Evening all!

It’s Imogen here with your Weekend Edition featuring Stewart Lee on the conflict in Iran, Sam Bright on the millions being spent on financing Reform UK, and Kadish Morris on pop in the time of AI. We’ve also got artist Jeremy Deller sharing his cultural recommendations, a delicious Vietnamese recipe, and Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson reviewing Lily Allen at Liverpool Philharmonic (so much teetering in spiky heels on a shagpile carpet that Kate got trip hazard anxiety!)

It’s been such a heavy week in world news - today I’ve been particularly haunted by reports of the mass funeral held in Iran for 165 schoolgirls and staff killed during the very first day of US-Israeli strikes. So it perhaps feels weird to be talking about celebrating anything. But it’s International Women’s Day on Sunday and it would be remiss of us as an all-female founding team not to take a moment to mark the date and honour everyone, everywhere striving for a more equal world - and particularly to ending violence against women and girls.

From pay to positions of power, our own industry, journalism, isn’t anywhere close to gender equality - but here we are trying to make a difference! Back when the Guardian was in talks to get rid of the Observer and we five started quietly hatching a plan to launch our own media outlet, we tried to recall other independent, female-founded news publications that came before us in the UK. Obviously there’s the mighty feminist magazine Spare Rib, founded in 1972, to which society owes a huge debt, and then the brilliant gal-dem online (and later print) magazine in 2015, created by women and non-binary people of colour. But in terms of news titles, we couldn’t think of any others. We think - incredibly - we might be the first. (Are we missing some? Do reply to this email if you have thoughts.) 

In the five months since we’ve launched we’ve stood on the shoulders of those giants - Rosie Boycott et al we salute you! - to bring you Carole Cadwalladr’s investigation into the extent of Palantir's enmeshment in UK state operations; Virginia Heffernan on Epstein and eugenics; Natasha Walter on the Palestine Action hunger strikers, and more. We’ve featured kickass women including Carol Vorderman, Ash Sarkar, Elif Shafak, Laura Poitras, new Green MP Hannah Spencer, Peaches and Nicole Kidman. And we promise there is much more to come. 

Last night a few of us - me, Jane, Sarah and our contributing writer Natasha Walter - went on a Nerve team outing to the latest sold out Guilty Feminist event at the Union Chapel in London co-hosted by Deborah Frances-White and author and screenwriter Juno Dawson. Since launching her funny and feisty Guilty Feminist podcast over a decade ago, Deborah has built a huge community of people striving for a more equal world (and having fun along the way) and the night was full of much laughter, stand-up and singing. But the star of the show was Green party leader Zack Polanski in conversation. As a drama graduate and avid theatre-goer, I’m well-acquainted with rapturous applause but I’ve never seen anything like the roaring reception that Zack got as he talked about how together we can build a better society for everyone. (He also took a moment afterwards to say that he loves what we’re doing at the Nerve.) 

L-R Hosts Juno Dawson and Deborah Frances-White with Greens leader Zack Polanski at the Guilty Feminist live last night. Photo: Callum Baker

So we are delighted to announce today that we are collaborating with Deborah and co on a Guilty Feminist x Nerve event on Thursday 30 April at Leicester Square Theatre in London. We’ll send details of a Nerve members reduced price ticket offer next week and the night’s special guests will be announced soon. We’re also in the process of finalising Nerve events in Bristol, Manchester and, don’t forget, we’ll be at the Laugharne Weekend later this month.

Finally, co-founder Carole is talking about the broligarchy, democracy and big tech as part of The Conversation series at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Monday (9 March, 7pm). For a 2-for-1 ticket deal head to our members’ events page.

Here are the links to this week’s edition. As ever, please do consider upgrading if you read this newsletter for free.

Stewart Lee on Trump and the Middle East

Reacting to reports that US troops are being told that the attacks on Iran are part of “God’s divine plan,” Stewart Lee writes that “the idea that Trump ‘has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’ is somehow more comforting than the alternative, namely that Trump is leading us into Armageddon by accident because he has no plan.” Read his column here.

The right’s magic money tree

News broke this week that Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s biggest donor, gave the party £3m in the last quarter of 2025 - taking his 2025 donation total for the year up to £12m. In other end-of-accounting period revelations, it was reported that GB News lost £26m in the year to May 2025, taking its cash haemorrhage total up to £131 million since launch. Sam Bright - an investigative journalist who publishes a newsletter investigating Farage and “other populist con artists” - looks at how the “vast, monstrous spectre looming over British politics” that is GB News outspends Britain's most influential right-wing think tanks - and avoids the kind of regulation that think tanks are subject to. Read Sam’s piece here.

Kadish Morris on how apparently AI-generated musicians are topping the charts

Singer songwriter Sienna Rose and other seemingly AI-generated creations are finding success that other human musicians can only dream of. Rose’s Into the Blue has a whopping 12m listens on Spotify and AI music “project” Xania Monet was the first to make the Billboard charts. Kadish Morris writes about this new development and argues that: “The bedrock of soul and R&B is authenticity and integrity, created by African American communities facing oppression in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s maddening to see these genres pastiched and turned into mere code.” Read Kadish’s piece here.

Artist Jeremy Deller. Photo: Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Esquire

The Recommender: Jeremy Deller

The Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, who will appear at the Laugharne Weekend, shares some recent cultural favourites - from the popular musician who is “redefining the idea of a gig” (who could that be?) to the “stressful” experience of reading a book which explains why “housing is such a mess in this country”. Read about his choices here.

Lily Allen on stage. Photo: Henry Redcliffe

Review of the Week: Lily Allen’s West End Girl tour

A headline-grabbing phenomenon when it was released last October, Lily Allen has now taken her tell-all divorce album on the road and Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson joined the crowds on a big night out in Liverpool to see how it has transferred to the stage. There's karaoke, ice cream vendors, wild costume changes and even sex toys "unglamorously emptied out of a placcy bag". The clues were all there to expect the unexpected, says Kate. Read her fun review here.

Lemongrass and coconut chicken curry. Photo: Laura Edwards

The Weekend Dish: Thuy Diem Pham’s lemongrass and coconut chicken curry

The Vietnamese born chef Thuy Diem Pham recalls growing up and watching her mum and friends cooking: “every pot and pan brought into action along with laughter, gossip and even the occasional song! The bigger the mess, the better the dish.” To help the home cook and those of you who end up washing the dishes, she has written One Pan Vietnam. Here she shares her recipe for an “addictive” chicken curry.

Thanks for reading. Please forward this email to anyone you think might like it - it’s one of the best ways to help us grow.

Imogen, co-founder

The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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L-r: Lynsey, Sarah, Carole, Jane and Imogen

sScreengrab of GB News’s Nigel Farage show. Photo: GB News

GB News has filed its latest accounts, and the headline figures are difficult to spin – even by the notoriously fact-sceptic broadcaster. It has now lost £131m since its launch in mid-2021, racking up another £22m during the latest period – the year to May 2025. 

To some extent, GB News has achieved a feat simply by making it this far. Its early broadcasts were a montage of bloopers, epitomised by its star presenter and co-founder Andrew Neil turning an ever-more alarming shade of red as the farce escalated.

GB News has changed a lot since then. Gone are the black curtains that perfectly framed Neil’s scarlet features, replaced by slick sets, coiffed presenters, and hard-right politics. He resigned as chairman and lead presenter three months after launch and later described the channel as looking like “it were coming from the nuclear bunker of the president of North Korea”. 

Indeed, one of the most startling features of the latest GB News accounts – alongside the ever-expanding financial black hole – is the claim that its “mission” is to “provide balanced and fair coverage, ensuring that its journalism is accurate, and conversations are insightful, respectful and set an example by treating others the way they would expect to be treated.”

Let’s take those mission statements in turn. 

On accuracy, GB News presenters have suggested that the Covid vaccine caused “turbo-cancer” and have called the virus a “plandemic” cooked up by ministers and government officials to ensure their future careers in the pharmaceutical industry. It regularly platforms perspectives that contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, including on one occasion airing the claim that seven billion people will die if the world reaches net zero emissions. 

On the question of balance, the broadcaster has previously been fined £100,000 by Ofcom for breaking impartiality rules for giving an “uncontested platform” to the then prime minister Rishi Sunak during an audience Q&A programme. It also employs several Reform UK politicians as presenters – including its leader Nigel Farage - who’s paid roughly £400,000 a year, making the broadcaster his highest source of income - as well as his stablemates Lee Anderson and Matthew Goodwin. 

And on “respectful” conversations, three GB News presenters were sacked in 2023 for either making or defending misogynistic comments on air. More recently, the broadcaster regularly hosted a commentator who has been accused of racism. And, just this week, it allowed a senior Restore party figure to suggest on air that GB News presenter Nana Akua is not fully British, despite having been born in Newcastle.

Writer Sam Bright

This reactionary rage bait is propped up by two key shareholders: Sir Paul Marshall, who founded and runs Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s most successful hedge funds, and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum. Marshall, who also owns the right-wing publications UnHerd and The Spectator, is himself an interesting case study in right-wing radicalisation. A former Liberal Democrat, he has spent tens ofms of pounds trying to own the libs who were once his allies. 

The amount of money torched by Marshall and Legatum is often mocked, but in reality their flippant largesse is the acceleration of a worrying trend in British politics. Namely, the super rich have cultivated vehicles to inject their low-tax, anti-regulation, elitist ideologies into political debate. 

Up to now, this has occurred largely through “Tufton Street” think tanks – policy shops based in and around one street in Westminster that drafted David Cameron’s austerity agenda, came up with the blueprint for Brexit, and “incubated” Liz Truss.

Their influence on British politics has been vast, but their clout pales in comparison to GB News. For context, one of the largest Tufton Street think tanks – the Institute of Economic Affairs – has an annual budget of roughly £2m, which is less than the amount that GB News lost every month on average in the year to May 2025. If cash is indicative of clout, GB News dwarfs its right-wing counterparts.

GB News is a vast, monstrous spectre looming over British politics – a relentless content machine that has executed Steve Bannon’s ploy of “flooding the zone with shit”.

And, in turn, it’s serving as an inspiration to the think tank world. Last year, with funding from Farage’s old mates in the metals industry, a new pro-Reform think tank was established, the Centre for a Better Britain, which claims to be far more ambitious than its Tufton Street predecessors in raising money and rewriting the political agenda. 

The think tank, whose alumnus James Orr has already become Reform’s head of policy, wants to raise more than £25m over the next few years – assembling the platform for a future Farage government. When asked by the BBC about the ambitions of the think tank, which he previously chaired, Orr told them that he was an admirer of the Heritage Foundation – the U.S. group behind Project 2025, the playbook for Donald Trump’s second term agenda. 

The Centre for a Better Britain – which is openly attempting to court Trump’s donors – is reportedly being investigated by the Electoral Commission for its proximity to Reform. If the regulator believes that the group has been campaigning alongside Farage’s party, it may be required to disclose its funding. 

However, as in the case of GB News, this will be unlikely to dissuade the mega rich and highly ideological from piling their profits into the project. These individuals are increasingly willing to sacrifice their cash in service of their political delusions and ethnic prejudices. And no regulator has so far proven even remotely capable of restraining their distorting, destructive influence. 

Sam Bright is DeSmog’s UK deputy editor and writes a newsletter focused on exposing reactionary populism

Singer-songwriter Sienna Rose, judged by many to be AI-generated.

"Hypothetically, if u watched this 2x u would be the reason my little song went viral,” reads the text on a video posted by singer-songwriter Sienna Rose on Instagram. Her smooth neo-soul song Into the Blue, which currently has over 12 million listens on Spotify, plays in the background. But there’s something eerie about Rose: the glitchiness of her facial expressions if you zoom in close, the sheen of the song – polished in a way that is uncommon for new artists. But, most suspiciously, it’s the speed in which she appears to be putting music out, releasing two albums and two EPs – 32 songs – between September and December last year. Rolling Stone described the frequency of her releases as "implausible” and concluded that she had to be the work of artificial intelligence. 

Still, AI creations appear to be achieving the kinds of successes real musicians dream of. AI R&B artist Xania Monet signed a record deal with Hallwood Media for $3m and became the first AI artist to chart on Billboard with the song How Was I Supposed to Know?  

It might seem like tech-savvy entrepreneurialism, but the truth is that many of these fabricated songs are often just patchworks of real ones. AI music-generation programs are trained using real copyrighted music. When a song by British dance act Haven called I Run went viral in late 2025, singer Jorja Smith’s record label, FAMM, released a statement accusing Haven of purposeful deception by leading the public to believe it featured Smith’s vocals when in fact they were AI-generated. “AI technology is being trained on the labour and ingenuity of the very same creators it intends to replace without any due credit or compensation,” FAMM said.

Unlike techniques such as sampling, where producers integrate an existing song or sound into a new recording, AI-generated music is wholly detached from music history. Sampling is about discovery, taste and homage. It’s the foundation of genres such as hip-hop, which heavily samples old funk and soul records. But the influences behind an AI-generated song are opaque and less traceable. AI emulsifies a colossal amount of material into one piece of reconstituted meat. It’s not hyperbolic to question what this means for the future of artistry if there is little to no process or craft involved in the making of music. Advocates of the software claim it revolutionises access, and is a democratisation of creativity, but it’s hard to see what an infinite supply of productivity-driven art has to do with equality. 

Sienna Rose on Instagram.

When AI-generated music first became prolific online, it was obvious and mostly absurd, like the viral trend of Spongebob's Patrick covering classic R&B songs, but now it’s becoming harder to detect by the ear alone. So what does this mean for listeners? Multiple studies have highlighted the relationship between music consumption and wellbeing. “People listen to music to regulate arousal and mood, to achieve self-awareness, and as an expression of social relatedness,” according to a 2013 academic paper. It’s also true that listeners can become deeply attached to musicians and particular songs which can, in turn, form essential parts of their identity and memories. As Jude Rogers writes in The Sound of Being Human, research suggests that the medial prefrontal cortex, responsible for “tracking the movement of melodies”, may also be responsible for “the preservation of a person’s sense of self and how they view and define themselves”.  With AI, you have no real way of knowing who or what could be soundtracking your life. 

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Many of the AI artists who are seeing huge success are “Black” artists making Black music. It’s very telling that Sienna Rose's first releases were presented with images of a white, redheaded woman, but the anonymous creator changed to images of a Black woman when that wasn’t gaining enough traction. The bedrock of soul and R&B is authenticity and integrity, created by African American communities facing oppression in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s maddening to see these genres pastiched and turned into mere code. Another AI creation, who has seen success in the gospel charts, is “Christian” artist Solomon Ray. Some listeners were outraged, others vowed to keep listening. In a way, AI is the antithesis of monotheism – the rapid expansion and omnipresence of AI is the greatest threat to the idea of one supreme creator.

Still, there are efforts to tackle the developing technology head-on. Last weekend, Pull the Plug, a community of people concerned with the impact of AI, held “March Against The Machines” – a demonstration in which 500 people marched through the streets of central London. Protesters gathered afterwards for a People’s Assembly and deliberated on their concerns with AI and what they would like to see the UK government do about it. “A proposal came up to have a ‘human-made’ certification for creative content – like ‘organic’ – and government economic protections,” one attendee said. “There was also consensus that the user needs to be the one to decide how much AI they want on their platforms, including streaming – that it must always be ‘opt-in’.” 

While there are many more issues around AI to worry about than just song-making – from mass surveillance to AI psychosis, not to mention the environmental costs of data centres – its encroachment on the music industry can’t be ignored. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired AI music-generating platform Producer AI, referring to it as a "creative collaborator".

Music has always been about real human collaboration. It’s a totem to how we connect and relate to each other and the times we’re living in. Art isn't product alone, it's journey too. AI-generated music leaves no space for serendipity or uncertainty. Diving into the unknown but keeping hope is a defining part of music-making. The imperfections, the experimentation, the unexplainable are all lost when songs are churned out of a machine in seconds. Innovation shouldn’t be about speed and ease, but rather, nurturing artists to utilise their imaginations and take risks. For better or for worse, that’s the divine essence of creative expression.  

Kadish Morris is a poet, critic and a Nerve contributing writer. In 2020 she won the Eric Gregory prize awarded to poets under 30

A man with an outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes and alleged crimes against humanity, and an adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster who hates wind and low water pressure but loves pussy and KFC, have launched an illegal invasion of Iran. And many Iranians are so disappointed in their current rulers they have welcomed it, which is a bit like letting some bears into your house in the hope that they will scare away a dog. 

Our own prime minister’s uncharacteristically correct decision not to actively participate in Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war has seen him criticised by Nigel Farage, whose most admired world leader is Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, loads of Reform-adjacent millionaires, who moved to the newly vulnerable Dubai to avoid tax and rain, expect to be flown home to safety by a country to which they contribute nothing. Hasn’t the bloke who owns Pimlico Plumbers got a fleet of white vans he can send out to pick them up? 

Under the command of Pete Hegseth, the American secretary of war (formerly the secretary of defence), whose body is covered in tattoos associated with white supremacist and Christian nationalist causes, American troops have been told the war against Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”. To be honest, I preferred Jesus when he just healed lepers, made a small amount of fish feed more people than it might reasonably have been expected to, and had his feet washed by prostitutes. But they say everyone gets more rightwing as they get older.

Oddly, the idea that Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” is somehow more comforting than the alternative, namely that Trump is leading us into Armageddon by accident because he has no plan and is lurching from one massive world-shaking gesture to another, perhaps in an attempt to avoid coverage of his many appearances in a set of still largely suppressed files that suggest the world is run by cabal of paedophile financiers and techlords. 

I needed a break from the constant mental torture of the news, so I went to King’s Cross to see the reformed 90s indie-pop band Heavenly, whose lead singer, Amelia Fletcher, has both a CBE and an OBE for services to economics.  Whatever anyone says, this is much cooler than Vanilla Ice having both a kangaroo and a goat. 

Heavenly have been reinvigorated by young people discovering their 1993 single P.U.N.K. Girl on an internet called Tick-Tock, which reduces often complex nuanced songs to short misrepresentative clips of only a few seconds, meaning relatively sophisticated songwriters are able to enjoy sudden flurries of belated commercial success in today’s attention-resistant marketplace by seeming to be less clever than they are.

Heavenly have risen to the challenge of their late-life rediscovery by writing a new set that reflects their suddenly sexagenarian existence, full of spider plants, Tunnock’s tea cakes and people listening out for the post. On his last album, Marilyn Manson, who is 57 and dresses like an Edwardian crocheted toilet-roll doll, sang about being eaten by some worms and then denied that he was a piece of taxidermy. I do not think Marilyn Manson has really given middle age and what it means any serious thought.

Delightfully, Heavenly’s current range of tour merchandise includes Heavenly branded bicycle bells. I bought one, but within hours it had been stolen off my bike while I was buying some onions in Sainsbury’s, another example of how life is a daily struggle against crime here in Sadiq Khan’s lawless Londonistan. 

Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), Vice-President JW Vance, British commentators on the right, swarms of Russian bots, and the jokes in adverts for the funnyman Ricky Gervais’s Dutch Barn vodka brand, do their best to consolidate the demonstrably false idea that London is a dangerous hell-hole where crime rages out of control, my bicycle bell a case in point. 

Indeed, in a petulant outburst after Starmer denied him the right to fight his illegal war from British bases, Trump himself declared, apropos of nothing, “but the UK, what they’re doing with [windfarms] and what they’re doing with immigration is horrible. And you have a terrible mayor of London. A terrible mayor. An incompetent guy. And you have Sharia courts.”  I would have more respect for Trump if he, like Ricky Gervais, was just lying about London to sell vodka. 

But why is the Orange Oligarch saying these things? I wondered if, somewhere along the line, the current American administration are quietly engineering reasons to carry out regime change here in the UK and Europe generally, should it suit their purposes. It seemed to have passed without significant comment in the rightwing press here, or “the press”, as it is known, when in December Trump’s US National Security Strategy made explicit its intent to fund far-right groups in Europe to protect “freedom of speech” and prevent “civilisational erasure” by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. 

Then I realised I was overthinking it. Trump doesn’t need a reason. Watch Channel 4’s Tony Blair series and look back in nostalgic 90s fondness at how George Bush at least felt obliged to concoct a story of weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq. Trump’s reasons for attacking Iran, and his hopes for what it will achieve, just change every hour. I miss the good old days when American politicians at least made the effort to maintain a consistent lie.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, and Stewart will be opening for Scottish punk pioneers the Skids on 14 March in Portmeirion as part of the band’s Absolute Weekend 

The conceptual artist Jeremy Deller grew up in London, and studied at the Courtauld and then Sussex University. His many inspirations include pop culture, folk tradition, history and music, and he frequently works with communities.

His collaborations include The Battle of Orgreave (2001), when 1,000 people recreated a violent clash between police and pickets during the 1980s miners’ strike, and We’re Here Because We’re Here, when 1,600 people dressed in first world war uniforms to commemorate the centenary of the battle of the Somme. Deller won the Turner prize in 2004 and represented Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. He is currently helping to organise the 50th birthday celebrations for the Rio cinema in Dalston (details on their website in next couple of weeks) on 18 April and will be appearing at the Laugharne Weekend (20-22 March), where the Nerve is the media partner.

David Byrne on stage in Cardiff. Photo: Kevin Pick

MUSIC

David Byrne – Who Is the Sky?

It is nice to know that someone at this time in their career is redefining the idea of a gig. He is someone who is not burdened by his back catalogue. The concert is clearly meticulously rehearsed but seems spontaneous – in a way that reminds me of Prince who, like Byrne, wanted everyone to have the time of their lives.

The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin, 1925. Photo: Film Publicity Archive / Getty

BIOGRAPHY

My Autobiography by Charlie Chaplin

For the first 100 pages alone, where Chaplin describes his upbringing in Kennington and Walworth, the word “Dickensian” has never been more apt. There is footage of him on YouTube in the 1950s wandering around the same bomb-damaged streets trying to make sense of it all.

NON-FICTION

Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It by Peter Apps 

Apps’s previous book, Show Me the Bodies – is the definitive account of the Grenfell fire and the building industry's culpability – everyone should read his follow-up for an explanation of why housing is in such a mess in this country. Not surprisingly, it's quite a stressful experience reading about recent history like this, especially if you live in London and have witnessed it firsthand.

FICTION

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

I am actually reading this at the moment so unless the final two-thirds are awful this is definitely one to recommend. I don’t read enough fiction but I should, as it's less stressful than the non-fiction titles I do read (see above). This novel is the one Jonathan Glazer loosely based his film on. It is a complex read, not least because you find yourself enjoying a novel about what is effectively the petty office politics – and sexual intrigue – of a concentration camp.

L-R: Josie (Kat Sadler), Deb (Louise Brealey) and Billie (Lizzie Davidson) in Such Brave Girls Photo: BBC/Various Artists Limited

TV

Such Brave Girls (BBC iPlayer)

Why this is not spoken about in any conversation about telly I don’t know – maybe it is, but not enough. This is the darkest, and therefore the best, TV comedy since Peep Show and The Office. In the best possible sense it feels barely acted. I can’t believe these characters are not real people. It's as if Here We Go went to the dark side.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

FILM

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple; Pillion

I got really confused about this franchise putting out two films with, essentially, the same title. Luckily I saw them the wrong way round, as part two (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) was much better and I might not have seen it if I had started with part one (28 Years Later). See how confusing this is already. It's a surprisingly funny film, considering all the killing and torturing, and has within it possibly the best use of a rock song ever in cinema.

Pillion is a great film, indeed a love story of sorts that is also an examination of that most fetishistic of subcultural kinks – midcentury modern suburban architecture. 

24 Hours in Police Custody: The Butcher of Suburbia

TV

24 Hours in Police Custody (Channel 4)

No comment.

Lily Allen live at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. Photo: Henry Redcliffe

Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, 3 March

The clue was always in the title. West End Girl, Lily Allen’s tour-de-force tell-all album about the breakdown of her fairytale marriage, was written like a film or a play, with each scene gaining he-did-what-now??!! momentum. The second sign that the live version was not going to be your average pop gig was the announcement of a concert-hall run. Then came the support act of three cellists called the Dallas Minor Trio, opening for Allen by covering her past hits with the lyrics on a screen for an audience singalong, a sort of subversive Christmas carol service gearing everyone up for a big girls night out. Finally, ice cream vendors pop up at the interval before Allen hits the stage – grab your tubs and tiny spoons, they signal, it’s going to be an old-school kinda show. 

Allen’s 2025 album was the bounce-back that landed her on the pop culture frontline. It peaked at No 2 in the UK, her highest-selling album in over a decade, and topped Best of 2025 lists. In Britain, her celebrity had tended to overshadow her musicality. But in recent years Allen has been championed by gen-Z stars such as Olivia Rodrigo and gained a much larger fanbase, especially in America, and the public has got to know her on her own terms through her successful podcast with childhood friend Miquita Oliver. West End Girl, written over two weeks in LA, was juicier than any gossip page anyway: a work of astonishing autofiction about infidelity, addiction, toxic masculinity and modern dating that had everyone googling what a dōjō was. It had the tongue-in-cheek realness that Allen’s been doing since her 2006 debut Alright, Still, but with a gut-punching emotional porousness. 

So how to translate that naked vulnerability to the stage? The title track mentions Allen getting the lead in a West End show to her former husband’s dismay (2:22 A Ghost Story, which earned her an Olivier Best Actress nomination in 2022). Now, she’s created her own. Last year, Self Esteem turned her album A Complicated Woman into a theatrical extravaganza with her all-singing, all-dancing ensemble. Allen’s done the opposite: she’s alone onstage under the spotlight, trapped within the four walls of a lavishly decorated bedroom, referencing her infamous Architectural Digest home-tour video. She appears as a beehived 1960s starlet, stripping down to a Chanel negligee and singing (very beautifully, despite the vocal effects) over a booming backing track.

The camp kitschiness is brilliant, evoking the lonely bombshell imagery of photographer Juno Calypso by way of Harold Pinter. During a reenactment of Allen’s telephone skit from the album, the audience supportively heckles “you’re too good for him”. Later a pair of mannequin legs fall out of a retro fridge and feather dusters go flying. There are some ingenious meta moments bordering on performance art, such as, for 4chan Stan, when Allen wraps herself, and then her head, in a sheet printed with the receipts of all the items her husband reportedly bought for other women. A quick outfit change and we’re into leather hotpants and a lace body for Pussy Palace, where Allen empties sex toys out of a placcy bag, the glamorous fantasy versus the tawdry truth. She ends the show in a Morticia-style dress, a vamp reborn.

These are fun set-pieces among the ennui: there’s only so much watching someone pace around a room you can take, a bit like leaving the OnlyFans camera on and forgetting it’s there. After a few songs, the towering-spike-heels-to-pink-shag-carpet ratio starts to give me anxiety about trip hazards; they seem to hold Allen back from really letting loose during the upbeat dance numbers like Ruminating and Dallas Major. She delivers a knowingly simplistic 90s-style dance routine for Nonmonogamummy at the front of the stage for some light relief, but all the pensive dramatics elsewhere don’t translate so well when there isn’t a screen to see her in close-up. 

Photo: Henry Redcliffe

There’s real bravery in delivering this performance solo. However icky it sounds, and however much she is also acting into it, we are watching her relive her betrayal in real-time. But sometimes the props just get in the way: for the stunning Just Enough, a searing track about being given just enough love to hold on to, a beaded curtain surrounds her face and gorgeous vocals, obscuring any potential for real connection.

Anna Fleischle, Allen’s production designer and co-creative director, has said that the set is “playing with the idea of what we think we know about a person’s life – especially when we’ve seen their home in magazines – creating a false sense of familiarity, while forgetting that we never truly know what someone might be going through behind closed doors.” In the same way, pretty much everyone who’s heard it has projected a lot on to West End Girl the album – that it’s a mic drop, an act of revenge, the ultimate fuck-you. Allen said herself in an interview: “I wanted it to feel brutal and tragic, but also empowering, that there was joy in being able to express it.” 

Perhaps that’s what I found missing the most. Instead of seeing Allen sitting forlornly at the end of the bed, I was hoping for some sort of cathartic climax, a joyful empowerment that never really came. The audience leave the hall looking bemused, but deep in chatter. Some can be heard muttering “well I didn’t expect that”; others, like the mother sitting next to us with her daughter, had been moved to tears. Lily Allen, our West End Girl, as divisive as ever. In some ways, that’s always been her biggest USP and what we knew all along.

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.

Chef Thuy Diem Pham. Photo: Laura Edwards

“My journey with food began in Câu Ngang, a small village in southern Vietnam where many of my fondest memories revolve around roaming freely on my grandparents’ rice farm, chasing ducks and picking low-hanging fruit from the trees along the way,” writes the chef Thuy Diem Pham in her new cookbook, One Pan Vietnam, of her early childhood. 

But after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, Thuy’s father, a naval commander, was one of the “boat people” who left their country in search of a better life for his children. He was rescued by a British ship, gained asylum in the UK and was later joined by his family. 

Growing up, she says: “I watched my mum and her friends turn food prep into a lively affair. Every corner of the kitchen would be occupied, every inch of counter space covered with ingredients, and every pot and pan brought into action along with laughter, gossip and even the occasional song! The bigger the mess, the better the dish, or so it seemed.”

With One Pan Vietnam, Thuy – who after a decade spent in the advertising industry opened the award-winning restaurant The Little Viet Kitchen in north London – wants to ditch the idea that Vietnamese cooking means dirtying all the pots in the house. “Too optimistic? If you’d asked me during my restaurant days, I’d have chuckled and given you a look that said ‘Good luck with that!’ My grandmother, with her years of wisdom, would have rolled her eyes at the very thought.”

But with a few tweaks and shortcuts, she promises that a cuisine known for its mix of sweet, sour and spicy can be simplified without losing its complexity: “You can achieve the same depth of flavour with just one pot.”

Here she shares a recipe for cà ri gà, or lemongrass and coconut chicken curry, which blends French colonial influence with traditional Vietnamese flavours and is, she promises, “utterly addictive”. 

Words by Jane Ferguson

Photographs by Laura Edwards

Cà ri gà or lemongrass and coconut chicken curry

This is best enjoyed with a portion of fluffy jasmine rice or a crusty French baguette, both of which are perfect for soaking up the delicious curry sauce. The recipe takes about 45 minutes.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 kg bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs

• ½ tbsp salt

• 3 tbsp ground turmeric

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

• 250g baby potatoes, halved

For the curry sauce

• 800ml coconut cream (at least 70% coconut)

• 3 echalion shallots, chopped

• 4 garlic cloves, chopped

• 80g ginger, peeled and chopped

• 1 tbsp curry powder

• 1 tbsp paprika

• 1 tbsp chilli powder

• 4 tbsp fish sauce

• 2 tbsp brown sugar

• 2 chicken stock cubes, crumbled

• 8-10 fresh lime leaves

• 4 lemongrass stalks, halved and crushed

To garnish

• 4 tsp crispy fried shallots (see below if you want to make these at home)  

• 4 pinches of coarsely ground black pepper

• Thai basil and coriander

Method

1. Rub the chicken thighs with the salt and turmeric, making sure the skin is well coated. Heat the vegetable oil in a large sauté pan over a high heat. Add the potatoes and the chicken, skin-side down.

2. Sear for 7-8 mins until the chicken skin is crisp and the potatoes are slightly browned. Flip the chicken skin-side up. Pour in the coconut cream, avoiding the chicken skin to keep it crispy. Add the remaining curry sauce ingredients.

3. Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for 25 mins, or until the chicken is tender and cooked through. Taste and adjust the balance of flavours if needed, adding more fish sauce or sugar if you like.

4. Garnish with the crispy fried shallots, black pepper and some Thai basil and coriander.

Crispy fried shallots (optional)

Golden, fragrant and irresistibly crunchy, crispy fried shallots add the perfect finishing touch to soups, noodles, rice dishes and salads. This recipe takes about 45 minutes and makes 500g.

Ingredients

• 1 litre vegetable oil

• 1kg shallots, very finely chopped

Method

1. Heat the oil in a large, deep frying pan over a medium heat, until it reaches 150-160C (302-320F). To check if it's ready, place a wooden chopstick into the oil: if bubbles form around it, the oil is at the right temperature.

2. Fry the shallots in batches of around 100g, stirring occasionally, until golden brown.

3. Remove with a skimmer and drain on paper towels, repeating the process until all the shallots have been cooked. 

4. Leave them on the towels overnight to air-dry, helping to preserve their crispness.

5. Once completely dry, transfer to an airtight container and store in a cool, dry place for up to a month.

One Pan Vietnam by Thuy Diem Pham is published by Quadrille (£22)

Dear Nervers,

Jane here with the Tuesday edition which today includes the extraordinary tale of Syrian-born journalist Loubna Mrie who survived Assad’s deadly regime; a column from Sangita Myska on Labour’s reaction to the election of the Greens in Gorton and Denton; and a welcome injection of culture, our weekly hotlist.

But, first, I imagine that you, like the whole Nerve team, have been floored by news coming out of the Middle East. 

At the start of the year, when millions of Iranians took to the streets protesting at the economic crisis they faced and demanding freedom, our co-founder Imogen commissioned an article from the British-based Iranian filmmaker Elahe Esmaili. She wrote a nuanced, part-hopeful article saying: “this wave of unrest could herald a new revolution for my country - if we can be truly free to create our own future.”

Following this weekend’s shattering news from the Middle East, Imogen got in touch with a devastated Elahe who had the following reaction: “It happened. Their bombs reached our sky and landed on our soil. After another round of negotiations between the USA and Iran, Trump decided to attack Iran in collaboration with his beloved Netanyahu. It surprised us all, even though we all knew it would come. Despite the digital blackout, horrific footage has come out already…” 

She continues: “In the first hours, the bombs killed the supreme leader, the dictator who killed so many Iranians, the one responsible for all the innocent lives we lost in the past four decades… The majority of Iranians celebrated his death around the world and in Iran. However, the happiness didn’t last long; at the same time, Israel bombed an elementary school in a deprived area in southern Iran, killing 165 schoolgirls and their teachers. A disaster that exposes the real face of this war, and this is just the beginning…”

The aftermath of a missile strike on a girls' school in Minab, Iran, 28 February. Photo: Ali Najafi / Getty

Her perspectives underline how we must always think about the people on the ground, hidden behind the headlines and semi-gloating discussions of conflict. Forget ‘geo-politics’ and reflect on what individuals are going through.

Two weeks ago, Natasha Walter, the author and a Nerve contributing writer, contacted us to say: “I'm just reading an incredible book, Defiance by Loubna Mrie. It's genuinely gripping and she is such a 'Nerve' woman. As a young Syrian she joined and reported on the protests against Assad at great cost to herself and her family, and then left and built a new life as a refugee.” 

We commissioned that interview and publish it today. How does Natasha see Defiance in the light of the current conflict? “When I got to the end of the book”, she says, “I was struck by how difficult it was for Loubna Mrie to celebrate straightforwardly the end of Assad's regime - of course she was glad to see him go, but so much had already been taken from her, and the future for Syria is still so uncertain. I would have thought that many Iranian dissidents both in Iran and in exile must be feeling a similarly painful mix of emotions after the death of Khamenei - yes, relieved to see the end of him, but also so much brutality has already been visited on them, and the future for Iran is so, so uncertain. 

“But also talking to Loubna reminds me that these people like her who have been through so much, who have lost their entire communities and homes, have so much to teach us about not giving up in dark times. At one point I said to her - you could not have imagined how far your father would go, just like the Syrian people could not have imagined how far the government would go, or the Iranian people could not imagine how far the Iranian government would go, and she said,  'the lesson here is that these systems are waiting for you to give up.

“‘They are using extreme force to scare you, hoping that you will stop at some point. And in my case, and in that of Syria, people did not give up and now when I see what's happening in the world, the level of brutality is so jarring, whether here or in the Middle East, throughout the world these systems are just waiting for us to give up. And what we can do as women, as activists, as people with conscience, is just to understand that if we give up, then the system wins.’”

Here are the links to today’s pieces, and please do consider upgrading to membership if you get this newsletter for free:

Activist and author of Defiance, Loubna Mrie. Photo: Cristias Rosas

Syrian-born journalist Loubna Mrie talks to Natasha Walter

Loubna Mrie who grew up in a wealthy Alawite family in Syria joined the protests against the Assad regime before leaving for Turkey in 2012. Now based in the US, she has spent the last seven years writing Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion and Survival in Syria. In a candid interview she says: “there are so many people who now see what I saw, the parallels between misogyny and authoritarianism.” Read it here.

Hannah Spencer with Zack Polanski after winning the Gorton and Denton byelection last week. Photo: Paul Ellis / Getty

Sangita Myska: Starmer’s casting of the Greens as “extreme” is nonsense 

The outbreak of war in the Middle East means it feels a lot longer than four days since Hannah the plumber trounced Reform and Labour in Manchester last week, but on Monday we were discussing how cynical the responses on all sides were to what was a straightforward byelection upset. It turned out that the most engaged, local candidate who really addressed voters’ concerns (and had a strong counter argument to the divisive commentary of the Reform candidate)... won! But Reform called it “Muslim sectarianism”: and Keir Starmer vowed to fight against “extremes on the left” and “those that want to tear our country apart”, casting the Greens as a mirror opposite to Reform. In her second column for the Nerve, Sangita Myska argues that Starmer should stop “peddling falsehoods” - and lays out what he should be doing instead.

Christian Bale as Frankenstein's monster and Jessie Buckley as the Bride in The Bride! Photo: Warner Bros

This week’s Culture Hotlist

Our brilliant weekly columnist Stewart Lee makes his Hotlist debut today recommending a new production of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? at Oxford Playhouse that, he says, has got it all: "Big laughs! Sick revelations! And lots of booze!" Meanwhile, director Maggie Gyllenhaal has reunited with star of the moment Jessie Buckley for The Bride! which Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones describes as an "electrifying" new Frankenstein-inspired movie "which gleefully stitches together body parts from the sci-fi, horror and gangster genres." Recommendations from the rest of the Nerve team this week include unmissable art, TV, music and a book that has Nerve co-founder Sarah “hooked”. Read the latest hotlist here.

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Jane, co-founder

The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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L-r: Lynsey, Sarah, Carole, Jane and Imogen

The Green’s historic victory in the Gorton and Denton byelection was, by any measure, a stinging rebuke to Labour from a disaffected electorate. The numbers speak for themselves: a 26% swing away from Labour in a seat it had held for almost 100 years, placing it third behind Reform, whose candidate, a pound-shop Enoch Powell, ran a toxic campaign. To top it off, the humiliation was amplified by a billion breathless reporters, a mass of YouTubers and most of Britain’s greyhound lovers (the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, has rescued four).

Keir Starmer was left flailing, desperately in need of a finely tuned message that would calm furious backbenchers, prevent members defecting to the Greens, and sound like he had solutions to the nation's woes. Instead, his comms team came up with this: “It's a very disappointing result. Incumbent governments quite often get results like that midterm. But I do understand that voters are frustrated.” 

Sigh. It was like no one had told him Labour had been trounced by a rapidly growing leftwing party that had never previously won a byelection.

I won’t linger on what followed immediately after his opening gambit (it amounted to a stab at authenticity and an interminable list of the problems that make everyday life a grind) because I want to draw your attention to his deeply cynical final thought: “I will also fight against extremes in politics on the right and the left. Parties who want to tear our country apart. The Labour party is the only party that can unite our country and our communities. And we will line up together in that fight against the extremes of the left and the right for the values that we believe in.”

Hold your horses, pal. “The extreme of the left and the right”? Any reasonable reading of this quote – in the context of Gorton and Denton – is that the prime minister thinks the Green party is “extreme” and ready to “tear the country apart”, thereby chucking it into the same sin-bin as the profoundly anti-immigrant Reform UK.

This is clearly false equivalence. While the Greens have advanced some policy positions that lack coherence under scrutiny, only one party has demonstrated time and again that its policies and rhetoric are deeply rooted in division and xenophobia: Reform. 

Let’s take Reform’s byelection candidate, Matt Goodwin, who’d stepped away from his day job as GB News rage-baiter-in-chief to be parachuted into Gorton and Denton – a seat 200 miles away from his pad in the home counties. Goodwin refused to disown remarks made last year linking national identity to biology: that “Englishness” is “an ethnicity that is deeply rooted in a people that can trace their roots back over generations” and that “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”. All this in a constituency where nearly half the population – 44% – identify as coming from minority ethnic backgrounds. 

As if degrading brown and black voters wasn’t enough, Goodwin has also previously pitted women against one another. In an unearthed blogpost, he espoused the view that those without children should be punished with a “negative child benefit” while those with more than two kids should be exempt from income tax altogether. These ideas were ripped off from the hard-right Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán. 

After losing the byelection, Goodwin went the extra mile with a statement so crass it inspired the hashtag #MattBadloss: “We are losing our country. A dangerous Muslim sectarianism has emerged. We have only one general election left to save Britain ...”

That, prime minister, is the definition of extreme and divisive. 

In sharp contrast, the Green party fielded the relatable Hannah Spencer, a plumber and local councillor who’d previously run as the Green candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoralty (where she came fifth behind Andy Burnham). Her campaign also faced criticism, the most substantive of which focused on its use of foreign-policy wedge issues in a constituency that has significant local problems to address. In spite of that, Spencer’s vibey, anti-racist, empathetic message worked; she won 40% of the vote. Moreover, her victory speech will have struck a chord with traditional Labour voters: working people – regardless of ethnicity – need to unite against the tax-dodging corporate kleptocracy that is lining its pockets while evading accountability. 

If Starmer hopes to prevent a repeat of Gorton and Denton, he must stop trying to out-Reform Reform and stop peddling falsehoods about the Greens (he’s been at it again today in parliament, appearing to agree with Conservative MP Alec Shelbrooke’s false claim that Green co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali, has protested “in support of the ayatollah”).

Instead, Labour must be more Labour. It could start by devising a comprehensive and credible plan for growth, reforming the “iron-clad fiscal rules”, be seen to take on vested corporate interests, and distance itself from US and Israeli hegemony. It also needs to find itself candidates like Hannah Spencer – who, once upon a time, would have been a natural fit for Labour. 

Sangita Myska is an award-winning journalist and presenter best known for her political and social commentary.

Christian Bale as Frankenstein's monster and Jessie Buckley as the Bride in The Bride!. Photo: Warner Bros

FILM

The Bride!

(15, 127 mins, in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, 6 March)

For The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal re-teams with Jessie Buckley, the star of her subtle 2021 directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, with electrifyingly different results. In 1930s Chicago, a murdered woman (Buckley) is revived as a mate for the Monster (Christian Bale), and the two then embark on a Bonnie and Clyde-style crime spree, which gleefully stitches together body parts from the sci-fi, horror and gangster genres.

Ellen E Jones, Nerve film critic

Katy Stephens and Leah Haile in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Oxford Playhouse. Photo: Craig Fuller

THEATRE

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Oxford Playhouse

(until this Saturday, 7 March)

Mike Tweddle's superb new production of Edward Albee's play crumbles the colossus of the Burton-Taylor reading in a quietly radical reinterpretation. Innovative staging frames the two couples’ conflicts very much as a form of performance, sets of curtains in the increasingly claustrophobic house echoing our assumptions about theatre, confessional monologues repositioned downstage like old-school front-curtain standup comedy, and fourth-wall-breaking antics spilling the collapsing third act into the main house itself. Big laughs! Sick revelations! And lots of booze! It's the shortest three hours you'll ever experience.

Stewart Lee, Nerve columnist

Tracey Emin, Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone’s been there, 1997 © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2026

ART

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

(Tate Modern, London SE1, until 31 August)

"A true celebration of living" is how Tracey Emin has described her new Tate Modern show, and while its 100 works in paint, video, textile and more overflow with pain, heartache, anxiety, abuse and near-death experiences, they are so full of Emin’s trademark honesty and defiance that it’s hard not to leave the show feeling joy. I remember the electrical jolt I felt upon first seeing My Bed in the 1999 Turner prize show. As a teenager, I’d been led to believe that displaying your emotions in public was embarrassing, and yet here was a woman not only proudly showing the messy remains, the actual dirty linen, of one of the darkest and most depressing times of her life, but turning it into art. I haven’t always loved every work of Emin’s since but it’s clear that in her 40-year career she has helped open up the conversation for women, helped change what’s acceptable. Here, surrounded by rooms filled with writings, paintings and reflections from other anguished periods of Emin’s life, the bed remains deeply poignant. In a world reeling from Epstein’s crimes and the reversal of so many women’s rights across the world, Emin’s total commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about how it feels to be a woman seems more needed than ever.

Imogen Carter, Nerve co-founder

David Thewlis as Ash in Dirty Business. Photo: Channel 4

TV

Dirty Business

(Channel 4)

After the Post Office drama, here’s another “real-life” TV series which is just as sharply observed and horrifying. Dirty Business, written and directed by Joseph Bullman, shows the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s decision to privatise water management in England and Wales. Cue years of asset-stripping and underinvestment by overseas investors leading to infrastructure so wildly unfit for purpose that the illegal dumping of untreated sewage into rivers and on to beaches became more or less routine. 

Reenactment of the devastation this has meant for customers and the environment is combined with real footage – rivers crusted over with shit, hundreds of dead fish – while the drama follows dogged campaigners Peter Hammond and Ash Smith (an ex-Oxford professor and ex-policeman, played by Jason Watkins and David Thewlis) who team up after noticing that sections of the River Windrush, near where they live, have gone from clear blue to murky brown. Their fight to get those responsible to sit up and take notice is mostly met with obfuscation and evasion. The tragic case of eight-year-old Heather Preen is depicted – a little girl who died two weeks after picking up an E coli infection on a beach in Devon – as is the story of Reuben Santer, who now lives with an incurable illness after surfing at Saunton Sands.

What a gripping and important three hours of TV. In the closing moments, a caption recounts conclusions reached by the Grenfell Tower inquiry as to the cause of that tragedy: “Decades of failure by private companies, regulators, lack of readiness by fire safety bodies and government.” Dirty business indeed.

Ursula Kenny, Nerve writer

MUSIC

HELP(2) – War Child

(War Child Records)

In 1995, War Child made the groundbreaking charity compilation HELP, a snapshot of Cool Britannia and the only time Blur and Oasis appeared on the same record. It raised over £1.25m for the charity’s efforts in conflict zones. Fast forward two decades and you don’t need me to tell you why a follow-up is necessary, although the stats are shocking: nearly one in five children globally, War Child says, are affected by current crises. And so to Abbey Road, where an impressive roster of A-listers from across the genres jostled for studio space over an intensive week of sessions and collaborations – including Damon Albarn, Kae Tempest, Pulp, Ezra Collective, Young Fathers, Sampha, Depeche Mode, Fontaines DC and American pop star Olivia Rodrigo – all overseen masterfully by exec producer James Ford, who worked on it in part while he was receiving treatment for leukaemia in hospital. Highlights include the punkiest Pulp have ever sounded on Begging For Change, a heady new track from Arctic Monkeys and a divine cover of Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine by Arooj Aftab and Beck. 

Kate Hutchinson, Nerve music critic

BOOK

Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth
(Verso)

It's not often you "meet" a writer first in the flesh rather than on the page. But last week, at the Southbank's first Indie Night (a smart idea for a new quarterly panel event in which four independently published authors discuss their latest books), I heard Vigdis Hjorth - a Norwegian novelist I'd not read and only vaguely heard of - talk and immediately became a fan. On stage, Vigdis was funny, brutally honest, eccentric - telling livewire anecdotes about her ex's lame literary response to one of her books, and at one point leaping round the stage. The lazy shorthand is that Vigdis is Norway's answer to Annie Ernaux. Her latest autofictional novel - Repetition - explores the experience of being a teenage girl and is dark in tone and full of startlingly perceptive sentences (beautifully translated by Charlotte Barslund). I'm hooked!

Sarah Donaldson, Nerve co-founder

BOOKING NOW

MUSIC
Somerset House Summer Series
(Somerset House, London WC2, 16-26 July)

Somerset House has just announced the names for this year’s edition of its annual outdoor gigs series held in its beautiful courtyard. The line-up features upcoming stars alongside established names, including the Flaming Lips, Benjamin Clementine, Agnes Obel and Grammy-winning saxophonist Venna. Tickets go on general sale from 10am on Friday 6 March (but the venue’s e-newsletter subscribers have access from 10am on Thursday 5 March)

CULTURE
Brighton Festival
(1-25 May, venues across the city)

Highlights of the 60th edition of the annual festival spanning theatre, dance, music, literature and visual art include the world premiere of the play Kohlhaas (adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas), directed by Omar Elerian and starring Arinzé Kene and one-off performances from Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson. There’s also a collaboration between Sampa the Great and W.I.T.C.H and, in dance, the final touring production from The Akram Khan Company, Thikra: Night of Remembering.

ART
Anish Kapoor
(Hayward Gallery, London SE1, 16 June-18 October)

As part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th birthday celebrations, the sculptor returns with a major show to the Hayward Gallery, where he staged his first major UK survey almost 30 years ago.

Activist and author of Defiance, Loubna Mrie. Photo: Cristias Rosas

When Loubna Mrie was 21 years old, she left Syria. Like so many other young Syrians, she had been caught up in the protests against the Assad regime, and as the crackdown became increasingly brutal she fled to Turkey in 2012. Reading her new memoir, Defiance, I feel a wave of relief as she crosses the border. Is this the start of greater freedom for this brave young woman?

But days after arriving in Turkey, Mrie becomes concerned that her mother, who is still in Syria, is not responding to messages. The silence continues. Then she receives a phone call. Her mother is on the line. “Her voice comes through, trembling. Something isn’t right ... It seems she isn’t able to hear what I’m saying. ‘Loubna, please come back’ ... I hear the pain in her sobs.”

Mrie never hears from her again, and eventually she realises that her mother has been killed in reprisal for Mrie’s resistance and flight. The guilt drags her down and follows her for years, even as she builds a new life as a respected journalist and moves from Istanbul to New York. When I meet her on Zoom the day before her memoir’s publication, I am almost scared to talk about this part of her story.

But Mrie, who is sitting on her bed with the east coast blizzard raging outside her windows, has made peace with her mother’s terrible fate. “The first page of my book says: everything I am began with you. And it feels like, truly, this book is my gift for her. I know the worst thing I could have done to her legacy is to keep taking shelter in my silence, and pushing her memory away.”

The most shocking part of this shocking story is that Mrie’s mother was killed not by anonymous government forces but by Mrie’s own father, or his acolytes. Because Mrie’s journey into the resistance is unusual in that she was brought up right in the heart of those faithful to Assad – the Alawite community in the city of Jableh – and her father was a powerful figure in the regime.

“My father was the first dictator I grew up with,” Mrie tells me. “I was made to believe that in order to be safe, in order to be a good daughter, you have to follow the rules, no questions asked.”

Her memoir begins with a compelling picture of her childhood, as she grows up both afraid of her father and longing for his attention. “When my sister read the book,” Mrie tells me, “she hated the first chapters. She said ‘you sound like you admire him’, and I'm like ‘but that's the truth’. We admired him growing up. We were fighting for his love and validation. I admired his power, I admired the scars on his legs.”

Growing up in Jableh, the young Loubna is expected to follow the example of other women in the extended family, who keep their heads down in return for security. But then she attends, almost by chance, one of the early protests against the regime in Damascus, and sees a protester shot in the street in front of her. The scales fall from her eyes. From that moment, there is no going back.

I ask Mrie if now, knowing what suffering was in store for her, she wishes she could have prevented her young self from attending that protest. She demurs, speaking about herself in the third person. “She stumbled upon that world just out of curiosity, and the curiosity is not something I want to take away from her. That was her way out of a life that was written for her before she was even born. I admire her for taking this path, even though the end was not clear.”

Aleppo, Syria, October 2012 during the uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Photo: Scott Peterson/Getty

The road is certainly not clear. It is studded with danger. At one point in Syria, Mrie is almost murdered as a suspected spy. Another time, when she crosses from Turkey back into Aleppo to continue to document the resistance as a journalist, she sees her fixer shot dead in front of her. Another time, she goes back into Syria to interview a foreign Islamic State fighter just after her American boyfriend, Peter Kassig, has himself been captured by IS. “It’s part of a larger pattern,” she writes. “Whenever I’m in pain, I find myself running toward the next burning building ... Danger distracts me from my grief.”

Mrie has finally arrived in New York on a scholarship to study photography when the news comes through that Kassig had been beheaded by IS. She keeps going forward, but always dragging the guilt and grief with her, often taking refuge in alcohol. When the news of Assad’s fall finally arrives, years later, she is on a rehab retreat. She wants to rejoice, but it is hard for her to compute all that has been taken from her. “I cried for hours,” she writes. “Not out of joy, because joy was impossible. I felt physical pain ... for all the years stolen from us.”

As I summarise these moments of loss and pain, I realise many readers will wonder if they have the stomach for this memoir. But to paint this book only as a story of anguish is to do it an injustice. Because on every page is Loubna Mrie herself: clever, funny, brave, sceptical, learning, growing – not just a witness to these terrible conflicts and violence, but also a participant in the blossoming of resistance, both personal and political.

A poster showing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, left, and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Homs, January 2012. Photo: Joseph Eid / AFP/ Getty

One of Mrie’s key moments of courage does not involve facing down men with guns, but when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and decides to have an abortion. “We don't write about abortion in our culture: we don’t even talk about sex,” she says to me. “At 22, I really did not have an example of someone who had an abortion and did not have their life destroyed. So I wanted to give that example to someone else – to be like, yes, you got pregnant, it's not the end of the world, you don't have to marry your rapist, you don't have to kill yourself, you have full agency over your body, and one mistake should not ruin the rest of your life.”

With this refusal to bow either to shame or oppression, Mrie is part of an uprising that refuses to die. She is not naive about the dangers posed by the new leaders of Syria, or the rise of authoritarianism and patriarchy elsewhere. But, despite everything, she has not lost faith with resistance, and she reminds us that this is no time for any of us to lose that faith.

“If the Arab spring taught us to dream, this moment is teaching us how to think,” she tells me. “That level of political awareness that came with the Arab spring throughout the whole region is not something that can be taken away from us. And there are so many people who now see what I saw, the parallels between misogyny and authoritarianism, and that it’s OK to rebel against the system in order to be your full, authentic self. It’s OK to dream, and it's OK to raise your voice.”

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion and Survival in Syria is published by Virago (£25)

Greetings dear readers!

Jane here with our final newsletter of February bringing you Stewart Lee on Kemi Badenoch, Claire Armitstead on the acquittal of the medics who took dramatic action to highlight the climate emergency, and Carole Cadwalladr on a must watch documentary about teens and social media. We’ve also got jazz star Shabaka’s cultural highlights and Emily LaBarge’s five star review for painter Rose Wylie at the Royal Academy.

But first, how good was it to wake up this morning to hear that Reform did not triumph in the Gorton and Denton byelection and that the Green’s “Hannah the Plumber” has taken the seat? Proof that progressive ideas can defeat Reform. 

They say that a week is a long time in politics and, Gorton and Denton was, from the start, a very unpredictable election. On Monday our investigative reporter John Sweeney visited the constituency in his signature orange beanie to find that no one from Reform UK would speak to him and that their candidate, GB News presenter Matt Goodwin, was nowhere to be seen. In contrast, the Green’s energetic local candidate Hannah Spencer was out pounding the streets. As she said to John then of the Labour administration: “We have seen Labour abandon a lot of their pledges to working people and working class communities.”

Sweeney’s video from Monday captured Hannah on a doorstep holding a toddler called Layla who she then mentioned in her victory speech this morning at 4.30am. “To Layla, the little girl I had the pleasure of meeting and holding this week. I promised you I would try and improve the world you are growing up in.”

Yesterday Imogen and I had a Zoom call with Deborah Frances-White, aka The Guilty Feminist to discuss an upcoming collaboration with the Nerve (🤫 more details soon). We were thrilled to see Deborah pop up on our screens - in the Manchester rain - volunteering and knocking on doors. This morning she told me: “An incredible result for the magnificent Hannah Spencer. I was delighted to be a small part of it by campaigning on the day. Politics is feeling hopeful and progress is feeling possible in Britain again. I’m crying while dancing today.” 

Here’s the rest of today’s edition:

Stewart Lee on the right’s social media latrine

“On Wednesday, at PMQs, Kemi Badenoch, conducted herself with all the grace and decorum of a woman squatting over a cavernously deep field latrine and hoping that whatever clods of filth she deposited into it would make a splash…”, writes Stewart Lee, exploring the total cynicism of some politicians’ carefully-crafted statements online - “filleted to byte-size chunks and shorn of context. Plop! Plop!! Splash!!!” Read Stewart’s latest column is here.

The medics, from left: Maggie Fay, Alice Clack, Patrick Hart, Ali Rowe, David McKelvey and Juliette Brown. Photo: Gareth Morris

The medics who broke the bank’s windows

Last month, I was in the audience for an evening of verbatim theatre, In Case of Emergency, which put on stage the trial of six medical workers who, in the middle of a 2022 heatwave, broke the windows of JP Morgan to protest against the bank’s fossil fuel funding. Their initial trial in 2024 was abandoned when the jury failed to reach a verdict. We were due to run an article about the production, but had to hold off to avoid prejudicing the retrial – in fact, no one who saw the play, at London’s Purcell Room, was allowed to report it. Then, last week, the medics were dramatically acquitted. Our writer Claire Armitstead has the story.

Molly Russell

Molly vs the Machines, a must-see documentary about online harm

In 2017 a 14 year old British teenager Molly Russell took her own life after years of being fed harmful content online. A new film, Molly vs the Machines, looks at the role social media – in particular Instagram – played in her death, and follows her father Ian’s fight for justice. We publish a conversation - moderated by our co-founder Carole Cadwalladr - between director Marc Silver, Ian Russell and two of Molly’s friends. “We wanted something good to come out of the tragedy,” says Ian. Read the piece here. The film is in cinemas on Sunday and on Channel 4 next Thursday - I really recommend it.

Rose Wylie, Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015. Courtesy private collection and Jarilager Gallery. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon © Rose Wylie

Review of the Week: Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First at the Royal Academy

It's an unprecedented year: almost every major gallery in Britain is presenting solo shows by women. Openings in the last fortnight alone have included Tracey Emin at Tate Modern, Beatriz González at the Barbican, Delaine Le Bas at the Whitworth and Gwen John at the National Museum in Cardiff. Spoilt for choice, Nerve art critic Emily LaBarge today reviews the "stunning, life-affirming exhibition" of the unstoppable 91-year-old artist Rose Wylie who has become the first female British painter ever to fill the Royal Academy's main galleries in its 250 year history. Read why she thinks this long overdue exhibition of huge, playful canvases should not be missed.

Photo: Joseph Ouechen

The Recommender: Shabaka

He's been called Britain’s hottest jazz star - perhaps best known for being the saxophonist with acclaimed groups such as The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet - but, as Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson puts it, Shabaka Hutchings "has evolved into a mystical multi-instrumentalist, producer and visionary solo artist beyond the confines of genre". As his third solo album, Of the Earth, is released, Shabaka (who now goes by just his first name) shares his recent cultural highlights with us: including a deeply affecting poem, an artist who should be better known and the YouTuber who feels like you’re "speaking to your intelligent uncle". Read his cultural highlights here.

Photograph: Laura Edwards

The Weekend Dish: Kobete - Greek-Ukrainian meat and potato pie

Alissa Timoshkina is a chef with a PhD in film history who was born in Siberia and now lives in London. Last year she published Kapusta, a celebration of the food of Eastern Europe. She shares a recipe for Kobete, a Ukrainian meat and potato pie which was traditionally served on special occasions. Alissa got the recipe from her baker friend Olga who has, thankfully, adapted it for busy home cooks - you can find the recipe here.

Thanks for reading. If you like this newsletter then please forward it on to someone who might enjoy it. 

Jane, co-founder

The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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L-r: Lynsey, Sarah, Carole, Jane and Imogen

Molly vs THE MACHINES is a new documentary about the British teenager Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 at the age of 14. The film looks at the role social media – in particular Instagram – played in her death and follows her father Ian’s fight for justice. This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place onstage last month after a screening at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema in London between Ian Russell, two of Molly’s schoolfriends, Charlotte Campbell and Sophie Conlan, and the film’s director, Marc Silver. It was moderated by Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr. 

The documentary, accompanied by a film of this conversation, will be shown at cinemas nationwide this Sunday 1 March. Full details here. It will then be broadcast on C4 on Thursday 5 March, 9pm. 

CAROLE
I'd like to say on behalf of the whole audience that we are incredibly moved and touched that you've taken part in this film. It's an incredibly courageous thing to open yourself up in this way. Can you talk about the process behind agreeing to do this, what it's been like, and what you're hoping people will take away from it?

IAN
It's easier for those of us who knew Molly, because, as her friends here show, she was just the most amazing person. I'm sure she would have grown up to do amazing things. So there's a sense of trying to fill the gap that's left behind her, and that sense was immediate.

We wanted something good to come out of the tragedy. We wanted other people to know more about the problems that could be found online, in the hope that others could be safer. We set up the Molly Rose Foundation [the charity family and friends established within a year of her death] in order to raise awareness about the dangers of online harms and lend support to people under the age of 25 specifically. This project grew out of that. 

The extraordinary process of the inquest, which took nearly five years, was also completely crucial to us – it was the right and proper method by which we could learn lessons from Molly's tragedy. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary coroner in Andrew Walker, because I gather that not all coroners would have been so determined to obtain the evidence that he insisted the tech companies provide.

Before the inquest was completed, we met Marc, [which presented] the opportunity to continue that story, to use Molly's story to do good and to expose the hideous business models of these unfeeling, uncaring, inhuman tech platforms. We set down that road in order to do some good and to spread the word. 

CAROLE
I really believe this film will continue that work. Sophie and Charlotte, that must have been quite something – seeing that story up on the big screen. Was that the Molly you knew? 

SOPHIE
I think it captures Molly in the best light possible. She was one of the purest souls I have ever met. I've never come across anybody with just that purity. Everything about her was so innocent – her likes, her dislikes. It makes you angry seeing what happened, but it's not the sort of angry where you want to scream and shout. It's an anger that says: this is a joke. And in the two years since filming, it has got even worse. The accessibility young people have to things like ChatGPT and everything else now – it's even worse. It's literally now or never.

CHARLOTTE
Like Sophie said, Molly was just incredible. There is no one like her. She was the funniest, sassiest, jokiest person I've ever met.

But it's hard. It's really infuriating to see what happened, because of how preventable it was. That didn't have to happen to Molly. The fact that she took her own life because of what she saw – and obviously other factors – it's just so preventable. It makes you so angry watching this. I didn't know the side of Molly that social media saw. I saw the happiest girl ever, who loved musicals and loved her cats. It's so, so different. And you just can't help but feel so angry towards these tech companies.

CAROLE
I think it's a really useful emotion to have.

I met Marc back in 2018 when he made a short film about Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie. We kept in touch after that, and Marc told me he'd started reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and that he wanted to make a film about it. And from that came this amazingly human, brilliant story. Can you talk about the process of how you got there?

MARC
It was through you, which led to Chris Wylie's whistleblowing. Through what I learned from Chris, and from Shoshana, I first came across a small article about Molly – maybe a year and a half before the inquest – and I encountered that article through the lens of those two. 

As much as Molly's story is about harmful content, what I saw was that underneath the surface of the harmful content was something bigger: how did the machine even know what Molly was feeling, and how did it know how to exploit that? I was able to take this 30-year history of Silicon Valley and lay it against Molly's timeline – different points in her life which matched up to the evolution of what was happening with social media – and we worked out how to thread all that together.

CAROLE
Ian, one of the things the audience may not know is how important the inquest was – that in this suburban court in London, a global, multibillion-dollar company was actually finally held to account, and you got this incredible verdict in which Instagram was essentially found partly responsible for Molly's death.

You talk about this before-and-after so movingly. Your "after" is that you became this campaigner – first for justice for Molly, and then for everything else. How have you kept going? Because it's incredibly difficult when you're up against these companies.

IAN
Of course they're hugely powerful – they have more money and power than many nations. They are hidden in plain sight. We used to draw lines on maps and look at geopolitical power around the world, but these entities are more powerful than many nations and yet invisible on those maps.

I don't see them like that, though, because they're led by people. Mark Zuckerberg is a person. Elon Musk is a person. Peter Thiel is a person – apparently; it's debatable.

So I just see it in human terms. And what powers me is that we've reached a point where everyone in public life, certainly every parent I speak to, is saying: this is wrong. This isn't good enough. We have to do something about it.

The extraordinary journey we've been on as a family has been propelled by people who want to be part of it: parents who want a safer digital world, the extraordinary legal team who fought to get the data out of the platforms – particularly Meta, who didn't want to supply it. The research from Molly's charity shows that Molly may have died eight years ago, but the sort of content she saw then – which the platforms claim they've addressed – is still available. It is still being algorithmically recommended. There may be a slightly blurred screen you have to click through, but ostensibly nothing has changed. Instagram claimed they introduced 30 tools to protect children, then 50 tools. When we went to investigate, we couldn't even find them all, and most seemed to have disappeared or weren't working. 

That's what powers me. It's just like Molly would have said: it's wrong. Stop it.

I think it's really important to emphasise that if a young person finds harmful content online, they're not doing anything bad. It's that content that has found them. Because if you think you've done something bad, you're going to hide and not tell anyone about it – and then the problem can multiply.

CAROLE
Marc, can you talk about the approach to the film – using the point of view of the machine, using AI to narrate? 

MARC
Ian is the protagonist in film terms, but the edit wasn't working because we didn't have an antagonist. We didn't have this battle.

Then, very coincidentally, I left the edit one Friday evening and got a message from a friend on Instagram: “Have you seen this?” I was on the tube watching a video of a mum at a kitchen sink asking ChatGPT: "From the perspective of the devil, if you wanted to control children, how would you do it?" And ChatGPT answered by literally describing every beat of what social media is. I thought it was a spoof, so I had to research whether it was real. It turned out it was. I went home that night and typed in: "From the perspective of the devil, tell me the story of Molly Russell." And it, horrifically, told that story.

I spent that weekend continuing that conversation with the machine and had a 100-page document by the end of it. None of us had really used AI up to that point, and as an artist I'd conditioned myself to avoid it because of questions of theft and IP. But I started thinking: maybe there's a way of subverting this technology. 

CAROLE
Marc, this is such a human story, and it's so important. But there's something else going on right now: these companies, these men, are lining up behind Trump, and these surveillance technologies are intimately implicated in his increasingly authoritarian regime. 

MARC
I think about this literally all the time. I always felt there was a clue in this story that connects to that. It goes back to the moment I first read about Molly and that question: how does the machine even know this? The power these companies have attained – financially, but more than that politically, through constant surveillance and what they can do with that knowledge – is one of the reasons we've reached the point you're describing.

CAROLE
Charlotte and Sophie, this idea of what the machine knows about you, what the algorithms know about you. When you're being fed content on social media now, do you notice it? Do you find yourself wondering: why are they sending me that?

CHARLOTTE
I don't really use Instagram much any more. The one app I'm unfortunately quite addicted to is TikTok, and I definitely notice it constantly feeding me things – even content I've never paid attention to. For example, I like to cook healthy food and generally live healthily. And yet I'll get fed posts where young people are promoting anorexia. I just don't understand how it makes that link, and I don't want to see it. I feel really sympathetic towards the younger generation – why should they have to try to beat an algorithm? 

CAROLE
What do you each hope this film will achieve? What do you want people to take away? What should people do? 

SOPHIE
Personally, I want people our age to start realising that we are far more addicted to this than we know. We've been through it firsthand, and we're still on social media. If that doesn't show that this isn't simply a matter of choosing to come off it, I don't know what will. We do need to take the right steps – as users, and as far as we can with the companies. 

But beyond that, I just want people to see Molly and her story, because she should be here. We shouldn't have had to lose our friend. Ian shouldn't have had to lose his daughter. It's just not worth it. Is Instagram really worth it to us? We all know it's not. 

CHARLOTTE
I hope everyone, especially the people running these social media companies, remembers the name Molly Russell and understands what they did. I hope the film educates people, and, like we're doing here tonight, sparks discussions – particularly among young people, because that's the generation being affected. And I just want everyone to see who Molly was. She was so much more than a story about viewing harmful content. She was an incredible human being. And like Sophie said, she should still be here.

MARC
I've been thinking a lot about the phones in all of our hands, and what happens as we scroll. We don't know what's going on behind that scroll. Sometimes when I watch the film I think: this is valuable because it reveals the thing behind the screen that we never get to see – and therefore can never talk about as a family, as a community, or as a school. I hope it undoes some of that.

IAN
In the offline world, we have found ways to regulate, police and learn from new technology. We don't seem to have applied any of those lessons online. If we took what has worked offline and employed it online, we would have the safe digital world we all deserve. And all these problems would disappear, because the companies producing them would no longer be incentivised to promote them.

In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans give confidential support on freephone 116 123, or via email: jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie

SHOUT - Text MRF to 85258; NSPCC Childline - 0800 1111; Papyrus HopelineUK - 0800 0684141

A list of international helplines and contacts can be found here 

On Wednesday, at prime minister’s questions, the leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, conducted herself with all the grace and decorum of a woman squatting over a cavernously deep field latrine and hoping that whatever clods of filth she deposited into it would make a splash that would echo all around the world. Plop! Plop!! Boom!!!

(Why do I think these obscene things and then express them? It’s a thin line between being a comedian and getting paid for saying this stuff, and being an innocent man with a terrible mental health condition who gets targeted and abused by millions of people online. Ah well. Swings and roundabouts.)

For the avoidance of doubt, in these nuance-resistant times where even the heavy-handed metaphor above may be open to wilful misinterpretation by Daily Mail columnists, I’ll clarify. The field latrine is social media, specifically Elon Musk’s AI–child-pornography platform Twitter (currently X); the clods of filth are Badenoch’s obvious and clanking attempts to attach the phrase “paedo protectors” to the Labour government; and the splash echoing all around the world is the possibility that these comments will go viral and stick.

Badenoch said that Labour activists have had the phrase “paedo protectors” shouted at them by the satirical British public because of their association with the dead paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, with whom they are associated by their association with the dismissed underpants-ambassador Peter Mandelson. Badenoch is cynical and shameless enough to know that if she can shit the phrase “paedo protectors” out there fast and hard enough on to sympathetic, algorithmically right-skewing social media such as Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), it will be out there for ever, like that meme of Michael Rosen’s face looking shocked.

Then the phrase “paedo protectors” will be consolidated by the algorithms in the way that Musk’s platform has already consolidated propaganda about dangerous multicultural Muslim-mayored London.  Once the lie becomes a Twitter-truth, we are only one move away from an oafish enabler like Ricky Gervais trying to reiterate it on the global far right’s behalf as part of his Dutch Barn vodka advertising campaign. “Welcome to London. Don’t forget your stab vest.” Vodka idiot. And what even is Dutch Barn? It sounds like a euphemism for sexual activity involving copious amounts of flatus and some farm animals.

Badenoch’s Undignified Field Latrine Dump, as political historians of the future are already calling it, is perhaps the most mainstream example of an increasing tendency for cynical perception-wranglers, usually on the right and in the pay of secret billionaires, to say or do things not because they believe them, and not because they are particularly appropriate or relevant in the moment, but because of how they will play subsequently on social media, filleted to byte-size chunks and shorn of context. Plop! Plop!! Splash!!! 

When the Triggernometry podcast’s monetised controversialist Konstantin Kisin appears on the BBC’s Question Time, without any explanation of his funding or provenance, as if he were a climatically induced mould or some kind of seasonal insect plague, he hopes to create a succession of powerful Gotcha! moments which will go viral, such as making the secretary of state for Scotland, Douglas Alexander, have a bit of a red face by interrupting him. And when Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism tried to walk against the flow of a pro-Palestine march in London in April 2024 while wearing a yarmulke, he emerged with footage that made a nuanced conversation with a not unsympathetic police officer, who he demanded arrest him, look far worse than it was.

And so it was that when on 29 January  on Oxford Street, London, I saw an American born-again Christian, and his followers and some children, bellowing through a PA system that homosexuals were going to hell, I instinctively looked for the cameras and assumed he was trying to engineer some kind of viral Gotcha! only yards from Soho, historically London’s best area for homosexuality. 

Passersby attempted to remonstrate with the man, some trying to wrestle the microphone from his hand, while four hi-viz Oxford Street Guardians watched and did nothing. It looked like an actual street brawl was going to kick off. I tried to advise the man to stop for his own safety but, increasingly frenzied, he started shouting about how there was no freedom of speech in Starmer’s Britain, which sounded like a rightwing JD Vance anti-European talking point looking for a pre-planned incident to perch on.

I have history with this sort of thing. In the mid-noughties, the efforts of similarly minded protesters effectively rendered Richard Thomas’s Olivier award-winning Jerry Springer: the Opera, which I directed, unperformable and financially non-viable, and I was driven back penniless towards the world of standup after five years’ largely unwaged work. There I instead became the most critically acclaimed practitioner of the medium this century, providing comfort to distressed liberals all over the land, as the world they knew was ruined beyond recognition. Perhaps this was Christ’s plan for me all along? Perhaps this is why I was “triggered”. And why I, along with other onlookers, called the police. 

Fifteen minutes later, officers listened to the Christian explain that what he was saying was God’s word, and that homosexuals were going to hell. A patient female officer, presumably struggling above her pay grade with the theological implications of Romans 1: 26-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10,  1 Timothy 1: 9-10 and Jude 1:7, and with the validity of the inclusion of Paul’s epistles in the accepted Christian canon generally, suggested to the preacher that this was only his interpretation of the holy text and he was ordered to desist, which he and his entourage did. Nothing had got filmed. Nothing had splashed and echoed in Badenoch’s field latrine. I was being paranoid. This was just genuine bigotry, not political theatre. Thank God for that!

But then this week, I recognised the same sort of flushed faces again. American born-again Christian ranters, though not necessarily the same ones, had finally made the actual newspapers after all, and GB News and TalkTV, having arrived outside a mosque in Whitechapel at the start of Ramadan to say “I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from sin, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from anger, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from crime, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from hatred” through a megaphone.  I’ve said worse things about religious people, but usually inside the giant inverted commas of the theatre or comedy club stage, and not outside St Paul’s on Easter Day.

An agitated group of locals were captured on camera while a female police officer, having attended a different theological training course to the Oxford Street one, explained that the Christians, on this occasion, had the right to express their views (it wasn’t a matter of interpretation), and she was subsequently praised for her courage by the usual rightwing commentators. Maybe the Christians had no agenda beyond thinking Muslims were sinful, and not necessarily more sinful than anyone else. But if the Whitechapel incident was an attempt to create and place a “No Free Speech Britain” story, it didn’t work, as the right to call all Muslims evil was upheld by the police.

However, the two incidents do throw up another story. In Starmer’s Britain, it appears the police will protect a Soho homosexual’s right not to be insulted, but will, rightly or wrongly, leave Whitechapel Muslims to lump it. It appears there’s one law blah blah blah. Is this a concrete example of the two-tier policing we have heard so much about? I think Nigel Farage needs to investigate and then invite the hard-done-by Whitechapel faithful onstage at the next Reform conference to complain about it.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, and Stewart will be opening for Scottish punk pioneers the Skids on 14 March in Portmeirion as part of the band’s Absolute Weekend 

Installation view of Rose Wylie, Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015. Courtesy private collection and Jarilager Gallery. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon © Rose Wylie

Royal Academy, London W1, until 19 April

They are big, bright, boisterous, beautiful, brimming with energy and life, colour and movement, just about ready to burst from the walls. They are single canvases, double (stacked, or side-by-side), multiple, like Muybridge frames, sometimes going around corners, hung like tapestries or film stills, a figure or a story elapsing in time. They are huge, really immense, you have to crane your neck to see some of them, move back to get the whole picture, move forward, up close, to see the wildly textured surfaces: thick globs of paint, rough edges, pencil notations, how the colours have been mixed on the canvas, the special wet-in-wet you get with oil paints, which is what the unstoppable 91-year-old artist Rose Wylie uses. 

Stretching through eight rooms of the Royal Academy’s grand upper floor, with its high vaulted ceilings and ornate flourishes, Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First is a stunning, life-affirming exhibition that veers between past and present, the history of art and its contemporary contexts, always rendered in Wylie’s hallmark vivid style, which, much like life and its rushing flow of images, is never as simple as it seems. 

Rose Wylie, HAND, Drawing as Central, 2022. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo: Eva Herzog © Rose Wylie

The artist, who was born in Hythe in 1934, is the first female British painter to have a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the RA, and is one of many women getting her due late in life: Wylie stopped making work for 25 years while raising her three children with the artist Roy Oxlade and only returned to do a master’s at the Royal College of Art in 1981, aged 47. She speaks of this hiatus in typically big-hearted terms: “I was never angry, because working with children is full of creativity.”

Nonetheless, practically it meant her career bloomed belatedly. And yet the sense of longevity in her images, of a life lived with complexity and empathy, is a strength. Wylie has described her work as emerging from her “vast memory bank of images”, and the subtitle of the exhibition – her largest to date in the UK – hints at the cornerstones of her practice: observation, memory, and how an image, something glimpsed, moves from life into art, transformed into another version of itself, indexical but also able to stand alone, fresh and new.

A black doodlebug in the sky, rushing through the clouds over Kent in 1944; the same type of missile at night, flying from Calais to London, bright flames licking its nose and tail. German bombers tangling high above Kensington Gardens and its Round Pond in 1940, while an array of dogs and a couple of bright yellow ducks frolic, seemingly unbothered, nearby. These paintings open the show, beginning at Wylie’s beginnings as a child living through the second world war in London and the Kentish countryside, though they were made many decades later, and as recently as 2022. The memory bank is always there to access, to dredge up images both willingly recalled and unbidden, to make us wonder how we can picture times long gone not with representational verisimilitude, but with the energy and power they hold over us as feelings, sensations, ideas, pictures that belong to us but also to the world at large. 

Installation view of Rose Wylie, Yellow Strip, 2006. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Rose Wylie

In Wylie’s painterly vision, perspective careens and flattens, almost cartoon-like in its dark black outlines and schematic landscapes (she says a childhood viewing of Disney’s 1937 Snow White both harrowed and inspired her with its fantastical aesthetic). Different temporalities collide, as in Lilith and Gucci Boy (2024), which combines the ancient figure of Lilith (“the first feminist,” Wylie calls her, for her rejection of subservience to Adam in the Garden of Eden) and a modern-day male model in a green Gucci suit, his face stretching beyond the frame of the image so that he appears headless (heedless?) as a contemporary pinup. In the diptych Bagdad Café (Film Notes) (2015), Brenda, the titular cafe owner in Percy Adlon’s 1987 film of the same title, stands grinning in the middle of the painting, a pink bow (flower? trumpet?) to her left, and two pages of a huge day-planner to her right, over which float some purple flowers and a huge disembodied mouth, crimson tongue emerging from between rose-red lips to lick a massive spoon.

History, that timeless memory trove, might be a recollection from infancy, but it might also be a film, a flower, a diary, Monday, Tuesday, a breakfast table, an artefact from the British Museum, a football match, the back of a celebrity’s red carpet dress, the ceiling of a famous gallery, an old advertisement for chocolate, a figure skater on the lam, poised for success. In Wylie’s work, all of these references and more, idiosyncratically preserved by her daily attention to the world around her, commingle in a timeless chronology, an accounting of a life and a mind fascinated by what images stay with us, how, and why, and what we can do with them. 

The picture may come first (Wylie collects news clippings whose visuals grab her notice) but the surface matters just as much: look past, or into, what has sometimes been referred to as a naif style and see how richly, joyously textured Wylie’s paintings are, with their thickly visible brushstrokes, heavy paint application, and alternations of bare with coloured stretches of canvas. To be able to look and notice and reimagine as Wylie does is pure pleasure, funny and fun, irreverently reverent about how much there is to see, to grab hold of and preserve, in any given moment. 

Emily LaBarge is the Nerve's art critic. A Canadian writer living in London, her essays and criticism have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, New York Times, Artforum, mousse, Bookforum, Frieze, The Paris Review and more. Her debut book, Dog Days, was published last year by Peninsula Press.

The medics, from left: Maggie Fay, Alice Clack, Patrick Hart, Ali Rowe, David McKelvey and Juliette Brown. Photo: Gareth Morris

At 7.30 on a sweltering Sunday morning in July 2022, six medics from across the UK met at London Bridge station and set off for Canary Wharf. They were wearing scrubs and carrying bags loaded with hammers and chisels. Their mission was precise and perilous: to carefully crack six windows belonging to JP Morgan, the American bank they had identified as topping the league for investment in fossil fuel extraction. They knew that they would be arrested, and that they were putting both their careers and their liberty at risk. It was a gesture of desperation, a performance for what they saw as the greater good.

One of the six, mental health nurse Ali Rowe, was also carrying a letter she had hurriedly scribbled on the tube, which she read out to the police who arrived to arrest them. “It is with overwhelming sadness that I take this action,” she wrote. “I’ve never broken the law in my life until now.” London was in the grip of an unprecedented heatwave, she explained later in court. “On that day it was the first level-four heat warning and people were going to die. 3,271 people to be precise that are not walking the Earth are dead. I broke a window because we are in a medical emergency.”

The six defendants – two hospital consultants, two GPs and two nurses – are all members of Health for XR, an independent group of medical staff supporting Extinction Rebellion. Last week, all six were dramatically acquitted of criminal damage, in one of a series of blows against increasingly draconian restraints on the right to protest. Two days later, aggravated burglary charges were dropped against 18 Palestine Action activists after a jury cleared six others of the offence at an Israeli arms firm site in Filton, near Bristol. 

In the case of the medics, it was the second time jurors had disobeyed a clear instruction from the judge that the only questions they had to answer were whether the defendants had broken the windows and whether they had set out with intent to do so. In the first two-week trial last year, the jury was dismissed after being unable to reach a verdict. The prosecution immediately requested a retrial. It took the new jury less than four hours on Monday last week to declare all six not guilty.

Three of the medical staff defended themselves in court, constructing vivid arguments based on medical ethics and clinical observation from their own lives. Yet so many protesters have been brought to trial in the last couple of years that the case of the Health for XR Six received barely any media coverage. Their story might have disappeared for ever into the court archives were it not for a brave decision by a charity, Empathy Museum, to commission a verbatim play from transcripts of the first trial. 

Most verbatim theatre on legally and politically sensitive issues – for instance, Richard Norton-Taylor’s Tricycle theatre collaborations about the Stephen Lawrence trial and the Hutton inquiry into the death of whistleblower Dr David Kelly – happen after the legal processes are safely over. In Case of Emergency was different, coming in the middle of two trials, when restrictions on reporting were still in force.

In Case of Emergency on stage at the Purcell Room in January, 2026. Photo: Archie Redford

The scale of the undertaking became clear in real time for Clare Patey, Empathy Museum’s founder and the show’s producer, starting with the challenge of finding backers to finance it, and a venue willing to take the risk of staging a work that could at any moment be halted for contempt of court, thereby putting their own institution at risk.

Two weeks of testimony had to be condensed down to 90 minutes of drama under the lead of playwright April de Angelis, director Ian Rickson and the writer and climate researcher Robert Butler who alerted Patey to the trial. A series of post-show discussions had to be cancelled, and all media coverage postponed, for fear of running into legal trouble and endangering the medics’ case. But, almost miraculously, days before the retrial was due to begin, In Case of Emergency was performed by a star cast to packed houses across five nights at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room in London. 

At the time, the buzz of witnessing the arguments unfold was tempered by pessimism about the likely outcome of the looming second trial. At an informal gathering after the final performance, anxious questions hummed around the room. The power of the case rested on the judge’s decision to allow the defendants to tell their stories. Would they be allowed to do so a second time? Might the very mention of the climate crisis be ruled inadmissible as evidence in a trial for criminal damage? How likely was it that a second jury would refuse to accept the narrow criteria for criminal damage as defined in law? 

Now that the trial is over, plans are being hatched to restage the show and, potentially, tour it around the country to reach as wide an audience as possible. The unique perspective of the medics, and the clarity and force of their evidence, make it a story that urgently needs to be heard.

Several of them had worked for medical charities in some of the regions worst hit by the crisis. Alice Clack, a consultant in gynaecology and obstetrics now based in north Wales, told of coping with 40-50C heat in Yemen. “We had air conditioning in our house, and there was some in the hospital, but I just wondered how any of my patients were managing to survive in tents around the town.”

David McKelvey, a Manchester-based GP, spoke of being in Tanzania when the rains failed. “They call it the njabi – the hunger – and, you know, people talk of the challenge of putting their child to bed when they’re crying of hunger, and then you land them with a bit of malaria on top of that, these children become desperately ill.”

But all of them were clear that climate catastrophe is no longer something that happens somewhere else. Maggie Fay, a hospice nurse living on a Scottish island, recalled trying to explain to an elderly patient with dementia, who lived on her own, why spending the weekend in her conservatory – her favourite place to while away a sunny day – might be fatal.

As she took her hammer to the glass, said Juliette Brown – a consultant psychiatrist working in east London –  she thought of the children of Tower Hamlets “whose lungs are smaller than those of other children across the country because of air pollution, which is a manifest injustice”.

In the very week of the protest, Brown pointed out, the IT systems for two major London hospitals had collapsed in the heat. “We rely entirely on our IT systems: we don’t have paper records in London any more. It was a critical patient safety incident and people died.”

Cast members from In Case of Emergency at the Purcell Room, London. Photo: Archie Redford

Patrick Hart, who worked as a GP in Bristol, recounted the life story that led to his first public protest in 2018. It took him from a complete faith in the power of medicine – because, as a child growing up in Devon, he had frequently witnessed it saving the life of his own mother – to a realisation that good health did not rely on doctors and nurses so much as on the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. “I started asking: ‘What does it mean to be a health worker?’ I can either be just the narrowest version of a doctor – keep giving out the pills – or I can start thinking about the health of the global population, and the health of the planet.”

Between the first and second trials, Hart spent four months in jail for convictions arising from another protest. His licence to practice has been suspended by the General Medical Council. Meanwhile, the British Medical Association last year passed a resolution recognising that the climate crisis was a public health emergency and that medical professionals had an ethical duty to advocate for urgent action.

Among the issues given painstaking clarity by the trial were the ethics of protest and the importance of juries – described by Brown, in her summing-up, as “the moral sense of the people – who bring humanity into this system … reality into these rooms”. 

For both these things to be under extreme legal challenge at a time of such unprecedented crisis is a small catastrophe of its own. If the case had come to court back in 2022, Hart pointed out, legal defences would have been available that have since been taken away from protesters.

Yet, Rowe said in her closing address last week: “Medicine is not about blind rule-following. Every good clinician knows there are rules that must be broken to prevent more serious harm. Is it acceptable for doctors and nurses to do nothing more than write another letter, sign a petition, attend a march, lobby MPs, organise high-level briefings? Is it ethically justified to break a lesser rule – to crack a window – when our collective intention was to protect life?”

In the old adage, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. In court, it was done but not seen by anyone beyond the few dozen who packed into the public gallery to support the medics, and the readers of legal bulletins and medical magazines. By putting it on the stage, In Case of Emergency has given their testimony a loudhailer and a future. As Hart said of the glass-cracking that set it all in motion: “Why bother when things look so bad? Because it is in this trying that we find our humanity.”

For details of upcoming projects: empathymuseum.com

Photo: Joseph Ouechen

Jazz linchpin Shabaka Hutchings is known for being the saxophonist with acclaimed groups such as The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet. But he has evolved into a mystical multi-instrumentalist, ambitious producer and visionary solo artist beyond the confines of genre or form, collaborating with everyone from hip-hop heavyweight André 3000 to ambient pioneer Laraaji. Two years ago, he stepped away from his sax and took up the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute usually mastered by monks, which he used on his first two solo albums. He’s back this month with a third, Of the Earth – now going by just his first name, like Madonna – where he returns to the saxophone and the clarinet he grew up playing in Barbados, alongside adventures in rapping, making dancehall beats and mixing everything himself.

Now by Dr LeRoy Clarke, 1970.

ART

Dr LeRoy Clarke

No one really knows this guy outside of the Caribbean, but he’s one of the greatest artists. It’s not like a load of his artworks come up when you type his name into Google, which is quite shocking. But I got this book of his artwork, Revelations … Cogitative Dimensions [from an exhibition of the same name], from one of the greatest bookshops in the world, Black Rock Books in Barbados. It’s a magical place, like something out of a storybook, which stocks a lot of rare journals and periodicals from around the Caribbean. I guess the easiest term to describe LeRoy Clarke’s art would be Afrofuturist. I don’t use the word lightly, but if I try to think of a definition of Afrofuturism, it’s work that takes an idea of the past and wraps it in a poetry that allows it to seem futuristic. And that’s what I get when I see his work: it looks so futuristic but it also goes back to ancient African traditions of painting.

YOUTUBE

F.D Signifier

F.D Signifier does videos about a lot of Black racial issues, a lot of hip-hop and just general pop culture, but he takes this deep, sociological stance. The videos are normally long and incredibly well-researched – he’s got a four-hour Tyler Perry video, or he’ll do things like “Sinners and the Death of Black Art”. It feels like you’re speaking to your intelligent uncle. [I listen to it] late at night and I’m washing the dishes, or brushing my teeth. If I don’t feel like listening to music, especially if I’m in the midst of making an album, I’ll put on podcasts while walking around or being on trains or other transport. It’s a good way of having someone talk to you.

Still from Bossplay Sankwan Series - volume 1

MUSIC

BossPlay Sankwan Series – volume 1

I saw this as a one-minute clip on Instagram and it was so good that I went straight to YouTube for the whole thing. It’s these little dudes from Ghana who are making this kind of highlife-inspired brass – they’re a brass band. This video just reminded me of the energy that I used to be around when I was in school in Barbados. There’s something special that happens when groups of teenagers are into music and really enjoying the music that they’re playing. That’s what music is about, for me. I had it on loop for an hour while I was going about my business – I don’t have that reaction to music a lot. 

Muslims attend a special morning prayer for Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, Rabat, March, 2025. Photo: Abdel Majid/Getty

PLACE

Observing Ramadan in Morocco

I’m in Morocco right now and I’m observing Ramadan. I’ve tried it before but I gave up after five days, whereas this time, being in a place where everyone is doing it around you makes you feel this solidarity. Everyone’s going through the same struggle – and there’s this joy of reuniting with food when everyone gets ready to eat in the evenings.

POEM

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi (2020)

I read poems all the time, but this one really affected me – about why we’re doing art, the function of art and actually, in some ways, the futility of art at a point where people are dying, genocides are happening, and the world is going crazy. It doesn’t try to offer solutions. It’s not telling you that there’s more appropriate art to be done. It’s just letting you know that your art, and the lofty ideals of art, or even the sentimental detachment that art can afford, is within a context of its opposite. I found this poem on Instagram – it’s interesting that you get out of [Instagram] what you put in, depending on what way you go. It’s like the sea: there’s tranquil parts, there’s beautiful parts, there’s the rough, dirty, polluted parts. You can drown in it or end up being washed away. But occasionally, you might discover a pearl.

Of the Earth is out on 6 March and Shabaka performs at Village Underground , London EC2 on 7 April. He is nominated for “Instrumentalist of the Year” at this year’s Jazz FM Awards.

Interview by Kate Hutchinson

Alissa Timoshkina is a food writer, historian and campaigner, best known for the multi-award-winning #CookforUkraine initiative, which she co-founded and which continues to provide aid to children affected by the conflict.

Alissa, who is based in London, was born in Siberia to a family with Ukrainian-Jewish lineage. Her book Kapusta, published last year, celebrates vegetables native to eastern Europe and the variety of foods that have shaped culinary tradition in the region. It was highly commended at the Andre Simon Awards last week, described by judge and chef Rowley Leigh as “delightfully fresh and focused”. 

This recipe for kobete, or meat and potato pie, comes from a baker, Olga Koutseridi, whose family come from Ukraine’s Greek diaspora in the southern region of Pryazovia, on the Azov Sea – a community Alissa says she knew little about until coming across Olga on Instagram but, she says, it’s an area that has been greatly damaged since the Russian invasion. “Olga draws on her PhD as a historian to not just share recipes but the essential histories behind them, preserving the Azov Sea area.” Alissa says.

As for the pie, Olga says: “This recipe comes from my Greek-Ukrainian grandmother, Eudokia; she learned it from her grandmother. This meat pie was reserved for special occasions such as holidays and communal celebrations. 

“Kobete is a national dish of Crimean Tatars and Crimean Greeks. According to my grandmother, it was served for special guests that would visit Greek-Ukrainian villages all over Pryazovia. Traditionally, the pastry for this pie is made using an incredibly laborious laminating process. I adapted this recipe to accommodate the busy home cook!” 

Words by Michaela Makusha

Kobete from Pryazovia

Serves 6-8

The lamb can be substituted for minced beef, pork or chicken.

Ingredients

• 490g puff pastry (2 sheets)

• 500g potatoes, thinly sliced

• 2 tsps salt

• 1 egg, beaten, for brushing

• 1 tsp sesame seeds

• 1 tsp black sesame seeds

For the meat filling

• 450g minced lamb

• 400g onions, peeled and finely diced

• 35g coriander, chopped

• 1 tbsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp ground fenugreek (optional)

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tsp cracked black pepper

To serve

• Fresh dill, coriander and spring onions, chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200C (400F).

2. Mix together the lamb mince, onions, coriander, cumin, fenugreek (if using), and salt and pepper.

3. Roll out one of the pastry sheets into a large rectangle, approximately 27cm x 38cm, and no thicker than 1mm. Transfer the dough to a 23cm x 33cm non-stick rectangular baking tray, pushing it into the sides. (It is important to have enough dough to cover the sides of the baking tray as you will need the extra dough for sealing the pie.)

4. Place half the potatoes in a single layer covering the bottom of the pie, season with salt, then spread the meat mixture evenly across the potatoes, again seasoning with salt. Cover the meat layer with the remaining potato slices and season with salt again. 

5. Take the second sheet of pastry and roll it out into a rectangle large enough to cover the top of the pie. Transfer it on to the pie and seal it around the edges. 

6. Brush the top of the pie with the egg, sprinkle with the sesame seeds, and cut a cross in the middle of the pie to act as a vent. 

7. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 50-60 mins, until the pastry is a golden brown colour. Serve hot, garnished with coriander, dill and lots of spring onions.

Kapusta by Alissa Timoshkina is published by Quadrille (£28) 

Photographs by Laura Edwards and Lizzie Mayson

When I ran for parliament in 2024 – not entirely successfully – there was one golden rule: that the candidate must make him or herself as visible as possible. So I got chased by a 10-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex while wearing an orange beanie and stuck our film on X/ Twitter for a quarter of a million people to have a laugh at. 

Reform UK’s man in Gorton and Denton, Matt Goodwin, is doing things differently. He is running for office in one of Britain’s poorest constituencies by playing the Invisible Man. So is his team. You won’t find Reform UK’s HQ in this south-east corner of Manchester on the internet. Ask the Greens, though, and they will tell you that it is in a mini industrial estate at the back of Denton railway station.

On the one side is the dragon’s roar of the M60; on the other a brutalist warehouse painted salmonella pink. In a high window sits a clue that a populist uprising is in the making: a turquoise sign inviting people to support Reform UK. As the drizzle from the dishcloth-grey sky turns into dogs, also cats, camera op Jeremiah Quinn and I sashay into the industrial estate. A big car pauses, and we get clocked by a man within. 

Aquatic canines and felines carpet-bomb us as we walk towards the warehouse. Two black-clad security men step away from the shelter of their salmonella citadel and block our approach. 

Sweeney: “Hello, my name is John Sweeney and I work for the Nerve. I would like to talk to Matt Goodwin.” 

First Security Man: “Is your friend here recording by any chance?” 

Sweeney: “Yes, he is.”

FSM: “Do me a favour and don’t get my face in please. Not to be rude, but we are third-party contractors.” 

We respect that. 

Sweeney: “Is it possible to talk to the candidate?” 

FSM: “Matt isn’t here.” 

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, a press officer pops out into the dachshunds and Burmese underneath an umbrella. He is the man in the big car. He says he recognises me and introduces himself as John Gill, and tells me we have met before – at the Stoke-on-Trent byelection in 2017, when Ukip’s candidate was Paul Nuttall, who struck me as something of a Schrodinger's player for Tranmere Rovers, in that he both did and didn't turn out for 'the Superwhites'. (Nuttall was a Tranmere youth team player but didn't turn out for the first team, a claim he said was wrongly made by Wikipedia, not him.)

Gill tells me that Goodwin is not “prioritising” the media but is out on the stump. This is a carbon copy of what happened when Llŷr Powell, Reform UK’s candidate in the Caerphilly byelection for the Senedd, stood last year. It is fair to point out that Powell said he had received 55 death threats and had to be moved from his home to an undisclosed location during campaigning. And also to point out that Gwent police said they had not received any reports of safety concerns over Powell from him or his party.

Goodwin playing hard to get for the media might also be explained by a potentially embarrassing story claiming that he had used inappropriate language with a young female researcher at GB News, where the former academic is a TV presenter (as is party leader Nigel Farage). Reform UK has threatened to sue the Guardian for its reporting but, as far as the Nerve understands, no writ has been issued. Farage has said of the row that it boils down to “Matt being Matt”. Goodwin has denied acting inappropriately. 

The byelection has been caused by the exit of former Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, who resigned for “health reasons” but also because he sent some career-killing WhatsApp messages, including some plainly antisemitic ones. Greater Manchester’s Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, wanted to run as their candidate but was nixed by the party’s National Executive Committee – and that has created Reform UK’s opportunity. 

There are three candidates who have a serious chance of winning: Goodwin for Reform UK, the Green party’s Hannah Spencer – she is both a plumber and the bookies’ favourite – and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia. 

The race is close and it is hard to gauge Reform UK’s popularity. What is weird is that the people who are likely to vote for Goodwin seem to be ticking the “no publicity” box too. Call me an irritating twat in an orange beanie – go on, I dare you – but I have done thousands of vox-pops in my old job, 17 years as a BBC reporter, and I have never known a bigger refusal-to-engage rate. You normally expect every two out of three people to give you the swerve or bark a quick no. In Gorton and Denton, nine out of 10 punters give me the heave-ho.

The constituency is one of the poorest in the country by any metric: prosperity, house prices, number of people who have attended university, life expectancy. It is the 15th most deprived of England's 543 seats. Just less than half of the constituency's children live below the breadline. In Longsight East, average household disposable income is £23,000 a year, which is grindingly poor. This is a community that is really pissed off with politics, and that makes me suspect that at least some of the people who don't want to engage with me are going to vote Reform.

Two people do engage: the first is an elderly gentleman who has always voted Labour. 

Why Reform? 

“Because I've had enough of Labour.” 

A second is a widow buying a car park ticket for her Fiat 500. 

“Reform.”

Why?

“The MP that's gone off on ill health. He’s stopped my heating allowance and I nursed my husband with Alzheimer’s and dementia for eight years. No, I’d had enough of all of them. I voted Labour all my life. I’m 84. I’ve had enough. I’m glad I'm on my way out and not my way in. I don’t like the world any more, so I’m sorry. I’m not saying they [Reform] will be any better than the others. Anyone. I really, I really don’t know. But I’ve got to put my vote there.” 

Keir Starmer rocks up while we are in town but seemingly at a private, Labour-party-only event, or one, at least, that we don’t know about. In the constituency all day, we see just one Labour placard and meet one Labour voter, who acknowledges his choice is an unpopular one. Still, he says, “I want to keep that fascist Nigel Farage out.” 

The candidate who is ever so very happy to talk to the Nerve is the plumber, Hannah Spencer. Green placards and posters are everywhere in the constituency and Spencer is great on the doorstep – down-to-earth, funny, local. One mum is delighted to find her campaigning in her street; a second younger mum opens her door and whoops with delight.

“Labour have abandoned benefits for people who desperately need them,” Spencer tells me. 

Missing from the mix is Farage, Reform UK’s messiah in tweeds. I hunt up and down the gunnels at the back of the terrace back-to-backs but it turns out he is on national security business elsewhere. 

Not in Gorton and Denton but, natch, the Maldives. 

Evening all,

It's Imogen here, bringing you a packed Tuesday edition. Today we have our indomitable Reform correspondent John Sweeney on the ground in Gorton and Denton ahead of the by-election on Thursday; film critic and co-founder of Cinema for Gaza Hanna Flint on the Bafta/BBC editing row; and our latest culture hotlist. Following Peter Mandelson's arrest yesterday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, we also have writer and academic Tamsin Shaw looking back at another Mandelson scandal, 2008’s ‘Yachtgate’ - remember that? - and how it can be seen as a kind of origin story for elements of the Epstein story. 

Speaking of the Epstein files, I'm sure, like us, you are still feeling sickened and horrified by what they reveal about the widespread abuse of girls and young women by him and his network, and what these crimes say about the culture we live in (so brilliantly explored by our co-founder Carole in her long read earlier this month). You may, however, also be taking hope from Gisèle Pelicot who has just published her incredible memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Must Change Sides, following her decision to waive anonymity and make public the rape trial that shook the world.

Gisèle Pelicot in Paris on 4 February. Photo: Joel Saget /AFP/Getty

On Friday, Jane and I went to see Gisèle in conversation at a sold-out Royal Festival Hall launch for the book, with actors Kate Winslet, Juliet Stevenson and Kristin Scott Thomas reading excerpts. It had been another long week at the Nerve and it was hard not to feel a little apprehensive about the heavy subject matter. 

In the event it was incredibly uplifting - somehow, miraculously, Pelicot has managed to find a belief in humanity despite everything she's been through. She spoke so tenderly about the strength the crowds of women outside the court gave her, about a friendship she’s developed with the security guard who first caught her husband upskirting shoppers (which led to his wider crimes coming out); and of finding love again. She is living proof that justice can happen and it felt cathartic to be part of a rapturous crowd who shared her belief (and ours at the Nerve!) that we must fight for a better world. Deborah Frances-White, aka the Guilty Feminist, writes in our hotlist today about why the book is a must-read, so without further ado here’s the rest of today's edition.

Peter Mandelson was hiding in plain sight

The arrest earlier this week of Peter Mandelson for allegedly leaking government secrets to Jeffrey Epstein brings into focus a scandal we never properly understood. In 2008, when New Labour's most powerful fixer was photographed on oligarch Oleg Deripaska's superyacht, we called it ‘Yachtgate’ and turned the page. New York University professor Tamsin Shaw explains how the Epstein files reveal what we missed: a two decade-long entanglement between the convicted sex offender, Putin's inner circle and Mandelson, held together by a toxic combo of friendship and kompromat. Read the piece here.

New John Sweeney film: on the trail of Reform in Gorton and Denton

“Call me an irritating twat in an orange beanie”, says the Nerve’s John Sweeney reporting from Gorton and Denton in greater Manchester ahead of Thursday’s by-election. John was out on the streets (with cameraman Jeremiah Quinn) to test the mood in what is England’s 15th “most deprived” constituency. An unusually high proportion of those asked refused to talk to John, but the Green party’s Hannah Spencer, who is officially the bookies’ favourite and is “great on the doorstep, down to earth, funny and local” told John, “Labour have abandoned benefits for people who desperately need them”. John’s written report is coming tomorrow, in the meantime watch the film here. 

Who is to blame for the Baftas racism row?

"A historic night for representation will now be remembered for one thing," writes film critic and broadcaster Hanna Flint of the racism row that has engulfed the BBC over the selective editing of Sunday's Baftas awards ceremony. While Sinners’ Ryan Coogler made history as the first Black winner of best original screenplay, Robert Aramayo became the first actor to take home the rising star and best actor awards for his empathetic portrayal in I Swear of John Davidson who has Tourette syndrome. These wins should have been cause for celebration but have been overshadowed by the corporation's broadcasting of an involuntary racist slur from Davidson while, separately, a pro-Palestine comment was cut. When Hanna hosted a Q&A screening of I Swear with Davidson back in October, she says, she was properly prepared in advance...Read Hanna’s piece here

Jack Bandeira and Ksenia Devriendt in Donbas at Theatre503. Photo: Helen Murray

This week’s culture hotlist

"I’ll tell you what we need right now," says Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson: "a concept album about a woman who lives in a cluttered house and finds freedom in her wonderful mess while the outside world is kinda tricky." Kate's talking about the eighth studio album from the acclaimed Americana singer-songwriter Mitski, Nothing's About To Happen To Me, with its lush instrumentation and twangy guitar. But if the culture fix you need right now is something entirely different then there's plenty to choose from in this week's recommendations from the Nerve team, from a buzzy romcom on Disney to a conceptual art exhibition (along with two films, a play and an unmissable memoir). Read the full list here.

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The Nerve is a fearless, female-founded, truly independent media title launched by five former Guardian and Observer journalists. We are editors Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter; creative director Lynsey Irvine; and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. We cover culture, politics and tech - brought to you in twice weekly editions via newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays (and also live events, social media and more). In our increasingly turbulent world, we believe that we all need nerve more than ever, so thank you for signing up. Journalism is expensive and we rely on funding from our community, so if you are not yet a paying member of the Nerve, please consider joining us. We need your support.

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