Great Britain’s Conservative Party went down to a huge defeat this summer, with Labour’s Keir Starmer taking the reins as prime minister in July. The New York Times Sunday Magazine of August 29 celebrated with a 4,000-plus-word story by Mark Landler, “The Conservative Crack-Up.” The equally blunt online headline: “How the Tories Lost Britain.”
A gleeful, vengeful tone permeated the piece, reflecting Landler’s five years of hostile reporting on the U.K. Conservative Party while serving as the paper’s London bureau chief. Over that time he managed to say virtually nothing positive about a party that nevertheless somehow managed to stay in office for 14 years.
He opened with an interview with Conservative politician Liz Truss, who had a “calamitous, 49-day stint as prime minister,” in which Truss criticized mass migration and the aggressive…
