The Edition: Stormy seas, Trump’s revolution & Gen Z’s sex recession
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Can Farage plot a route to Number 10, asks Tim Shipman in our cover article this week. He might be flanked by heavyweights – such as his head of policy Zia Yusuf and Conservative Party defector Danny Kruger MP – but he will need a lot more people to pull off his biggest upset for British politics yet. Where will they come from? And what’s the balance he needs to strike between being radical enough to win power but also without alienating significant chunks of the electorate?
Plus, as former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson breaks his silence – in this week's Spectator – to argue that Europe needs to adapt to a new reality, Freddy Gray ponders what Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is actually all about. Immigration? Drugs? Oil? Or just plain chaos?
For this week’s Edition, host William Moore is joined by political editor Tim Shipman, deputy editor and editor of our US edition Freddy Gray and columnist Mary Wakefield. As well as domestic and foreign politics, they examine Generation Z’s attitude towards sex – or rather their lack of it. Are politics and porn making them too anxious? Is this another example of the cultural ‘boring twenties’ young people are living through? And how will each of the guests approach the sex education of their own children?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, |
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| 0:34.0 | Hello and welcome to the edition from The Spectator. |
| 0:38.8 | I'm William Moore, the Spectators, Features Editor. |
| 0:42.3 | The latest edition of the magazine has just gone to print, and to talk about what's in it. |
| 0:46.3 | I'm delighted to be joined by Freddie Gray, our Deputy Editor and the Editor of the US Edition, Spectator World, |
| 0:53.3 | our political editor Tim Shipman and Spectator World, our political editor, Tim Shipman, and |
| 0:55.4 | Spectator columnist, Mary Wakefield. |
| 1:02.7 | Thank you very much for joining me. |
| 1:04.0 | Great pleasure. |
| 1:05.0 | Tim, let's start by talking about your cover piece, which is Stormy Seas, can reform |
| 1:10.2 | plot a path to power. So first of all, I suppose, |
| 1:13.2 | what do we know so far about Farage's plans for No. 10? Yeah, another brilliant cartoon cover |
| 1:20.6 | with a nautical theme for a shipment piece. This is very exciting. Look, what's the biggest |
| 1:26.7 | question in British politics this year? |
| 1:28.7 | We're expecting the mayor elections to be dramatic and exciting and sort of put things on a |
| 1:33.4 | different path. And I think after that, there's a decent chance that people will be seriously |
| 1:37.4 | asking whether Varage can be prime minister and does he have a plan? And the big question is, |
... |
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