Ben Wallace, then the defence secretary, had to ask with some tact that people send money instead. Clips of born-in-the-USSR Russian incompetence electrified social networks. No war ever seemed to cost so little. It generated a new, brief faith in ourselves, even in Boris Johnson. Our capabilities, our diplomacy, our technology, our sanctions packages, our intelligence services, our rules-based liberal order. We didn’t even have to fight. The Ukrainians would do that for us. Ukraine was a good war, a morally clean war, giving a precious gift to Europe’s leaders: meaning, valour, solemnity, glory.

That was not how it looked in Kyiv this winter, where the congealed violence of four years of war had transformed the country into something many in Europe no longer want to think about: a war of extermination fought between two militarised societies barely two days’ drive from Dover. The teams of men coldly eyeing their live feeds in bunkers, busily assassinating each other with drones, then posting the results online. The schools where children learned underground, as if they were surviving a nuclear winter. The old men and women who froze in their apartments and had to be cut out from them once their neighbours realised what had happened. The war had pulled the US and Europe apart, invented a whole new machinery of death, underlined our dependence on brutal petro-states, flooded this corner of Eastern Europe with several generations worth of weapons. A British official told me that Ukraine’s population, which had been estimated at just over 40 million in 2014, had shrunk to something like 20 million by 2025, significantly less than most estimates in the public domain.

I came to the war late, first visiting at the end of 2024. I witnessed Europe’s early hope and energy begin to curdle and move elsewhere: to Gaza and Greenland, Venezuela and now Iran. The world was a mess, expensive munitions for advanced air defence platforms were running low and needed everywhere from Kyiv to Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi; Ukraine was not a front-page story anymore. The same image, the same blood, the same nation. Shrug. A terrible thing was happening somewhere far away.

A few days after I returned from Kyiv last month, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched their war on Iran. Turkey, the keystone that sits directly between Ukraine and Iran, may yet be pulled into it. The vengeful Iranian Shaheds, so familiar to Ukrainians after four years of nightly terror, now rained down all over the Gulf. There were rumours that they were being mass-produced in China. Taken aback by the violent efficiency of the Iranian counterattack, Trump was demanding a Western armada enter the Gulf. War was spreading.

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

A selection of our writers will be reading in London this Saturday, 25 July. Tickets below.

[George Monaghan @GMonaghan1998]

If you're in London this Saturday, I'll be reading at this and would love to see you there :)

[Nicholas Harris @nickpaulharris]

I went to Clacton, met Jim Davidson OBE, and wrote about why Nigel Farage isn't the joke in this by-election

[Joseph Williams @lifeisnotanovel]

Huge piece on Nolan. Great read

[Liam Evans @Liam__Evans]

I’ve launched a new monthly column for @LabourList on what progressives can learn from the right’s media machine.

For the first piece, I consumed 1,000 hours of GB News, right-wing podcasts and the darker corners of the internet.

Here’s what I learned 🧵

[Faye Curran @fayecurran99]

🚨Some personal news: I am very happy to announce that I am now a Commissioning Editor at the @NewStatesman, focusing on long-form features. If you have a story you think we might be interested in, do send it my way.

[George Monaghan @GMonaghan1998]

In other reshuffle news, I am very happy to announce my promotion to Newsletters Editor of the @NewStatesman! Can't wait to get stuck in :)

[bob appetit @flugenhof]

almost three years to the day of this piece

[Tanjil Rashid @tanjil_rashid_]

Literary style in British politics

My @NewStatesman column reflects on Andy Burnham's English degree (and my thwarted one).

It includes a potted history of the study of Eng. lit. in politics, via the early Labour movement, FR Leavis and @michaelgove...
https://t.co/hYI01RWSlC

[Finn McRedmond @finn_mcredmond]

Being Irish is a constant state of opening the weather app and recoiling in horror. I wrote about a restaurant in my home town, and an adolescence in the rainiest place conceivable.

Silver Spoon for @NewStatesman

[Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot]

Loved this read on Your Party by @meganekenyon

[megan kenyon @meganekenyon]

💥ONE YEAR OF YOUR PARTY💥

At 8.11pm on 3 July 2025, a surprise post dropped on on X.

After 14 years, Zarah Sultana was leaving the Labour Party to co-lead the founding of a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn.

Except, there was one problem. Corbyn knew nothing of her intention to post. He hadn’t agreed to co-leadership.

What happened next would define the future of the British Left.

After covering this story closely for the past 12 months, today I’ve revisited the events of Your Party’s founding and looked at why things happened in the way that they did, and where things are at for Your Party now.

@NewStatesman

[Will Lloyd @Will___lloyd]

@AngusColwell @cosiadair Congrats!

[Oli Dugmore @OliDugmore]

In which I confess to being a massive bloody legend

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA by John Gray

As America reaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, a project that was born in rationalist optimism and an inherited religious faith is foundering in delirium and absurdity. The Founders fused an Enlightenment faith in human agency with belief in a divinely ordained providence to create what they believed to be the political vehicle of a new world. Donald Trump has dispelled that hope. A nihilistic trickster is dissolving the country’s origin myth, leaving America’s future profoundly uncertain.

While the second Trump administration sinks into a vortex of bungled military adventurism, clownish diplomacy, economic mismanagement and Putin-style kleptocracy, defenceless European commentators cling to the hope that Trump is a singularity, an unrepeatable aberration in a constitutional order that – albeit punctuated by a ferocious civil war – has endured longer than any other. But Trump’s America is the by-product of a precipitous collapse of trust in the country’s political classes following the era of neoliberal globalisation.

With the dissolution of its unifying mythology, America’s own ancien régime faces a crisis of legitimacy, which is aggravated by the corrosive impact of progressive ideology. Describing American politics today in the terms used by the Founders is to fall into category mistakes. Trump’s America is no more an expanding empire than it is any longer a functioning republic. By ceding Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz,this ludicrously misjudged and palpably lost war has turned a decaying theocracy into the region’s rising hegemon. Realising they can no longer rely on American protection, America’s Arab allies are tilting towards China, while Israel is isolated and besieged.

The neoliberal system over which Washington presided is decomposing into rival spheres of influence, with America’s shrinking by the day. Trump’s war brings the next step in deglobalisation. The “rule-governed order” is being supplanted not by unfettered American imperial power but by a carnivalesque charade, in which America’s still extremely formidable military assets are being depleted and wasted to stage a media spectacle. Oil and agricultural commodities such as urea and phosphorus are finite material resources that cannot be conjured into being in the way money is created on Wall Street. Trump’s empire is like Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City, a figment in a virtual world.

Cover art by Tim McDonagh

[Ailbhe Rea @PronouncedAlva]

Scoop: Jacinda Ardern's election-winning campaign director, Hayden Munro, has been brought in by Andy Burnham to coordinate the "campaign" of the next three weeks.

In this week's New Statesman

https://t.co/46o2dxT7PX

[Duncan Robinson @duncanrobinson]

Everything revovles around Ed Miliband https://t.co/bFx8HGMfu4

[Leo Robson @leorobsonwriter]

I had fun writing this lighthearted @NewStatesman Weekend Essay about my relationship with New Labour and how Tony Blair’s failings served as a Muse in the writing of my novel The Boys now in paperback @riverrunbooks h/t @Will___lloyd @nickpaulharris
https://t.co/oGJ6e7iPV7

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

I review two superb books on Iran.
Stolen Revolution @bozorgmehr @yjtorbati
Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian in the New Statesman @NewStatesman
https://t.co/HAjIiSFGd8

[Tanjil Rashid @tanjil_rashid_]

One of the greatest accomplishments in the history of the novel. I interpret it as Mann taking the written word on a journey back home to the Bible.
In the @guardian's survey of the greatest novels, I was sad to see I was alone in choosing it in my top ten.