Inside: Yoga in the King’s garden, JD Vance’s Cotswolds sojourn, farewell to Carrie Bradshaw, Trump meets Putin, and politicians go on holiday.

Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the best of the New Statesman, in print and online this week. This is Finn with Nicholas and George.

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How was that for a great anti-climax? Yesterday, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Alaska to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine. Maybe hopes of a major breakthrough, and belief that sense might just prevail, were always fanciful. But in any case, this meeting really did come to a bland resolution.

Putin praised the “very good, businesslike and trustworthy” discussions. Trump insisted the meeting “was a 10” (out of… 100?). In reality, Putin has not budged on his initial demands: Ukraine renouncing ambitions to join Nato, adopting a formal position of neutrality and limits to the size of its military; and ceding Crimea along with four eastern regions of the country to Russia.

But, within the last few minutes, Zelensky has announced he will meet Trump in Washington on Monday. So, perhaps – even if the contours of the conflict seem unchanged after the Alaska summit – there is movement after all. Katie Stallard has us covered on the conflict. Stay with us. And as ever, thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

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1—“Convincing geranium impression”

Off to King Charles’s Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, where Will forked out £180 to attend a “Wellness Day”. This, as it transpires, involved a yoga session, a sing-a-long and a conversation with the plants. Rather Will than me, that’s for sure. Finn

Two prim guides turned up to show us around the grounds, which were twisty and strange, filled with odd pagan flourishes, staring busts of Jungian psychoanalysts and disturbing tributes to the late Queen Mother. One guide pointed out the best view of the house: seen from behind a statue of a naked gladiator, taking in his pert, oxidised copper arse cheeks. The ladies loved the geraniums, which bloomed hectically. Every stem and leaf looked like Charles: tense, heavily waited on. As we thanked the plants again in an artificial clearing, the hoarse sound of a lorry driving to Tetbury was just audible above the birdsong.

2—“Vance’s guestlist”

The vice-president’s holiday has looked more like a rotating procession of reactionary courtiers, featuring Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, James Orr and Thomas Skinner. For our weekend essay, Freddie Hayward probes the ideas and influence of this intellectual network. Nicholas

This summer Vance held court in an English 18th-century manor, a forward operating base in his campaign to Maga-ify the British right. His itinerary was arranged by his local fixers, the slick Cambridge theologian James Orr and the podcasting former chancellor George Osborne. The less well-known Orr used to do Jordan Peterson’s scheduling during his tours of British university campuses. Orr also serves as a Vance interpreter, explaining to the Times that Vance has a “special concern” for the UK. Vance’s criticism of the British government, particularly over its backsliding on free speech, seems grounded in a paternal feeling for America’s errant ward. For these precious weeks Vance has come in person, here to help guide the country onto stronger ground.

3—“Not just disappointing, but indefensible”

The kids, unhappy about the party’s position on Gaza, are abandoning Labour and prompting some threatening behaviour by certain MPs. Our excellent intern Hattie Simpson reports from inside the Labour student movement in a scoop-filled debut. Nicholas

Behind the scenes, rumours have circulated that students have been warned against speaking out on Gaza, with the threat of reputational damage or future career jeopardy. Youth committee members describe being strongly cautioned by HQ staff that speaking out on this issue could damage their reputation and credibility. These warnings were even given to senior, well-established youth figures who have spent a long time working in an unpaid capacity for the party. In one case, a young member’s non-Labour employer was contacted by a senior backbench MP, who warned the employer to be “wary” of the student, and to “not trust them” after they were unable to attend an organised study trip to Israel.

4—“The imperfect radical”

Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker’s iconic character of Sex and the City and more recently And Just Like That, has had her last TV outing. But no one could say we hardly knew her. Kate Mossman bids adieu to “the closest thing television has come up with to a universal self.” George

Sex And The City did change everything. People won’t remember this, but a certain kind of straight man was deeply irritated, when it started, by the fact that Carrie Bradshaw was considered “attractive”. Suddenly women in university halls were talking about masturbation, and being sexually unsatisfied. Sex And The City showed that friendships are the primary relationships of life, and that some people are happier out of love than in it. It suggested that many women feel sick and panicky when they see a detached house in the suburbs: only Charlotte is a mother by choice, and she’s infertile. Carrie Bradshaw’s only successful relationship is with New York itself: she’s a 1990s Dorothy Parker, fearless in the city. Falling in and out of love is almost tidal for her: it’s not a means to an end. Underneath the play acting is a free spirit, and from the outside it often looks like loneliness.

5—“Shapeshifting powers”

Tommy Robinson’s EDL was drawn from, as Nicholas describes, “a school, or squadron, of politics we’re rightly inoculated against.” But now something strange is happening: Robinson is slowly conquering the “alternative media” sphere. Did he ever truly go away? Maybe not. But in any case, we are warned, he is back. Finn

During the Tommy Robinson interview, Konstantin Kisin reads out some advertising copy for gold and silver investments with Wyoming-based Augusta Precious Metals, directed at “helping Americans move wealth… into self-directed IRAs”. This is political broadcasting in 2025, directed at an American audience. England is simmering, and the whole world is watching the men boiling the pot.

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It will have been a tough few months for the Saturday Readers who were taking their A-levels this year. Don’t worry, you studious folk: that’s all over now. Exams have finished and results are out. Hopefully you all got what you wished for. Don’t feel too badly if it wasn’t your day.

The rest of us have to find other ways to make results day interesting. There was a good top line story this year: the boys are back, in school. At last, after eight years of drooling, male students are ruling. The lads have pipped their female counterparts in the A* totals. We will see how things shake out next year. But it raises some interesting questions about the “crisis of masculinity”, for which poor academic performance has long been adduced as evidence.

Generation AI by Tony Evans isn’t just about machines. How organisations guide people through change is vital. Modern organizations are multigenerational-and that diversity is the secret weapon. Generation AI sets out the case for how to unite different generations in the workforce into a force ready for AI-enabled change.

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6—“Viva la revolución, Oxfordshire-style”

Veep JD Vance, you are aware, has been holidaying in Oxfordshire. Finn swung by, and composed a Cotswold Elegy of her own. Frankly, she found the politics soft. Not quite enough fear or loathing in gorgeous Charlbury to foment an uprising. George

I am sitting in the Bell (a pub apparently run by children but technically owned by the Daylesford estate) and talking to a gardener. How are they preparing for Vance? I ask. There’s not much to do, he tells me. Charlbury is on constant alert for the great and good: David Cameron only lives up the road (“and he was actually prime minister”); Jeremy Clarkson’s farm can’t be more than a 25-minute drive away; the man beside me in a very serious watch is probably receiving the A-list treatment, too. If Charlbury is ready for anything, it’s ready to serve a perfectly cooked onglet to the second-in-commands of the worlds’ erratic superpowers. The protesters, I suspect, are not inclined to serious disobedience.

7—“Pulls on his trunks”

Airwave king Matt Chorley has laid down his headphones and picked up his pen to reflect in the New Statesman on the long history of prime ministerial holidays. It all started with Harold Wilson’s knees… George

For any prime minister looking to make a break for it, there are major considerations to be made about the style, duration and location of a holiday. The Isles of Scilly are perfect: still part of the UK but feel more abroad than home. Failing that, there’s Cornwall, where they treat you like you’re foreign. Even that can be risky: I once almost ran over David Cameron in a vintage VW camper van. I was trying to navigate a narrow road through Polzeath when a man clutching a boogieboard suddenly stepped out in front of me, and I hit the brakes. Only I seemed to notice that the sun-kissed prime minister was there; everyone else was absorbed in their ice pops.

8—“Powder keg”

When I hear English civil war, I think of Cavaliers with big wigs and the Battle of Marston Moor. But listen to the British right, concerned that the country is on the brink of total societal collapse, and you can update your imagery. Phil Tinline looks at the commentators longing for modern civil war. Nicholas

It may be that the return of talk of civil war is less a glimpse of our near future, more a signal that something has become intolerable. Clearly this is partly about immigration, but look beyond the fevered talk on YouTube, X and GB News, and something else comes into view. When Sky’s Liz Bates challenged Dominic Cummings to explain what he meant by “civil war”, he didn’t talk about ethnic strife, bar a passing reference to “no-go areas”. He cited widespread anger at the decay of public services from closing police stations to inaccessible GPs, 15 years of flatlining pay, and repeated broken promises of change.

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5. The last nice rich people on TV
6. Briton caught stealing from Pompeii is spared the “curse”

And with that…

This week (for professional purposes) I withstood an entire episode of the YouTube phenomenon Triggernometry. I’ve come across their stuff before, in dribs and clips, but never done a full sitting. The video was an interview with Tommy Robinson, the EDL founder, and you can read what I made of him above. But equally perturbing was the window into the alternative economy from which these YouTube channels make their dough. After all, though obviously they’re in this game for free speech, facts and logic, Triggernometry has made its presenters two rich men. The video was broken up by four sponsorship intermissions: for virtual private networks, for medical hypnosis, for gold and silver investments and, most bafflingly, for saffron supplements (yes, as in the spice). Admittedly nothing too sinister – but I never saw this stuff on the old ITV Hub.

It put me in mind of a paragraph from David Runicman’s recent review of Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards, in which he surveyed the alternative media scene and its accompanying galaxy of products. In this space, the political atmosphere is one of crisis (it’s a culture “war” after all). But then: “a message of impending catastrophe was invariably accompanied by ads for the things that might hedge against it: pills and protein powders to get you ready for a world in which only the fittest will survive, books and videos to explain what was at stake, and, above all else, gold – buy it! trade it! hoard it!” If you sell a message that the world’s gone mad, I suppose you do need to supply the cure. The only question to ask of these audiences is whether they genuinely are more open-minded than the rest of us – or simply more gullible.

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— Finn, Nicholas and George.

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