The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription, in print and online, plus a £20 £20,000 Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Spectator Outland. Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Oscar Edmontson and on the podcast

this week. Katie Balls reads her politics column on Stama's ceasefire predicament. Matthew Paris

discusses the dangers of righteous anger and Fabian Carstairs details how he found himself on a dating

blacklist. Up first, Katie Balls. This could have been the

week that Kier Stama buckled under pressure from his party and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

A fifth of his MPs are publicly backed one, including 13 front benches and big names such as

Anasawa, Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham. Stama's suggestion in a radio interview that Israel could be justified in defending itself by

cutting off electricity and water to Gaza had already led to more than 25 Labour councillors quitting,

while several shadow ministers are on resignation watch.

Instead of U-turning in the face of party mutiny, Stama doubled down.

A ceasefire freezes a conflict, he said, and would lead Hamas, with the infrastructure and the

capabilities to carry out his second attack on Israel.

It was not quite a clause-fall moment, but a significant one nonetheless.

He knows that he is facing a test for a would-be Prime Minister.

Many floating voters want to know, would he stand up to his party? He's now given the answer. Or at least, he'd like it

to be seen that way. In private, he's more equivocal, and has yet to discipline a single shadow

minister for not towing the party line. He knows if he did, then resignations would follow,

says the senior party figure. He suspended the Labour whip from a backbencher, using the

...