The Edition: Trump’s gilded age, the ‘hell’ of polyamory & is Polanski Britain’s Mamdani?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

A year on from his presidential election victory, what lessons can Britain learn from Trump II? Tim Shipman writes this week’s cover piece from Washington D.C., considering where Keir Starmer can ‘go big’ like President Trump. Both leaders face crunch elections next year, but who has momentum behind them? There is also the question of who will replace Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States. Can Starmer find a candidate who can get the Americans on side?

Host Lara Prendergast is joined by The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman, features editor Will Moore and commissioning editor Mary Wakefield.

As well as the cover, they discuss Mary’s piece urging us not to ‘look away’ in the wake of the Huntingdon train stabbings; whether Zack Polanski can harness the energy seen in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral election victory; and the growing fashion for polyamory.

Plus: what books have the panel enjoyed reading this year?

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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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0:22.9	me, Michael Gove, and our assistant editor, Madeline Grant. Go to www.combe.combe. Terms apply.
0:48.1	Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator. I'm Laura Prendergars,
0:52.1	the Spectator's executive editor and the latest issue of the magazine has just gone offstone. To talk about what's in it, I'm joined by our political editor, Tim Shipman, our commissioning editor, Mary Waitfield, and welcoming back our features editor and co-host of this podcast, William Moore.
1:04.3	Welcome.
1:05.1	Thank you very much. Love to be back.
1:16.8	Before we get further into the magazine, let's look at this week's cover story.
1:18.4	Tim, you've written the cover story.
1:20.3	The headline is The Guilded Age.
1:23.7	And in it, you look at the lessons from Trump's second era.
1:27.4	You've just returned overnight on The Red Eye from DC. What was the mood like in DC?
1:30.7	Yes, you're all right there, Tim. Yeah, I'm all right. I'm bearing up. We've got a glass of sherry,
1:34.8	so it's all good. Very spectator. The mood there is really interesting. I found, I think,
1:42.1	lots of MAGA people and pretty well every Brit I spoke to, be it sort of diplomats, people in the media, ran into some White House correspondence, all of them who think Trump is doing pretty well.
1:54.9	And that it's, if you're on the media side, people, you know, White House correspondents who covered the first term, which was a sort of open season where the president would phone any journalist and berate them and then give them stories, you couldn't move for members of the administration briefing against each other.
2:11.6	Rather disappointed that Trump too is rather more coherent, that his team seems to be pulling broadly in the same direction.
2:18.9	And as a consequence, they got themselves organised.
2:21.6	They did quite a lot of stuff up front.
	...

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