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    Northern Ireland Has a Sinn Fein Leader. It’s a Landmark Moment.

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    The idea of a first minister who supports closer ties to the Republic of Ireland — let alone one from Sinn Fein, a party with historic ties to the Irish Republican Army — was once unthinkable. On Saturday, it became reality.As Michelle O’Neill walked down the marble staircase in Northern Ireland’s Parliament building on the outskirts of Belfast on Saturday, she appeared confident and calm. She smiled as applause erupted from supporters in the balcony. Yet her determined walk and otherwise serious gaze conveyed the gravity of the moment.The political party she represents, Sinn Fein, was shaped by the decades-long, bloody struggle of Irish nationalists in the territory who dreamed of reuniting with the Republic of Ireland and undoing the 1921 partition that has kept Northern Ireland under British rule.Now, for the first time, a Sinn Fein politician holds Northern Ireland’s top political office, a landmark moment for the party and for the broader region as a power-sharing government is restored. The first minister role had previously always been held by a unionist politician committed to remaining part of the United Kingdom.“As first minister, I am wholeheartedly committed to continuing the work of reconciliation between all our people,” Ms. O’Neill said, noting that her parents and grandparents would never have imagined that such a day would come. “I would never ask anyone to move on, but what I can ask is for us to move forward.”The idea of a nationalist first minister in Northern Ireland, let alone one from Sinn Fein, a party with historic ties to the Irish Republican Army, was indeed once unthinkable.But the story of Sinn Fein’s transformation — from a fringe party that was once the I.R.A.’s political wing, to a political force that won the most seats in Northern Ireland’s 2022 elections — is also the story of a changing political landscape and the results of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the decades-long sectarian conflict known as the Troubles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Under Pressure, U.K.’s Sunak Tries Another Cabinet Reset With a Swerve to Center

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      After more than a year as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, a Conservative, has failed to close a yawning gap in the polls. On Monday he did something new.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain fired one of his most senior and divisive ministers on Monday, in a reshuffle of his top team that unexpectedly brought a centrist predecessor, David Cameron, back into government.The departure of Suella Braverman as home secretary and the surprise return of Mr. Cameron as foreign secretary were the latest in a series of convulsions that have rocked the governing Conservative Party since the fateful Brexit referendum that Mr. Cameron called in 2016, and signaled the peril facing Mr. Sunak as he nears a general election expected next year.After 13 years in Downing Street, the Conservatives’ grip on power appears to be slipping, with the party trailing Labour by around 20 points in the polls against a challenging economic backdrop, with sluggish growth and inflation eroding living standards, and a public sector under acute strain after years of Conservative-led austerity.Mr. Sunak has tried various gambits to address his party’s unpopularity with voters, weakening environmental targets, pledging to defend motorists and promising tougher sentencing for serious criminals. None seem to have worked.At the same time, Ms. Braverman, who is seen as a rival within the party, had become increasingly emboldened as home secretary, raising her profile and appearing to prepare the ground for a leadership bid if the Conservatives lose the election as many expect.Last week she wrote an extraordinary opinion article in The Times of London, which was not authorized by Downing Street, in which she criticized the police for not seeking to ban a pro-Palestinian protest march in the capital, and described the demonstrators as “hate marchers” and “Islamists.”Protesters in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, on Vauxhall Bridge in London, on Saturday.Hollie Adams/ReutersAfter counterprotesters clashed with the police on Saturday, critics accused Ms. Braverman of inflaming tensions and encouraging far-right demonstrators onto the streets, and her position was judged untenable by Downing Street.Mr. Sunak and Ms. Braverman spoke by phone on Monday, and in the shuffle of jobs that followed her departure, she was replaced by the more emollient former foreign secretary, James Cleverly, freeing up his position for Mr. Cameron.Both men are regarded as moderates and the changes appeared to signal a shift away from the divisive politics that were championed by Ms. Braverman, whose focus on cultural issues had become a feature of Mr. Sunak’s government in recent months.Neither of the two appointments was good news for the right-wing faction of the Conservative Party where Ms. Braverman had a small but vocal group of supporters.Nor was Mr. Sunak’s decision to keep Jeremy Hunt as chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Hunt’s resistance to offering tax cuts has antagonized a wider group of Conservative lawmakers. He, like Mr. Cameron, campaigned against Brexit in 2016, but Mr. Hunt has made controlling inflation his priority and says that reducing taxes will have to wait.The return to the cabinet of Mr. Cameron may remind some voters of the political chaos that he triggered in 2016 when Britons ignored his recommendation and narrowly voted to leave the European Union. Mr. Sunak is the fourth Conservative leader to have become prime minister since Mr. Cameron stood aside after the referendum result, which sent shock waves around Europe.David Cameron, Britain’s new foreign secretary, departing 10 Downing Street on Monday.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Sunak restored some stability when he succeeded Liz Truss as prime minister last year, but his latest reshuffle risks reopening ideological divisions that have dogged the party in recent years. Though the salience of Brexit has faded in British politics, Mr. Cameron — who led the campaign against it — will now be partly responsible for promoting the policy around the globe.Yet, while bringing back Mr. Cameron is a political gamble, Mr. Sunak may have judged the risk worthwhile. He has limited time to win back voters, or possibly even to limit the scale of a defeat in the looming election.Ms. Braverman had lost her job as home secretary once before, under the short-lived government of Ms. Truss, but she was given it back by Mr. Sunak when he entered Downing Street. She used her position in cabinet to push hard-right policies and embraced polarizing rhetoric, describing migration as a “hurricane,” the arrival of asylum seekers on the British coast as an “invasion” and homelessness as a “lifestyle choice.”While Mr. Sunak’s language was more measured, he supported most of her ideas — in particular, her pursuit of a policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That faces a critical test on Wednesday when the country’s Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on its legality following a series of challenges.Mr. Sunak visiting an Ikea distribution center in Dartford, Kent, in June.Pool photo by Jack HillThe decision to bring back Mr. Cameron, who led the Conservatives between 2005-16, seemed at odds with Mr. Sunak’s recent claims at his party’s annual conference to be an agent of change.It also underscored a constitutional requirement of Britain’s political system that ministers hold a seat in Parliament so they can propose legislation and be held to account by fellow lawmakers. As a consequence Mr. Sunak on Monday nominated Mr. Cameron for a seat in the House of Lords, Parliament’s less powerful, unelected upper chamber.It is not the first time in the modern era that a foreign secretary has been a member of the House of Lords, rather than the House of Commons: Peter Carington, who became Lord Carrington — and as such, gained a second r in his name — filled that role between 1979-82. He resigned amid the Falklands crisis, when troops from Argentina occupied a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic in 1982, sparking a brief conflict.While the situation is not unique, Mr. Cameron’s status as a member of the House of Lords has already raised tensions among lawmakers in the House of Commons as he will normally speak not to them, but to an assembly of unelected members of the upper chamber.Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons, said on Monday that he was looking into ways in which the new foreign secretary could be held accountable by elected lawmakers. It was “especially important” that they should be able to scrutinize his work, “given the gravity of the current international situation,” Mr. Hoyle said in Parliament. More

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      Scenting Power, U.K. Business Flocks to the Labour Party

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      The governing Conservative Party was long seen as entrepreneurs’ natural ally and lobbyists’ most important target. With an election on the horizon, that’s changing.It was impossible to miss: a large green, yellow and blue off-road vehicle parked in a prime spot in the exhibition hall at the Labour Party’s annual conference. The car belonged to Ineos, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, and its outsize presence, among dozens of businesses and organizations, marked the company’s first time attending the gathering.Andrew Gardner, who runs Ineos’s huge refinery complex in Grangemouth, Scotland, was standing by the vehicle on Tuesday afternoon, grabbing time with passing Labour lawmakers to discuss the company’s goals.He had never attended a Labour conference before, and skipped the governing Conservative Party’s the previous week, but said he had come to this one, in the northern English city of Liverpool, because Labour was expected to form the next government. His colleague Richard Longden, Ineos’s head of communications, chimed in, describing “a vibe here of a party that’s changed, and one that’s looking forward to the future. And business needs to be speaking to them and needs to be seen.”“Which is exactly why we’re here,” Mr. Gardner added.In Britain, the Conservative Party has traditionally been seen as the party of business and the guardians of free enterprise. Now, under the centrist leadership of Keir Starmer, Labour is taking over that mantle. As the party inches closer to power, with a general election expected next year, it is engaged in a mutually beneficial love-in with the corporate sector.At the four-day conference this week, attended by 18,500 people, British executives and lobbyists representing industries from finance and technology to construction and defense crammed into bars, corridors and meeting rooms as Labour made its pitch to be “the undisputed party of business,” in the words of Jonathan Reynolds, a lawmaker who speaks for Labour on the issue.The record attendance was boosted by companies showing up for the first time, decamping from their more familiar habitat of Conservative Party gatherings, including Ineos, whose CEO and founder is the billionaire Brexit supporter Jim Ratcliffe.Ineos’s refinery complex in Grangemouth, Scotland. The company, whose founder is a billionaire Brexit supporter, had a strong presence at Labour’s conference.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMr. Gardner said that Labour was already saying 80 percent of what he wanted to hear in terms of decarbonizing large-scale industry, as the company invests in reducing its carbon emissions. (That off-road vehicle was hydrogen-powered.) But he was there to push for the last portion, which was to lobby Labour not to end natural gas exploration in the North Sea too soon.That message was “slowly percolating,” he said. And there was some evidence that Ineos was being heard: Rachel Reeves, who would become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour win next year, mentioned Grangemouth in her speech to party members.The party brought together about 200 executives on Monday at a forum within the conference to meet would-be cabinet ministers.“What we are experiencing is a party who tell us that, if elected, they want to be business-friendly government, that they want to work with the private sector in partnership,” said Chris Hayward, who speaks on policy questions for the City of London, Britain’s historic financial district.At a reception on Tuesday evening held by Labour Business, a forum to engage with the commercial sector, the mood was almost euphoric. As guests sipped wine and ate canapés, the group’s chairman, Hamish Sandison, said that not only had the tide turned in terms of Labour’s relationship with business, it had “become a tsunami.”That enthusiasm partly reflects strained relations with the governing Conservatives, particularly over Britain’s exit from the European Union, which many big corporations opposed.Boris Johnson, a former prime minister, famously dismissed the concerns of businesses over Brexit in crude terms. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, caused markets chaos with her plans for unfunded tax cuts. And although her successor, Rishi Sunak, restored some calm, he has recently upset many businesses by abruptly changing targets on some net zero plans and canceling part of a high-speed train network.Labour has been on a journey, too. Its previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, promised nationalization of key industries and big increases in public spending funded by higher taxes. That agenda has been unceremoniously junked by Mr. Starmer, who became leader in 2020 and moved to purge his predecessor.Labour’s shift attracted some surprising names, like JCB Hydrogen, an energy firm, which handed out tote bags to party members. Its chairman, Anthony Bamford, was a prominent supporter of Brexit and, during the last general election in 2019, hosted a campaign event for Mr. Johnson.Outside the Labour conference on Tuesday. It had 18,500 people in attendance.Jon Super/Associated PressWhat draws many businesses to Labour is the prospect of a more stable policy environment, which could be cemented by the party’s plans for a long-term industrial strategy — an idea that runs counter to Mr. Sunak’s free-market instincts.Carl Ennis, the head of Siemens in Britain and Ireland, was also at the Labour conference for the first time. He was there to lobby for an “overarching” and long-term approach, which was something that the Conservatives were struggling to provide, he said. “My job is to make the U.K. an attractive place for Siemens to invest its money in,” he said, adding that Labour’s industrial strategy appealed to him.In every meeting room, businesses had the same central plea: Give us consistency. And the Labour party was receptive, said Shevaun Haviland, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce. “We feel very positive that the party’s listening to what we have to say and what our members have to say,” she said.Ben Wilson, vice president of public policy for Mastercard, said that his experience of engaging with the party was “indicative of how open Labour is to business,” saying that he and other executives had the opportunity to discuss policies that could form part of the platform of the “next government.”All this has revived memories of the 1990s when, in the years before Tony Blair became prime minister, the party wooed business over lunches and dinners in what was nicknamed the “prawn cocktail offensive.” This time much of the interaction has been over breakfast with Ms. Reeves, nicknamed the “scrambled eggs and smoked salmon offensive.”“Ever since I became shadow chancellor I’ve had this aim to reach out to business,” Ms. Reeves, a former economist at the Bank of England, said at a small event on the sidelines of the conference. “A lot of the businesses that I’ve met over the last two and a half years would have seen, in some of the announcements this week, their fingerprints on our policies.”While some on the left of the party were unnerved by the dominant presence of business and its influence on future policy, other supporters suggested it was the inevitable result of Labour’s double-digit poll lead.“Businesses are here in numbers,” said Stephen Kinsella, a former antitrust lawyer and Labour donor. “There are a lot of people who want to back a winner, think they have spotted a winner and realize they need to get to know the people who are going to be in government.” More

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      How America Made James Bond ‘Woke’

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      After so many decades fighting evil masterminds bent on Britannia’s destruction, the 21st-century version of James Bond has found a very 21st-century antagonist. In the newest Bond novel, “On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” 007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a supervillain whose nom de guerre is Athelstan of Wessex — in other words, a Little Englander, a Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.The novel’s Bond, who carries on a “situationship” with “a busy lawyer specializing in immigration law” (not to worry, he’s not taking advantage, “he wasn’t the only man she was seeing”), must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation; along the way the secret agent muses on the superiority of the metric system and the deplorable dog whistles of populism.The book’s mere existence seems designed to agitate conservatives; I wouldn’t have read it without the spur of hostile reviews from right-of-center British scribblers. But the progressive Bond also usefully illustrates an interesting feature of contemporary politics in the English-speaking world. It isn’t just that American progressivism supplies an ideological lingua franca that extends across the Anglosphere, such that what we call “wokeness” naturally influences the fictional MI6 no less than the real C.I.A. It’s that forms of progressivism that originated in the United States, under specific American conditions, can seem more potent among our English-speaking friends and neighbors than they do in America itself.This is not a fully provable assertion, but it’s something that I felt strongly on recent visits to Canada and Britain. Politically, Canadian Conservatives and Britain’s Tories seem to be in very different positions. In Canada, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, looks poised for a major victory in the next election, which would end Justin Trudeau’s three-term reign as prime minister. In Britain, the Tories are poised for a drubbing in the next election, which would push them into the opposition for the first time since 2010.But in power or out of power, both groups seemed culturally beleaguered, resigned to progressive power and a touch envious of the position of American conservatives (if not of our political captivity to Donald Trump). In Canadian conversations there were laments for what was lost when Trudeau defeated Stephen Harper in 2015 — how elections have consequences, and the consequences in Canada were a sharp left-wing turn that no Conservative government is likely to reverse. In British conversations, the talk was all about how elections don’t have consequences, and how notional conservative rule has done nothing to halt the resilience of progressive biases in government and the advance of American-style wokeness in the culture.These complaints encompass a lot of different realities. In Canada, they cover the rapid advance of social liberalism in drug and euthanasia policy — with nationwide marijuana decriminalization followed by British Columbia’s new experiment in decriminalizing some harder drugs, while assisted suicide expands more rapidly than in even the most liberal U.S. state. In Britain, they cover the increasing enforcement of progressive speech codes against cultural conservatives — like the Tory councilor recently arrested by the police for retweeting a video criticizing how police officers dealt with a Christian street preacher.In both countries the complaints cover rising immigration rates — the conscious policy of the Trudeau government, which is presiding over an extraordinary surge in new Canadians, and the sleepwalking policy of the British Tories, who despite Brexit and repeated populist revolts find themselves presiding over record net migration rates. (By contrast, when America elected the immigration restrictionist Trump, immigration rates did actually decline.)And in both countries, conservatives feel that their national elites are desperately searching for their own versions of the “racial reckoning” that convulsed the United States in the summer of 2020, notwithstanding the absence of an American-style experience with either slavery or Jim Crow.Thus the spate of national apologies, canceled patriotic celebrations and church burnings in Canada in 2021, following claims about the discovery of a mass grave in British Columbia near one of the residential schools for Indigenous children that the Canadian government sponsored, often through religious institutions, in the 19th and 20th century. (The cruelty and neglect at these schools was real but the specific claims about graves at the B.C. school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) Or thus the attempted retcon of England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least — into an American-style “nation of immigrants” narrative, and the sense, as the British writer Ed West wrote in 2020, that in English schools “America’s history is swallowing our own.”To the extent that these complaints capture an Anglosphere reality, I think you can identify several different points that might explain what Canadian and British conservatives are seeing.The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium, so it’s not surprising that their leaders and tastemakers would sometimes rush to embrace ideas that seem to be in the American vanguard — behaving, as the British writer Aris Roussinos puts it, like “Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets” to establish their identification with Rome. By contrast in continental Europe, in countries that are under the American security umbrella but don’t share as much of our language and culture, the zeal for imitation feels a bit weaker, and “anti-woke” politics that double as anti-Americanism feel more influential.The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. The new progressivism is not simply a new or semi-Christian substitute for the former Western faith, but the rhetoric of diversity-equity-inclusion and antiracism clearly fills part of the void left by Christianity’s and especially Protestantism’s retreat. So it would not be surprising for an ideology that originates in the post-Protestant precincts of the United States to carry all before it in post-Protestant Canada or Britain, while meeting more resistance in the more religious regions of America — and not just in the white-Christian Bible Belt but among the religious-conservative minorities whose rightward trend may be keeping the Republican coalition afloat.Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse. Once a set of ideas take hold among the cognoscenti — progressive ideas in this case, though it could apply to other worldviews as well — it’s more natural to conform, and more difficult to dissent, in the cozier precincts of Westminster or among Canada’s Laurentian elite than it is in the American meritocracy, which spins off more competing power centers and dissenting factions.An extreme example of this tendency is visible in Ireland, which shifted incredibly rapidly from being the West’s conservative-Catholic outlier to being close to uniformly progressive, a swing that the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald attributes to a fundamental reality of small-island life: “Because of Ireland’s size, it is much more socially costly for an Irish person to appear to go against a consensus than it is for other people in other countries.”A recent essay by the Cardiff academic Thomas Prosser makes a related point about other small Celtic polities, noting that Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland have governments that are more progressive than their voters, a pattern he attributes to the way that ascendant ideologies (neoliberalism in the 1990s, or woke progressivism now) can sometimes achieve a kind of full elite “capture” more easily in smaller countries.Bucking consensus is presumably easier in Britain and in Canada. But not as easy, perhaps, as in the vast and teeming United States — which in its First Amendment-protected multitidinousness can be both the incubator of a potent new progressivism and also the place where resistance to that ideology runs strong, indeed stronger even than among 007 and other servants of His Majesty the King.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Tony Blair, Former U.K. Leader, Is Suddenly Back in Favor

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      The former British prime minister, who left Downing Street widely unpopular, is back in favor with his party, Labour, which hopes his political skills can be an advantage as an election nears.A decade and a half after Tony Blair left Downing Street, one issue still defines the former British prime minister in the eyes of many Britons: his disastrous decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.When Mr. Blair was given a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II last year, more than a million people signed a petition demanding the honor be rescinded. And within his own Labour Party, he remained a complex figure, detested by those on the far left while grudgingly admired by some who noted that he was the party’s only leader to have won three consecutive British elections.Today, with the Labour opposition sensing rising power under the stewardship of its leader, Keir Starmer, Mr. Blair is suddenly, and rather remarkably, back in favor. For Mr. Starmer, embracing Mr. Blair sends a political message, underscoring Labour’s shift to the center. But the former prime minister also has charisma and communication skills that Mr. Starmer lacks, assets that could be useful as a general election approaches.Last month, the two men appeared onstage together, exchanging compliments at a glitzy conference organized by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — an organization that works for governments around the world, including autocratic ones, and churns out policies that could help Labour if it wins the next election.Mr. Blair, now 70, is graying, thinner and his face a little more gaunt than when he left Downing Street in 2007. But he still effortlessly held the stage as he told the audience that Britain would be in safe hands if Mr. Starmer won the next election.“It was like the apostolic succession was being declared,” said John McTernan, a political strategist and onetime aide to Mr. Blair, who added that “the chemistry between the two guys made you think they talk a lot and they understand each other.”Mr. Blair and Labour’s current leader, Keir Starmer, exchanged compliments onstage at a Tony Blair Institute conference.Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Getty ImagesJill Rutter, a former civil servant and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a London-based research institute, said Mr. Blair “has clearly been keen to reinsert himself as a big player in British politics,” but Mr. Starmer “is the first leader who seems prepared to let him do so.”The right-leaning Daily Telegraph newspaper was more blunt. “Tony Blair is preparing to rule Britain again — and Starmer might just let him,” read the headline of an opinion article.Mr. Blair led Labour into power in 1997 in a landslide victory and was prime minister for a decade, shifting the party to the center, helping to negotiate a peace deal in Northern Ireland and presiding over an economy strong enough to invest in health and education.But by the end of his tenure, and as Iraq descended into chaos, the public had soured on Mr. Blair, who, along with George W. Bush, the United States president, had justified the invasion with never-substantiated claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction. The invasion led to years of sectarian violence in Iraq and the rise of Islamist militant groups that became precursors to the Islamic State.Mr. Blair’s reputation post-Downing Street was further damaged by lucrative consultancy work for governments with dubious human rights records, seeming to confirm his affinity for wealth. Such questions have also been raised about his institute. London’s Sunday Times recently reported that the institute continued to advise the government of Saudi Arabia after the slaughter of the writer Jamal Khashoggi and still received money from the kingdom.The awarding of a knighthood to Mr. Blair last year prompted a street protest.Antony Jones/Getty ImagesIn a statement, the institute said, “Mr. Blair took the view then and is strongly of the view now — as he has said publicly — that whilst the murder of Mr. Khashoggi was a terrible crime that should never have happened, the program of social and economic change underway in Saudi Arabia is of immense and positive importance to the region and the world.”“The relationship with Saudi Arabia is of critical strategic importance to the West,” it added, and “therefore staying engaged there is justified.”None of these criticisms have stopped a rehabilitation that would have been inconceivable while Labour was led by Mr. Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger and a fierce political adversary of Mr. Blair’s. At the time, Mr. Starmer worked alongside Mr. Corbyn, and when Mr. Starmer became party leader in 2020, he initially kept Mr. Blair at arm’s length.Now, their ties are so warm that when the former prime minister recently celebrated his birthday at a London restaurant, Mr. Starmer dropped by to wish him well.“Tony has just kept going after a period in which it was almost like the Labour Party didn’t want him to be around,” said Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair’s former spokesman. “I think people eventually think, ‘Say what you like about the guy, but he’s good at what he does; he’s still the most credible explainer of difficult situations.’”Some see a modern-day political parable in Mr. Blair’s return.“A lot of politics has now taken on the narrative of celebrity,” said Mr. McTernan, the political strategist, adding, “Tony, as a political celebrity, fell in the eyes of the public but he has earned his way back.”“It’s not about forgiveness about Iraq, but there is an arc of a narrative around Tony,” Mr. McTernan said, with Britons starting to “be ready to listen again.”Mr. Blair addressing British troops as prime minister in Basra, Iraq, in 2003.Pool photo by Stefan RousseauMr. Blair’s political rehabilitation has been helped by comparisons with a governing Conservative Party that has presided over political turmoil. Years of deadlock over Brexit were broken when Boris Johnson won a landslide election in 2019 — only to be driven out of Downing Street last year under a cloud of scandal. He was replaced by Liz Truss, the British prime minister with the shortest stint in history, before Rishi Sunak restored some stability.“We have had such a succession of failed prime ministers that, to look at someone who did command the stage, you do look back and say, ‘He was quite a big dominating prime minister,’” said Ms. Rutter.The institute’s output has also helped change Mr. Blair’s image, Mr. Campbell, his former spokesman, said. The former prime minister saw a gap for relatively nonideological research focusing on technocratic policymaking and tackling challenges such as artificial intelligence, digital policy and relations with the European Union.With about 800 staff members scattered around the world in Abu Dhabi, Accra, San Francisco, Singapore and New York, and a sleek, modern office in the West End of London, the institute has even had influence over the Conservative government, Ms. Rutter said, pointing to Mr. Blair’s proposal during the coronavirus pandemic to structure its vaccine program around giving as many people as possible a first shot.Mr. Campbell, his former spokesman, added that the work of the institute showed Mr. Blair in a new light, making money not just for himself but also “to build an organization, the fruits of which people are now seeing.”Perhaps the biggest question is: Now what?Mr. Blair, on the left of the second row, sat with other former prime ministers at the coronation of King Charles III this year.Pool photo by Richard Pohle“In the campaign, does an intervention from Tony help?” Mr. Campbell said of the coming election. “In my mind, it would; it would be big news. But that’s a tactical question.”If Labour wins power, more possibilities for influence would open up for Mr. Blair.Ms. Rutter suggests he has built up his institute in part because, when he was in Downing Street — which has relatively few staff members compared with government departments — he believed he had too few experts at his disposal.“The question is whether Blair is content to have an institute churning out reports that a Labour government may or may not want to look at, or will he be looking to be more of a power behind the throne,” she said.Mr. Blair, she added, “has tried to amass a huge piece of policy capability — the only problem for him now is that he’s not prime minister.” More

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      Justices Ignoring the ‘Scent of Impropriety’

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      More from our inbox:The Costs of the Trump InquiryGiuliani’s False AccusationsReform the College Admissions SystemBiden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Hannah RobinsonTo the Editor:Re “What Smells Off at the Court?,” by Michael Ponsor (Opinion guest essay, July 16):Judge Ponsor’s bewilderment at the loss of olfaction on the Supreme Court is spot on. As he explained, it isn’t that hard for a judge to catch even a faint whiff of the scent of impropriety.And you don’t have to be a federal judge to smell it. Every federal employee knows that aroma. When I was a Justice Department lawyer, a group of federal and state lawyers spent months negotiating in a conference room at the defendant’s law firm. The firm regularly ordered in catered lunches and invited the government attorneys to partake. None of us ever accepted a bite.Another time, a company hoping to build a development on a Superfund site hosted a presentation for federal and municipal officials. The company’s spokesperson presented each city official with a goodie bag filled with stuff like baseball caps bearing the project’s name. To me and my colleagues, the spokesperson said: “We didn’t bring any for you. We knew you wouldn’t take them.” They were right.The sense of smell is more highly evolved in the depths of the administrative state than in the rarefied air at the pinnacle of the judicial branch.Steve GoldCaldwell, N.J.The writer now teaches at Rutgers Law School.To the Editor:Judge Michael Ponsor alludes to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges as the guide he has followed his entire career. However, he implies that the code is faulty by stating the Supreme Court needs a “skillfully drafted code” to avoid political pressure on justices. He does not elaborate on what shortcomings the existing code has that make it inapplicable to the Supreme Court.The existing code is very skillfully drafted. It emphasizes that the foundation of the judicial system is based on public trust in the impartiality of judges. The code is very clear that the “appearance of impropriety” is as important as its absence.This is at the core of the scandals of current sitting justices. The actions and favors received most certainly have the appearance of impropriety. Those appearances of impropriety are undermining confidence and trust in the Supreme Court. No amount of rationalization and argle-bargle by the justices can change that.R.J. GodinBerkeley, Calif.To the Editor:When I served as a United States district judge, it did not take an acute sense of smell for me to determine what action was ethically appropriate. I had a simple test that was easy to apply: Do I want to read about this in The New York Times? I think the current members of the Supreme Court are beginning to realize the value of this simple test.John S. MartinFort Myers, Fla.The writer served as a district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1990 to 2003.The Costs of the Trump InquiryThe scope of Jack Smith’s investigation of former President Donald J. Trump greatly exceeds that of the special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Cost of Scrutinizing Trump Continues to Grow” (front page, July 24):We should weigh the cost of investigating and prosecuting allegations of major crimes committed by Donald Trump against the cost of doing nothing.Imagine a world in which the United States descends into an authoritarian regime — with our rulers selected by violent mobs rather than in elections. The costs to our rights as citizens and our system of free enterprise would be incalculably larger in such a world than what Jack Smith is currently spending to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor of law at Columbia University.Giuliani’s False Accusations Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Poll Workers Get Retraction From Giuliani” (front page, July 27):If there was such widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, why did Rudy Giuliani resort to falsely accusing the two Atlanta election workers? Didn’t he have many true examples of fraud to choose from?Tom FritschlerPort Angeles, Wash.Reform the College Admissions SystemThe Harvard University campus last month. The Biden administration’s inquiry comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Legacy Admission at Harvard Faces Federal Inquiry” (front page, July 26):While I applaud the focus on legacy admissions, it is clear that the entire process needs an overhaul. Every day now it feels as if a new study is released that confirms what we had long suspected: that elite colleges favor the wealthy and the connected. Does anyone believe that removing legacy admissions alone will change this?As it stands, elite schools care too much about wealth and prestige to fundamentally alter practices that tie them to wealthy and connected people. If the Education Department is serious about reform, it will broaden its inquiry to examine the entire system.However one feels about the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, at the very least it has forced us to reconsider the status quo. I pray that policymakers take this opportunity instead of leaving the bones of the old system in place.Alex ChinSan FranciscoThe writer is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University.Biden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA White House staff member walking Commander, one of the Biden family’s dogs, on the North Lawn of the White House earlier this year.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Emails Report List of Attacks by Biden’s Dog” (news article, July 26):I support Joe Biden’s presidency and think he is generally a thoughtful, kind man. But I am appalled to learn that Secret Service agents — or any employees at the White House — have to regularly contend with the risk of being bitten by the president’s German shepherd.No one deserves to face not just the physical harm and pain of dog bites but also the constant fear of proximity to such an aggressive pet. Keeping the dog, Commander, at the White House shows poor judgment.This situation hardly reflects the Bidens’ respect and caring for those sworn to serve them. It’s time for Commander to find a new home better suited to his needs.Cheryl AlisonWorcester, Mass.A Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “The Disaster No One Wants to Talk About,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, July 23):I am a Brit, a fact I have been ashamed of since the Brexit vote in 2016, if not before.I voted to stay in the European Union. I was shocked at the result, and I was more shocked at the ignorance of others who voted.Our lives absolutely have changed since Brexit, but not for the better. My family is poorer, and we can no longer afford a holiday or many of the luxuries we previously could. As the economy suffers, with the rise in interest rates our mortgage is set to reach unspeakable sums. Package that with a near doubling in the cost of our weekly groceries, and we have big decisions that need to be made as a family.And still, despite this utter chaos, the widespread use of food banks, the regular striking of underpaid and underappreciated key workers, despite all of this, there are still enough people to shout loud in support of Brexit and the Conservative Party.We are a nation in blind denial. We are crashing. And yes, we are being pushed to breaking up into pieces not seen for centuries.As a family we miss the E.U., we mourn the E.U., and we grieve for the quality of life we once had but may never see again.Nevine MannRedruth, England More

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      NatWest C.E.O. Resigns Amid Nigel Farage’s Feud With Coutts Bank

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      Nigel Farage, a political insurgent and ally of Donald J. Trump, exposed his bank for dropping him over “reputational risks.” Some analysts say he could parlay his situation into a comeback.When Nigel Farage campaigned for a fellow populist, Donald J. Trump, in 2020, he seemed like a faded star seeking the spotlight abroad after it had swung past him at home. Mr. Farage, who helped mobilize the pro-Brexit vote in 2016, was marginalized in Britain, then consumed by the pandemic.No longer: For three weeks, Mr. Farage, has been back on the front pages of British papers, with an attention-grabbing claim that his exclusive private bank, Coutts, dropped him as a customer because of his polarizing politics.Early on Wednesday, after Mr. Farage’s allegations were largely vindicated, the chief executive of his bank’s parent, NatWest Group, resigned after she admitted improperly discussing his bank account with a BBC journalist. The chief executive, Alison Rose, said she was guilty of a “serious error of judgment.”For Mr. Farage, who expertly stoked the dispute on social media and with appearances on the TV network GB News, the drama catapulted him back into the limelight. It was a striking turn of events for a political insurgent who became, for many, a reviled symbol of Brexit, and later, a culture warrior on right-wing television.Now, facing expulsion from Coutts, a bank founded in 1692 that serves members of the British royal family, Mr. Farage suddenly began getting expressions of sympathy from some improbable places.“He shouldn’t have had his personal details revealed like that,” Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party said on the BBC Radio 5 Live show. “It doesn’t matter who you are; that’s a general rule,” Mr. Starmer said, adding that Ms. Rose’s departure was warranted by her mishandling of the case.Among Mr. Farage’s stoutest defenders was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who said on Twitter, “No one should be barred from using basic services for their political views. Free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy.”Pressure from Mr. Sunak and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, hastened Ms. Rose’s downfall after she confessed to being the source for the BBC report, which claimed, erroneously, that Mr. Farage had been dropped because he did not have enough money in his accounts. The government owns 39 percent of NatWest, which in turn owns Coutts.Alison Rose resigned her position at NatWest Group after saying she spoke to the BBC about Mr. Farage’s bank account.Simon Dawson/ReutersThe episode, analysts said, underscores the power that Mr. Farage, a former head of the U.K. Independence Party, still wields over the Conservatives. The Tories have long feared losing the votes of Brexiteers, who were critical to their electoral landslide in 2019, to whatever populist party is currently identified with Mr. Farage.Though Mr. Farage, 59, stepped down in 2021 as head of his latest party, Reform U.K., he is the host of a GB News talk show and remains an outspoken voice on issues like asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats. Prodded partly by Mr. Farage’s commentary, Mr. Sunak has made curbing the influx of small boats one of the five major goals of his government.“They’re very aware they need to hold on to the Farage-friendly voters they picked up in 2019,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, “They’re being driven in that direction, too, by the right-wing print media. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened — and it won’t be the last.”Mr. Farage isn’t satisfied yet. He is demanding the ouster of NatWest’s chairman, Howard Davies, and the chief executive of Coutts, Peter Flavel. And he says he will fight on behalf of thousands of other people whose accounts he says have been unfairly closed.“You can’t live or survive in the modern world without a bank account — you become a nonperson,” Mr. Farage said on GB News on Wednesday. “The whole banking industry culture has gone wrong. We need big changes in the law.”What exactly Mr. Farage has in mind is not clear. But his campaign plays into a fervid political climate in Britain, which suggests that his critique might gain traction. The Conservatives, trailing Labour in opinion polls by double digits, are seizing on social and culture issues to try to galvanize their voters.Mr. Sunak asserted this week that the Labour Party was in league with criminal gangs and unscrupulous lawyers in promoting the flow of asylum seekers across the channel. He presented himself as the bulwark against this illegal immigration, the kind of claim Mr. Farage might have made when he was in politics.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain onboard Border Agency cutter HMC Seeker, last month ahead of a news conference on immigration. Pool photo by Yui Mok“If Farage is smart, he will use this as a runway to some kind of political comeback,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent whose recent book, “Values, Voice and Virtue,” claims that Britain is ruled by an out-of-touch elite that is well to the left of the broader population.“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mr. Goodwin said. “The institutions, like the banks, are dominated by people who lean much further to the cultural left than many voters and who often do not even realize they are being political.”Such sweeping assertions are open to debate, of course. In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has had mixed results going after what he calls the “woke” policies of corporate giants like the Walt Disney Company.What makes Mr. Farage’s story striking is that he turned out to be right on the facts of the banking case — and some bastions of the British banking and media establishment turned out to be wrong.In late June, Mr. Farage said on social media that his bank told him it planned to close his account in July. Seven other banks, he said, turned him down when he tried to open a new account. He said he believed he had been flagged as a “politically exposed person,” meaning he was vulnerable to bribery by foreign governments, and therefore a risk to the bank.In early July, the BBC reported that the bank, now identified as Coutts, dropped Mr. Farage because he was not maintaining adequate account balances — and that his politics had nothing to do with it. But on July 18, Mr. Farage made public a 40-page document he obtained from the bank, which painted a different picture.A branch of Coutts Bank in London.Susannah Ireland/ReutersMr. Farage, the report said, is “considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter,” often criticized for racist or xenophobic statements. Such statements, it said, put Mr. Farage at odds with the bank’s goal of being an “inclusive organization.” The report also noted that he is an ally of Mr. Trump’s and a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, though the bank’s risk committee found no evidence of “direct links” between him and the Russian government.“There are significant reputational risks to the bank in being associated with him,” the report concluded, recommending that Coutts wind down its relationship with Mr. Farage after the expiration of a mortgageThe BBC’s economics editor, Simon Jack, and the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, apologized to Mr. Farage — as did Ms. Rose, who confirmed that she was the source for its report. She expressed regret for discussing his account, as well as for “the deeply inappropriate language contained in those papers.”For Mr. Farage, who has sometimes seemed adrift since Britain left the European Union, it seemed the springboard to a new cause, if not a return to politics.“It signals a big campaign on behalf of the huge number of ordinary people who’ve been de-banked and have had no one to speak up for them,” Mr. Farage said through a spokeswoman at GB News. More

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      As Sunak Makes His Case to Britons, the Economy Could Undermine It

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      Britain’s Conservative government faces a morass of problems, some new, others longstanding, that are stymying Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hopes to hold onto power by selling himself as the repairman for a broken Britain. On Wednesday, he got a faint sign that the repair work was gaining traction: the government announced that Britain’s inflation rate in June was 7.9 percent, a decline from the previous month.But the rate is still higher than that of Britain’s European neighbors and more than twice that of the United States. And it is just one of a morass of economic problems — from spiraling debt to labor shortages to sputtering growth — that are stymying Mr. Sunak as he makes the case that his Conservative Party, in government for the past 13 years, deserves to stay there after an election that he must call by January 2025.The Conservatives will face an early test of their political fortunes on Thursday, with three by-elections, special elections to fill seats in Parliament vacated by Tory lawmakers. The party is girding itself for a long day.“They’re running out of runway,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “These by-elections are likely to be a referendum on the government, and they could lose all three.”Shoppers in London last month. Britain’s annual inflation rate is higher than that of its European neighbors and twice that of United States.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer who once worked at Goldman Sachs, has cultivated a reputation as a technocrat and problem solver. He has thrown off the supply-side ideological experimentation of his predecessor, Liz Truss, and the have-your-cake-and-eat-it style of her predecessor, Boris Johnson.But Mr. Sunak’s return to fiscal prudence has yet to reinvigorate Britain’s growth. On the contrary, inflation is forcing the Bank of England to hike interest rates aggressively to avert a wage-price spiral. The tight-money policy threatens to tip the economy, already stagnant, into recession. And it is inflicting pain on millions of Britons who face soaring rents and higher rates on their mortgages.Inflation, economists agree, is likely to continue to drop in the next six months, perhaps even enough to meet Mr. Sunak’s goal of halving the rate to 5.2 percent by year-end. But Britain’s other problems — anemic growth, low productivity, a labor shortage, and a crumbling National Health Service — are not likely to be fixed in time for him to claim a full turnaround before he faces the voters.“Low productivity and low growth make economic policy challenging,” said Mahmood Pradhan, head of global macro economics at Amundi, an asset manager. “It reduces fiscal space. It’s a very tight straitjacket to be in.”With deteriorating public finances, Mr. Sunak can neither spend heavily to raise wages for striking doctors or railway workers, nor can he offer tax cuts to voters. As things stand, he is already at risk of missing another of his five pledges: to reduce national debt. Government debt has risen to more 100 percent of gross domestic product for the first time since 1961, according to the latest data.Striking junior doctors outside Queens Hospital in Rumford in March.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesFor two years, the government has frozen the income brackets for personal income taxes rather than raising them with inflation, driving up the effective rates. As a result, Mr. Sunak finds himself in an awkward paradox: a free-market Conservative heading into an election with a government that is imposing the greatest tax burden on the electorate since World War II.Critics argue he has no one to blame but himself. Mr. Sunak supported the fiscal austerity of the Conservative-led government of David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, which hurt Britain’s productivity and hollowed out its public services. And he championed Brexit, which cut into its trade with the European Union, scared off investment and worsened its labor shortage.“He’s quite rare in being directly associated with both Cameron-Osborne austerity and Johnsonian hard Brexit,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Many other senior Tories could plausibly claim that they didn’t really buy into one or the other. Not Sunak.”This week’s by-elections attest to Mr. Sunak’s predicament. One seat belonged to Mr. Johnson, who resigned from Parliament after a committee recommended suspending him for misleading lawmakers about his attendance at parties during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. Another was held by an ally of Mr. Johnson, who also quit, and the third by a lawmaker who resigned after allegations of drug use and sexual misconduct.While Mr. Johnson’s soiled legacy and Conservative Party scandals will play a role in these races, analysts say the cost-of-living crisis will be the dominant theme. Few governments, Professor Bale noted, win elections when real wages are eroding, as they are in Britain. In the latest polls, the opposition Labour Party leads the Conservatives by close to 20 percentage points.The specter of a sweeping defeat has put Mr. Sunak under pressure from Tory backbenchers to offer voters relief in the form of tax cuts or help in paying their mortgages. The most analysts expect, however, is for him to promise a reduction in income taxes next spring, to be deferred until after the election.As Mr. Sunak likes to remind people, not all of Britain’s problems are unique or self-inflicted. Like many other countries, it suffered from supply bottlenecks after pandemic lockdowns ended, from rising food prices and from the lingering impact of soaring energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine.Yet Britain’s core inflation rate — which excludes volatile energy and food prices and is a gauge for domestic price pressures — has remained high at 6.9 percent, compared to 4.8 percent in the United States and 5.4 percent in the eurozone.“That does suggest these inflation dynamics have become more embedded than they have in other countries,” said Kristin Forbes, a professor of management and global economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting committee.Britain, she said, had the misfortune of being hit by both the energy spike, like its neighbors in Europe, and strong domestic inflationary pressures because of a tight labor market, like the United States.Commuters cross London Bridge last week. Unlike most countries, Britain still has more people out of the labor force than before the pandemic.Andy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock“The U.K. was facing a more difficult challenge than the other countries, in the sense it was really hit by a confluence of shocks that were greater than the individual shocks hitting other countries,” Professor Forbes said.But there are other problems that are distinctively British. Unlike most countries, Britain still has more people out of the labor force than before the pandemic. A majority say they can’t work because of long-term illnesses, a problem exacerbated by the crisis in the N.H.S. With so many job vacancies, wages are rising rapidly, which further fuels inflation.Mr. Sunak has offered to increase public sector wages by 5 percent to 7 percent to end strikes that have closed Britain’s schools and crippled the health service. But that has yet to quell the labor unrest.Britain has so far avoided a recession, surprising some economists. But its resilience could crack, as people curtail spending to pay their rising mortgage bills. Already, about 4.5 million households have had to swallow rate increases since the Bank of England started raising interest rates in December 2021. The rest, another 4 million, will be affected by higher rates by the end of 2026.As with other Western leaders, Mr. Sunak’s fortunes may be largely out of his hands. Last month, the Bank of England, stung by the virulence of inflation, unexpectedly raised interest rates by half a percent, to 5 percent. Traders are betting that rates will climb further still, to about 5.8 percent by the end of the year — implying several more rate increases that would mean higher financing costs for businesses and households and hurt economic growth even more.“The more tightening we see, the risk of recession rises,” said Mr. Pradhan, who served as a deputy director of the International Monetary Fund. “It wouldn’t take very much to tip the U.K. economy into recession.” More

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      Scotland’s Independence Movement Is Down, but Not Out, Analysts Say

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      Support for Scottish independence has dipped, but backing for Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom is fragile, too. Nicola Sturgeon’s arrest leaves the fate of the movement in flux.For almost a decade Nicola Sturgeon, as the leader of the Scottish government, was the uncontested figurehead of the push to break Scotland’s centuries-old union with England.Her resignation earlier this year — and now her arrest on Sunday over an investigation into her Scottish National Party’s finances — leaves the fate of the movement in flux.Support for independence has dipped, but backing for Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom, a bond forged in 1707, is fragile, too. Opinion polls show the Scottish public still roughly split on the issue. For now, the political path to an independent Scotland is blocked.“It’s a stalemate, there is no settled will for independence, but equally we have to acknowledge that there is no settled will for union either,” said Nicola McEwen, professor of territorial politics at the University of Edinburgh.“Reports of the demise of the independence movement and indeed of the S.N.P. are somewhat exaggerated,” said Professor McEwen, who added that “given everything that’s going on, maybe it’s surprising that support hasn’t declined more than it has.”Operation Branchform, the code name for inquiry into the Scottish National Party’s finances, began in 2021 and was reported to have followed complaints about the handling of about 600,000 pounds, or about $750,000, in donations raised to campaign for a second vote on Scottish independence. In 2014, Scots voted by 55 to 45 percent against breaking away from the United Kingdom in a divisive referendum.Ms. Sturgeon, who was released on Sunday after seven hours of questioning and who swiftly proclaimed her innocence, has not been charged. On Monday, her successor, Humza Yousaf, rejected calls for Ms. Sturgeon to be suspended from the party.She is the third senior figure in the party to be arrested but not charged. Another is Ms. Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive who held the post from 1999 until March, when he resigned after accepting blame for misleading statements from the party about the size of its dues-paying membership.Police officers outside the home of Ms. Sturgeon and her husband, Peter Murrell, in Uddingston, Scotland, in April.Andrew Milligan/Press Association, via Associated PressThe police investigation deepened in the weeks after Ms. Sturgeon’s surprise resignation and the fractious competition to succeed her that was won, narrowly, by Mr. Yousaf.His leadership is still relatively new but, so far, he has struggled to match the high profile of his predecessor, or to advance toward the prize that ultimately eluded her: Scottish independence.Supporters have pressed for a second vote on Scottish independence after the first one failed in 2014. Their argument was bolstered by Brexit, which took Britain out of the European Union because the majority of Scots who voted in the Brexit referendum of 2016 wanted to remain in the European bloc. They were outnumbered by voters in England and Wales who wanted to leave.But, to have legal force, the government in London must agree to another vote on independence, and successive prime ministers have refused, insisting that the decision of 2014 stands for a generation.Ms. Sturgeon hit another roadblock last year when she tested in court her right to schedule a referendum without approval from London. In November, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled against her.Some hard-line voices favor unilateral action, perhaps holding a vote in defiance of London. Catalan separatists in Spain took that route in 2017, but it led to the imprisonment or exile of some independence movement leaders. And going outside the law would block an independent Scotland’s path toward membership of the European Union, the S.N.P.’s objective.Frustrated on all sides, Ms. Sturgeon finally proposed using the next British general election, which is expected in the second half 2024, as a de facto independence referendum, making Scotland’s constitutional future the central question. Internal critics doubted the practicality of that idea, given that other political parties would not agree.Nicola Sturgeon at a news conference in 2022 about Scottish independence.Andrew Milligan/Press Association, via Associated PressIn an interview broadcast on Sunday, before Ms. Sturgeon’s arrest, Mr. Yousaf said he was confident that, even with recent setbacks, an independent Scotland was coming.“Despite having some of the most difficult weeks our party has probably faced, certainly in the modern era, that support for independence is still rock solid. It’s a good base for us to build on,” he told the BBC. “I’ve got no doubt at all, that I will be the leader that will ensure that Scotland becomes an independent nation.”The party might have missed its moment, however. It is hard to see a more favorable backdrop for the independence campaign than the messy aftermath of Brexit, the chaotic leadership of the former prime minister, Boris Johnson — who was unpopular in Scotland — and the political dramas of 2022 when Britain changed prime ministers twice.Paradoxically, while Brexit may have strengthened the political case for Scottish independence, it has complicated the practical one. Britain has left the European Union’s giant single market and customs union, and that implies that there would be a trade border between an independent Scotland and England, its biggest economic partner.The years of gridlock and chaos that followed the Brexit referendum may also have scared some Scottish voters away from further constitutional changes.In addition, the S.N.P. has been criticized over its record in government, and the opposition Labour Party senses an opportunity to recover in Scotland, where it dominated politically before the S.N.P. decimated it.“Coming after dishonest claims of party membership, a very poor record in government and making no progress on independence this simply adds to the S.N.P.’s woes,” said James Mitchell, a professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, referring to recent events.“It would be damaging enough to the S.N.P.’s electoral prospects but with Labour looking ever more confident and competent in Scotland as well across Britain, it looks as if the S.N.P.’s opportunity to advance its cause has passed.”Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new first minister, has said he was confident that, despite recent setbacks, an independent Scotland was coming.Russell Cheyne/ReutersThe next British general election might present Mr. Yousaf with a new opening if, as some pollsters predict, Labour emerges as the biggest party but without an overall majority. In that scenario, the S.N.P. could try to trade its support for a minority Labour government in exchange for a promise to hold a second referendum.The problem is that Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has so far rejected any such deal. And, if some Scottish independence supporters vote for Labour to try and defeat the Conservative government, led by Rishi Sunak, the S.N.P. could lose seats at Britain’s Parliament, weakening its hand.Some analysts believe that the independence movement should concentrate on building wider popular support, including through other organizations and political parties, reaching out beyond the confines of the S.N.P. and its supporters.After all, Scotland’s union with England was entered into voluntarily, and were opinion polls to show around 60 percent of voters consistently favoring an independent Scotland, that would be difficult for a British government to ignore.Even Mr. Yousaf acknowledges that is some way off, however. At present, he told the BBC, “it’s pretty obvious that independence is not the consistent settled will of the Scottish people.”The question confronting him, his colleagues and the wider independence movement is how they intend to change that. “I don’t really see any signs of a strategy,” said Professor McEwen, “that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, I just don’t see any evidence of it.” More