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    Steve Hilton, former David Cameron adviser, to run for California governor

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    David Cameron’s former top adviser Steve Hilton has joined the 2026 race for California governor, running as a Republican to replace the Democrats’ Gavin Newsom, who is prevented by law from seeking a third term.Hilton, who hosted a show on Fox News for six years, launched his campaign with the theme “Golden Again: Great Jobs, Great Homes, Great Kids”. His campaign said Hilton would be “reinforcing his commitment to positive, practical solutions instead of today’s ideology and dogma”, and that his brand of “positive populism” would focus on helping working families.Hilton was one of the then UK prime minister’s closest advisers before the pair fell out over immigration and Brexit in 2016. Hilton, a former advertising executive, is thought to have been largely responsible for a host of early Cameron measures and photo opportunities including the husky expedition to Alaska to popularise his “Vote Blue, Go Green” message.At his campaign launch in Los Angeles, Hilton took aim at state Democrats over notoriously high state taxes, soaring home prices and “the destruction of the California dream.”He said he would welcome running against the former vice-president Kamala Harris, a one-time California senator and attorney general who has not ruled out a run for the governorship.View image in fullscreenHilton said the governor’s job was not a “consolation prize to be handed out to a failed and rejected machine politician from Washington … who thinks she should get this job because of her identity, not her ability”.Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother and would become the first Black woman elected governor in the US if she were to run and win.California operates a top-two primary system where all candidates compete on one ballot, regardless of party, and the two who receive the most votes go on to the general election in November.Republicans have not won a statewide race in heavily Democratic California in nearly two decades. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the last Republican to be elected governor, in 2006.As Cameron’s head of strategy, Hilton was the inspiration for Stewart Pearson in the BBC satire The Thick of It and described as “the eco-friendly, media-savvy, blue-sky-thinking director of communications for the Cabinet Office”.After leaving Cameron’s team in 2012, Hilton backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton for the US presidency in 2016. He supported Brexit but criticised the former Conservative government for “dark” policies that “pull up the drawbridge” to the rest of the world.With the Associated Press More

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      Rapper Rhymefest on Trump, Kanye and David Cameron: ‘There’s a political realignment happening in the US’

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      View image in fullscreenChe Smith is your favorite rapper’s favorite wordsmith. As Rhymefest, the Chicago native announced himself as a formidable battle rapper, verbally sparring with Eminem and other stars in the late 90s. He co-wrote some of Kanye West’s biggest hits, not least the Grammy-winning Jesus Walks, while carving out his own exemplary career as a conscious emcee. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Glory, the Selma film soundtrack theme he co-wrote with John Legend and Common, a fellow Chicagoan.Even as the successes piled up, Smith, 47, never stopped thinking about his humanitarian obligation to his home town of Chicago, cut down to a metonym for urban violence and rot.This year, when Chicago held school board elections, the first in the city’s history, Smith decided to run as an independent because he believed his experiences and relationships in the art and music community could prove beneficial.“I had my eye on this,” says Smith, an imposingly sage presence who commands attention whether on the stage or the stump. “I knew how historic an elected school board would be to Chicago, the last major municipality that did not have the democracy of an elected school board.”Pitted against a pastor, a non-profit CEO and a former district principal, Smith won with 32% of the vote. Once sworn in, he hopes to use art to expand students’ horizons. “In terms of Stem – science, technology, engineering and math – why are we not adding arts to make Steam?” says Smith, a former teaching fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “I know it sounds cliche, but if you’re taking a trigonometry class and learning angles, and you’re in art class learning angles, it could make you better at trigonometry.”Smith’s twinning of commercial artistry with activism separates him from his rap celebrity peers who’d sooner shovel money into a foundation and occasionally turn up to hand out school supplies.View image in fullscreenHe might have become one of those check-writing celebrities if West’s mother, Donda, hadn’t intervened. “One of my biggest teachers,” Smith says of the late mentor he called Miss Maya, for Maya Angelou. “We would [come to campus] and play music for her when we’re 14 or 15. When she would hear us talk about shooting or selling dope, she would ask, ‘Is that really who you are? And if you get famous, is that who you want to be? Because if that is who people perceive you as, you’re going to have to live inside that character for the rest of your life.’”Smith and Ye (as the artist is now known) have been friends since they were teenagers, bonding over music. They came of age as Chicago was emerging as a hive of socially conscious rap and hip-hop force to rival the coasts. With Common and the producer No ID as guides and Twista and Lupe Fiasco pushing them, Smith and Ye emerged as a dynamic duo – the former putting weighty words to the latter’s chipmunk soul beats, inspiring generations of homegrown talents that run from Chance the Rapper to Earl Sweatshirt.In 2011, Smith and Ye founded Art of Culture, a youth mentoring non-profit where Smith teaches writing and leads cultural retreats around the world. It was originally named Donda’s House. But differences of opinion over how the non-profit should be run drove a years-long rift between the two. Things are better between them now. “What we do have is brotherhood,” Smith says. “And I think we as human beings in America have to learn how to have brotherhood and village without always expecting somebody to make our dream come true.”View image in fullscreenSmith’s imagination has carried him quite a distance. Unlike Ye, who was raised middle-class, Smith grew up poor and was raised by a single mother who had him at 15. He recounts some of this in a 2015 Showtime documentary called In My Father’s House. In it, Smith is driven to reunite with his father, absent from his life since age 12, after purchasing his childhood home. Despite dropping out of high school to pursue music, Smith gravitated to Donda and other individual teachers in his neighborhood – not least the Rev Jesse Jackson, who opened up the south side headquarters of his Operation Push civil rights organization for Wu-Tang concerts and rap shows featuring local artists.After seeing that combination of song and social responsibility play out so seamlessly up close, with Donda’s “sage counsel” still ringing in his ears, Smith committed himself to a more practical brand of rap realness. “When you hear lines like ‘we all self conscious / I’m just the first to admit it’ [from Ye’s All Falls Down], that didn’t come from how brilliant we are as artists,” Smith says. “That came from teachers that trained us how to be authentic. We have great teachers here that work with you in art. And the same way that was done for me, it’s my duty to serve in that way for up and coming artists.”Chicago city politics are notorious for being a vipers’ pit of sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners wheeler-dealing, defined by major party crony favor-trading for the better part of a century. The standard was set by Richard J Daley, the imperious mayor fabled to have fixed the 1960 presidential election for John F Kennedy. Decades later the same political machine would put Barack Obama in the White House.It’s only in the last few years that the Chicago Teachers Union has emerged as a major political player, funneling more than $23m into Illinois candidate Pacs since 2010 – investment that culminated in the 2023 election of the mayor, Brandon Johnson, a former public school social studies teacher. In 2023 CTU and its affiliate unions spent nearly $6.5m on Chicago elections, more than any interest group.Smith wasn’t the strongest candidate to represent district 10 – a craggy south side outcropping where a handful of high-performing schools are sprinkled among the failing and condemned. His given name alone, Che, taken from the Marxist revolutionary, writes its own attack ads; his Muslim faith provides the exclamation point.“I have a brother that walked across 15 countries, through the Darién Gap, who lives in my house,” Smith says when I ask him how the immigration crisis is affecting city schools. “Chicago has been having low birth rates, 10,000 less children for the last 10 years. That means there are hardly any children to enroll in public schools.” The new arrivals, he argues, keep the schools filled and funded.Then of course there’s the matter of Smith’s music career, another potential reason for voters to not take him seriously. Broadly, Smith takes offense at the way musicians are treated in the political arena, as if they’re only good for kicking off rallies. It pained him to watch Lil Jon deliver Georgia’s roll call at this year’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. “Lil Jon’s father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a military nurse,” Smith says. “He can relate to people whether they’re low information or high information, and he’s not the only one. Kanye is the son of a Fulbright scholar. Lupe’s mom was a community activist. Chance’s parents are political operatives in the city. Why wouldn’t you let them reimagine policy? It’s a missed opportunity, but we artists have to take it upon ourselves not to wait to be handed power.”Smith might have waited longer to make his move if Mark Ronson, a close collaborator and one-time label boss, hadn’t pushed him to write an open letter to the former British prime minister David Cameron after the then Conservative party leader took exception to the hip-hop-coded content on BBC Radio 1 in 2006, saying it “encourages people to carry guns and knives”.“David Cameron – someone who I have very little, if anything, in common with – inspired me to know what my influence was as an artist and leverage my cultural currency for social and political justice,” recalls Smith. “But he said something that made sense in our meeting: ‘I turn on the radio, and all I hear is sirens, gunshots and violent rhetoric. I thought it was a national emergency. What am I supposed to do with that as a political leader?’“I thought he had a point,” Smith goes on. But what I had to tell him is that his politics created that warning shot he heard on the radio.”View image in fullscreenHe believes one reason Cameron ultimately lost power is because he “was never really in tune with the people on the street”.Keen to live up to his independent tag, Smith put $100,000 of his own nest egg into his school board bid – which was notably not endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union. He says his victory is a credit to a grassroots coalition that ran the gamut from “the streets” to former university students – whose votes he counted as a “‘very good’ professor rating”. He further appreciates that some of the same people who voted for him also voted for Donald Trump – a man who once disparaged Chicago as a “war-torn” city of Black people and Latinos “living in hell”.“Votes for Trump went up across the board in Black communities and Latino communities,” Smith says of the rightward shift in deep blue Chicago. “They voted for a deconstructor of systems. There’s a political realignment happening in America, and I don’t even think the institutions have caught up with it. There are a lot of people that long for the dismantling of the system for the opportunity to build it anew.”Smith has a lot he wants to tackle in his first term – busing, strategic partnerships, the district’s $1bn budget shortfall. That doesn’t seem like it leaves much room for making or performing music. But because school board politics is essentially pro bono work, he’ll have to find the time. “You have to ask yourself, why are these interests putting millions of dollars into running candidates for a job that doesn’t pay?” he says.There was a time in the not too distant past when Smith thought his raptivism could have lasting impact only if he were on a similar fame level to Ye, and not just a dope lyricist. But after his landmark victory, Smith feels like he’s finally meeting the political moment that was laid out for him long ago and is encouraging his industry peers to take similar authorship. “It’s not enough to make a song anymore,” he says. “You gotta make a song and then create a reality from it. It’s time to take all those raps and all those words and start to walk through them and create a better society from the imagination of the music. That’s what I’m doing.” More

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      in US Politics

      David Cameron: the Boy’s Own robot made of ham was nearly out-Foxed

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      How much have you really engaged with David Cameron, since he became foreign secretary in November? I always get a discombobulating strobe effect, all the alternative futures that could have been: the not-Brexit, the not-Boris Johnson, the not-austerity and social fracturing, if it hadn’t been for this rosy-face Duff Cooper in 21st-century fancy dress, and the incomprehensible number of people who didn’t take one look at that face and run a mile. So I find him quite hard to look at.As he does the American media rounds, talking Ukraine and Gaza to wingnuts (Fox News) and sensible centrists (CNN), the look he’s going for is somewhat changed. You know what they say about America, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening period of civilisation (no offence, Fox News!)Cameron went from floppy young man in a hurry to elder statesman without the intervening period of regular, middle-aged statesman; did he ever really govern? Was he ever really real? Well, he must have been. Because all that stuff happened.He was fresh from meeting Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, which he couldn’t say much about because it was a private meeting – the US anchors of every channel nodded delightedly when he said that. I think it sounds saucy yet quaint when a posh person says it, but he said this much to This Morning on CNN: “The point I’m making is …” (ah, memories … Cameron saying, “Let me be clear on this point that I am making,” piping busy words, the catchphrase of a man who’s never once wondered whether he’s interesting) “is that I think profoundly in Britain’s interest, but also to America’s interests, that Trump doesn’t get to win in Ukraine.”We can come to why not if you really think it’s necessary, but what a profoundly weird thing to say. Get to win what? The US election? Because, if he doesn’t win that, it’s hard to see how he wins anything in Ukraine. But if he does win the US election, then he, rather than the British foreign secretary, does sadly “get to” decide what their interests are.Trump, you’ll remember, wants the Ukrainians to cede Crimea and the Donbas border regions to Vladimir Putin in return for no longer getting shot at. Cameron is probably right, it “wouldn’t just be bad for our European security, our adversaries around the world, whether it’s Iran or China or whoever, would draw lessons that we don’t stand by our allies”. And, OK, this next bit is a little flabby, but odds on, there will be “risk of further aggression and further danger in our world”.Yet I worry that Cameron really thinks this is what geopolitics are – a nice, rule-based game where you might get the odd leader who huffs and puffs, but all the other players, nice chaps, will step in and say, as one: “No, you don’t get to do that.”His language is pure Boy’s Own adventure – “the bravery of the Ukrainians”, “Europe and America sticking together and standing up against bullies”. Sure, he’s not swimming in very complicated waters (Trump, for comparison, said that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want to Nato countries who do not spend enough on defence”), but you don’t, from Cameron, get the deep sense of security that settles upon one while listening to a sensible adult, with a full complement of faculties, rooted in reality.He was introduced as “Britain’s top diplomat”, which made him sound kind of cute, like he’d won his title in a Britain’s Got Diplomats quizshow. I’m not sure they take us tremendously seriously, as a nation. Conceivably, because of all that stuff that happened.Fox News went a different way, as they say, with a question you’d call dumb, except that’s what they want you to think, so you’re playing into their hands, except what are you going to do, not call it dumb? It remains dumb. What did Cameron think about London, our London, where “streets are taken over by pro-Hamas folks” and the “Jewish community is describing a country that’s become almost unrecognisable, in terms of the toleration of this”.Cameron’s face is famously hard to read. Caitlin Moran once said he looked like a robot made of ham. But this must surely have ruffled him on the inside: this is what half his party says, round the clock.This is the means by which they threaten the right to protest, and the tactic they use to deflect any serious consideration of the situation in Gaza; that it can’t be a massacre because Hamas and any right-thinking person disputing that slaughter must love Hamas, and that British Jews are terrified of their own country, because the streets are lined with Hamas-lovers. Everyone knows that’s not true but, for as long as it’s useful, that’s what a lot of Conservatives will claim to think.Did it give the foreign secretary, who himself mourns the bloodshed, a second’s pause, to be confronted with this live on air? Did it make him think how far the Tory party had moved, how obliterated the one-nation lot, his lot, were? Did he stop and wonder about his part in all that?Really hard to say – see robots, ham – but he deflected it quite well, stressing all the freedoms, stressing the rule of law, stressing that Benjamin Netanyahu ought to observe laws, too, particularly with regards to civilians.“The Brits and the Americans didn’t provide aid to Germans, in World War Two,” the anchor replied.Britain’s top diplomat didn’t dignify that. More

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      in Elections

      Cameron: Aukus and Nato must be in ‘best possible shape’ before potential Trump win – video

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      The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, has suggested the Aukus pact and Nato alliance must get into the best possible shape to increase their chances of surviving Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House. Speaking after high-level talks in Australia, Cameron was careful to avoid criticising the former US president and presumptive Republican nominee for 2024, saying it was ‘up to America who they choose as their president’. The comments were in response to a question about whether the election of Trump in November would affect the Aukus agreement that was sealed with the Biden administration in March last year More

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      in US Politics

      Cameron warns failure to supply arms to Ukraine will harm US security

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      David Cameron has said that the continued US failure to supply arms to Ukraine would undermine its own security, strengthen China and cast doubt on America’s reliability as an ally around the world.The UK foreign secretary, who attended the G20 meeting in Brazil earlier in the week, admitted that the effort to rally global support for the Ukrainian cause had been “damaged” by the fact that neither the US nor the UK had voted for a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. But he argued the damage had been mitigated by the UK’s clarification of its position.Cameron was speaking in New York on the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine at a time when the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, is blocking a substantial package of military aid to Kyiv, leading to a severe ammunition shortage for Ukrainian troops.The foreign secretary was flanked by his German and Polish counterparts, Annalena Baerbock and Radek Sikorski, who made their own calls for US supplies to be resumed at a meeting organised in New York by the Wall Street Journal ahead of a UN security council meeting on Ukraine on Friday afternoon.Earlier in the day, Joe Biden had announced 500 new sanctions on Russia and a further 100 entities around the world for providing support to Russia, in an effort to squeeze Moscow’s revenues. But the foreign ministers made clear that arms supplies were the key in the struggle with Russia in Ukraine.Cameron sought to frame his argument in terms of competition with China, one of the few issues that unites Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress.“I know that lots of people in Congress are hugely concerned about the role of China and if you’re concerned about the role of China, you must make sure that Putin doesn’t win,” he said.He added that Beijing was enjoying “the fact that we’re, we’re not as united as we should be. I think that’s why the American package is so important.”In its relations with countries around the world, Cameron argued, China was saying “come have a relationship with us. America isn’t reliable.”The end of US military support to Ukraine, he added “would strengthen that argument they make in an enormous way”.Baerbock said the blockage of US aid “will be the biggest gift for Putin and will be the biggest gift for China”.“The Ukrainians are fighting like lions, but you cannot fight with bare hands,” Sikorski said. “They are running out of ammunition for anti-aircraft missiles that are protecting cities and when soldiers don’t have artillery shells, they have to do close combat fighting. That means that Ukrainian casualties are greater.”The European ministers face an uphill task persuading a Republican congressional leadership that is under the powerful sway of Donald Trump, an opponent of Ukrainian aid, and also resistant to allied pressure. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican congresswoman, responded to an earlier effort by Cameron to persuade Congress in Ukraine’s favour that the foreign secretary could “kiss my ass”.“I’m not trying to lecture or tell American congressmen what to do,” Cameron insisted on Friday. “I love my own country but I love America too. I think this is really important for America, for American security.”He admitted that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and western positions on the conflict had complicated efforts to build global solidarity against Russia. Earlier this week, the US vetoed a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire for the third time, and the UK abstained.“The fact that we haven’t signed up for some of these resolutions and what have you, it does do some damage. There is no doubt about that,” Cameron said. “But I think when you explain how we really want to stop the fighting right now and have got a plan to do it, I think that helps to build some faith between the Arab world and what foreign ministers like myself and others say.”As European ministers sought to change minds in the Republican party, Volodymyr Zelenskiy held talks with a US congressional delegation in Lviv. The group – led by the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer – said it wanted to show that the US had not abandoned “the Ukrainian people”, or its Nato allies in Europe.Schumer said he and his fellow Democrats would “not stop fighting” until $61bn in military funding for Ukraine was delivered. House Republicans are currently blocking the assistance package, despite a 64-19 Senate vote in favour.View image in fullscreen“We believe we are at an inflection point in history and we must make it clear to our friends and allies around the globe that the US does not back away from our responsibilities,” Schumer said. The consequences of walking away would be “severe”, he warned, saying he would “make this clear” to the Republican speaker and to others obstructing aid back in Washington.Schumer told the Associated Press opposition to the national security package “may be the view of Donald Trump and some of the hard-right zealots. But it is not the view of the American people, and I don’t think it’s the view of the majority of people in the House or Senate.”Ukrainian commanders say with no new US weapons deliveries they are facing serious problems on the battlefield. They say that Ukrainian soldiers were forced to withdraw from the eastern city of Avdiivka last week because of an acute shortage of shells and ammunition. Further Russian gains were likely if no more aid arrived, they admitted.Ukraine is also running out of western-supplied interceptor missiles. A Russian drone strike killed three people early on Friday in the Black Sea port of Odesa, the regional governor, Oleh Kiper, said. Ukrainian air defences were only able to shoot down 23 out of 31 drones – a significantly lower number than in attacks last year.Earlier in Lviv Zelenskiy met with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. The country has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest European allies. Frederiksen recently pledged to give all of Denmark’s artillery reserves to Ukraine and on Friday signed a long-term security agreement with Kyiv. It envisages giving €1.8bn ($1.9bn) in support.The two leaders visited Lviv’s Lychakiv cemetery and laid flowers at the grave of a Ukrainian soldier. Many hundreds of service personnel have been buried there since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago. More

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      in US Politics

      David Cameron urges US Republicans to send Ukraine more long-range weapons

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      David Cameron has used his first trip to the US since his appointment as the UK’s foreign secretary to urge the Republican party to back Ukraine with more long-range weapons, saying the aid represented tremendous value for money.He said for 10% of the US defence budget nearly half of Russia’s prewar military assets had been destroyed. Urging the west be patient about the pace of Ukraine military advances, he argued no red line should be set on western aid save Nato troops directly fighting Russia.“There is nothing that will drive Russia further back and put Putin more on the back foot than actually seeing that Crimea, which is legally part of Ukraine, is properly under attack from Ukrainian forces,” Lord Cameron said. He said that would require the further supply of long-range weaponry.In a change of UK tone if not policy, he also called for the west to seize and not just freeze Russian central bank assets in the west, saying he had looked at all the arguments against making the move, including the potential chilling effect on investments in western economies or breaching past legal undertakings. “So far I have not seen anything that suggests it would be a bad idea,” he said.The seized assets should be used as a down payment for the reparations Russian will eventually have to pay for the illegal invasion of Ukraine, he said. Cameron was planning to raise the issue in talks with the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.Speaking to an Aspen Security Forum in Washington, Cameron adopted a tone of optimism about Ukraine that has been absent in the British government since the departure of the former prime minister Boris Johnson.He urged Republicans not to be despondent about victory, saying Ukraine had taken back half the territory that Russia stole and sunk a fifth of the Russian Black Sea fleet.He said: “There are many aspects to this war that do look quite like the first world war, the deep trenches, the frozen lines, the big defensive elements and all of that but I think what you’ve seen is where we have gone further on weapons and helped, they can make an enormous difference.”US hesitancy led to Ukraine being supplied ACTMS long-range weapons for use only in October.“There has been a hesitancy over escalatory threats that has not been borne out,” Cameron said. “As long as you don’t cross the red line of Nato soldiers fighting Russia soldiers, we should do everything we can to continue to support Ukraine.”Cameron, who spent time in Congress meeting senior Republicans, said: “Putin’s invasion is the worst example of one state invading and wrecking the sovereignty of another state since the second world war.”On Wednesday the US Senate blocked a supplemental funding bill that included financial aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as provisions aimed at bolstering border security. Every Senate Republican opposed advancing the legislation. The 49 to 51 vote increases the likelihood that Congress will fail to approve more funding for Ukraine before the end of the year. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on politicians and pop: don’t maim that tune | Editorial

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      The scene is Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month. Up on stage is a man running to be the Republican party’s next pick for US president. A song starts over the tannoy. It is one of the hopeful’s declared favourites. Pumping the air, he lifts the mic and begins rapping along: “You better lose yourself in the music / The moment, you own it, you better never let it go.”So goes one of the best-known songs of the 21st century – and one of the most bizarre moments so far in the Republican primaries. Why is Vivek Ramaswamy – with an estimated net worth somewhere north of $950m – karaoke-ing about life in a mobile home? What does a product of Yale and Harvard know about having to wear a sweater coated with vomit (“mom’s spaghetti”)?Such questions clearly troubled Lose Yourself’s author, Eminem, who last week fired off a lawyer’s letter demanding that the politician stop using any of his work. Just as the song foretold, Mr Ramaswamy only got one shot – sadly for him.Politicians have tangled with pop for decades – just think of Harold Wilson’s canny award of MBEs to the Fab Four – yet in recent years, real political contenders have had to pretend that they actually listen to the stuff. Picking her Desert Island Discs in 1978, Margaret Thatcher thought she would subsist on a diet of Beethoven and Dvořák. Three decades later, Gordon Brown was asked whether he liked Arctic Monkeys and tried a cheery bluff about how they’d “certainly wake you up in the morning”.As the then chancellor later admitted, he’d never heard the band, let alone sluiced cider down his jumper to I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor. But he was right to observe that, from Strictly to the Lionesses, “Unless you can offer a view on each and every issue of the day, you are immediately accused of indecisiveness.” As mass-membership parties have withered away, so modern politicians must show that they are one of us through a feigned enthusiasm for popular culture – even though it has nothing to do with their job.In a few weeks, Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem, turns 51. He ranks among the most talented performers in hip-hop, an art form that has marked its own 50th birthday this month. Both are a good sight older than 38-year-old Mr Ramaswamy, and are soaked into our daily lives to an extent that politicians can only dream of. Lose Yourself has soundtracked countless gym sessions, an advert for Chrysler and a campaign by Joe Biden. Its author may hate the politics of Donald Trump and his Republican acolytes, but artists can’t choose their fans.Yet it is odd to see a venture capitalist such as Mr Ramaswamy act the underdog; or to hear Old Etonian David Cameron proclaim his love for The Eton Rifles by the Jam. Part of how this era of supersized inequality persists is by the people at the top pretending they’re just like those at the bottom. Why, they even listen to the same music! The boss of Goldman Sachs is a DJ, and our very own prime minister enjoys rap. Although, being Rishi Sunak, he knows all the words to that 90s embarrassment Ice Ice Baby. Give us Eminem any day. More

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      in World Politics

      The Tories Get a Thumping in Local UK Elections

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