Martin Kettle's Blog

Was this Starmer’s best speech? Yes. But he’ll need a new battle plan to convince a doubting Britain | Martin Kettle

The era when a barnstorming address would turn political fortunes is gone. The PM is out of step with modern digital politics and needs to catch up

Keir Starmer saved his best for the fragile circumstances of a difficult Labour conference. It may not yet be enough to save him. All the same, this was by some way Starmer’s most effective and certainly his most interesting conference speech since becoming Labour leader five years ago. Not a particularly high bar, it must be admitted, since Starmer is no great orator – but at least the bar is one that he cleared.

In the dire situation now facing Labour, this mattered a lot. In his earlier conference speeches, Starmer was always stolid and decent but at times painfully careful not to drop the famous “Ming vase”. The phrases that define those earlier efforts – mission-led government, a government of service or even the 2024 manifesto title, Change – may have meant something to Starmer and those around him. But they meant little to anyone else. They sank like stones into the contemporary sea of political indifference.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Elixir of Love review – an intoxicating brush with a snake oil salesman

Hackney Empire, London
English Touring Opera’s witty production sets this Donizetti comedy at the seaside, complete with donkey rides, fish and chips and a persuasive conman

A programme essay asks what there is to laugh about in Donizetti’s Elixir of Love. It’s a good question to ask about an opera whose two main characters spend much of the evening being unhappy. But the answer, in Martin Constantine’s well judged new production for English Touring Opera, is - plenty. With witty sets and costumes by April Dalton, Constantine’s production neatly transports the setting from rural Italian village to English coastal town, but with no loss of the music’s sparkle, affability or poignancy.

The setting offers Constantine the use of almost every available cliche of the rundown English seaside resort – there are donkey rides, a fish and chip van, a pair of lifeguards, a solitary fisherman in sou’wester and oilskins, as well as a theatre that has seen better days. Though it stops short of the Donald McGill world of double entendre postcards, that’s maybe because there’s a contemporary point being made here too. A conman from outside arrives in town to play the pivotal role in this opera, and Dr Dulcamara’s snake-oil elixir has a delicate whiff of Farage, never overstated, about it.

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Philharmonia/ Rouvali/ Ólafsson review – orchestra opens 80th celebrations with sparkle and style

Royal Festival Hall, London
Víkingur Ólafsson’s Beethoven was clear, contemplative and witty, in a concert that also featured Olivier Latry at the mighty RFH organ and a UK premiere from Gabriela Ortiz

Legions of keyboard fans know that Víkingur Ólafsson does reflective like few others. Calmness, softness of touch and introspection are among the Icelandic pianist’s widely admired trademarks. It helps make him a perfect performer for the AirPod age.

But how does Ólafsson respond to a full orchestra in a large-scale work such as Beethoven’s third piano concerto? The answer, in this opening concert of the Philharmonia’s season, is that he does it with enviable ease. It assured a distinguished start to the 80th birthday year of an orchestra whose founder, Walter Legge, had shamefully tried to kill it off when it had not even reached two decades old.

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Trump’s UN rant revealed his true priorities – and Britain should watch out | Martin Kettle

Less than a week after his state visit, the president launched a surprise attack on the UK – and sent a clear signal about US power

Trying to pin down the real Donald Trump is a mug’s game. Doubtless, some will have persuaded themselves that the real Trump was the one we saw in Windsor a week ago, fawning over the royals, treating Keir Starmer with respect, and claiming that Britain and the United States were two notes in the same chord. Well, maybe.

Perhaps the more plausible version was actually the one who went to the United Nations this week. This Trump went not to fawn but to boast and trash, whingeing about everything from the UN’s supposed failure to back his claims to have ended seven “un-endable” wars, to its refusal to award him a renovation building contract – “I said at the time that I would do it for $500m, rebuilding everything, it would be beautiful” – for its New York headquarters complex.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Sicilian Vespers review – plot and theatrical panache collide in Verdi’s Parisian reinvention

Royal Opera House, London
Stefan Herheim’s production of this fascinating work battles with hollowness and ambiguities despite an impressive debut from Speranza Scappucci as principal guest conductor

The Giuseppe Verdi of 1855 was not unlike the Bob Dylan of 1965. Both had just produced, in rapid succession, three defining masterpieces which would ensure their immortality – in Verdi’s case Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, in Dylan’s the trilogy of albums starting with Bringing It All Back Home. The question that now loomed was – where to go from here?

For Verdi, as for Rossini and Donizetti before him, the answer was Paris, and the conquest (and financial rewards) of French opera. The outcome was The Sicilian Vespers, a five act grand opera in French, complete with ballet, depicting the Sicilian rising against French invaders in 1282. It is a work of uncommon musical fascination, in which Verdi subjects his art to a form of self-renewal in something of the manner that Dylan would also do more than a century later. The score, much admired by Berlioz, is full of new forms of declamation and controlled grandeur. But it has never held a position in the repertoire to compare with its predecessors.

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I know many are deeply opposed to Trump’s visit. But Keir Starmer doesn’t have that luxury | Martin Kettle

The choice for governments around the world is clear: engage, or fall beneath the US president’s wheel. For now, Britain must do the former

Has any visiting leader ever seen so little of Britain or the British as Donald Trump is doing this week? The absurdly unrepresentative version of the country offered up to the US president on his second state visit on Wednesday was a Windsor parody, a Potemkin version of this country, glistening with protocol and polish, amid a lavish reenactment of the British monarchy’s invented traditions. Just about the only thing that was authentic was the rain.

But here’s the unalterable and underlying thing. None of that really matters. What matters is that Trump is the most powerful leader in the world. Despite all the Trumpian shocks, the US and Britain remain allies. Business can and should be done between them. So the opportunity for face-time with Trump, in circumstances designed to soften him up with flattery and engage him over this country’s own priorities, is to be seized. Not to do this would be perverse.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Is Britain really the new North Korea? Let us consider the evidence | Martin Kettle

Yes, there were some serious problems for Labour this week, but overblown claims in the press undermine what remains of our political debate

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Tell me, fellow Brits, how are you getting used to our island version of North Korea? How are you coping with life, now that we are a global pariah alongside Pyongyang? How do you feel about modern Britain having to vie with North Korea, Myanmar and Afghanistan for the wooden spoon on every international index of oppression?

For that is the country Wednesday’s Daily Mail front page insists we have now become. It is tempting to laugh off a headline that asks “When did Britain become North Korea?” as just another here-today-gone-tomorrow piece of journalistic hyperbole. That’s even more the case when you read the cobbled-up pandemonium of provocations that form the contents of the headline-writer’s charge that Britain is being strong-armed into “Starmer’s socialist utopia” – nervy bond markets, the possibility of compulsory ID cards, the arrest of the Father Ted writer for his tweets and, of course, Angela Rayner.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Art and politics are not the same thing – but the Anna Netrebko case shows what happens when they collide | Martin Kettle

The arts and politics are bound to mix, but they are not the same thing. In the cold war, Soviet artists performed in the west. Should the Russian soprano, who has condemned the Ukraine invasion, be blocked from singing in London?

It is one of my very earliest concert memories. In October 1965, my father drove us to Manchester to hear Mstislav Rostropovich play in the Free Trade Hall. Rostropovich played Dvořák’s cello concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic, who began the concert with a symphony by Tikhon Khrennikov and ended it with one by Brahms. I was smitten by Rostropovich’s noble playing. I had never heard a musician like him before.

This was, though, a concert taking place slap-bang in the middle of the cold war. The Cuban missile crisis had taken place less than three years earlier. The Berlin Wall was still fairly new. The Vietnam war was deepening. That summer I had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The movie version of Le Carré’s novel, with Richard Burton, was due out by the year’s end.

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As Putin’s bombs fall on Ukraine, the Royal Opera House had a call to make about Anna Netrebko. It made the wrong one | Martin Kettle

The Russian soprano says she has condemned the war and has no affinity with this Kremlin. But hosting her still seems unwise

Puccini’s Tosca is high on the list of operas I don’t much care if I never see again. So the fact that the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, unquestionably one of our era’s exceptional opera singers, is due to sing Tosca in a new production at Covent Garden next month does not present me with a dilemma. I won’t be there anyway.

It might be more difficult, I admit, if Netrebko was singing Verdi, where she is so outstanding. But this column is not about my taste in opera. It is about something of wider moral importance. Netrebko’s London performances pose complex questions but require straightforward answers. First, is it right for a prestigious British institution, the Royal Opera House, to be hiring Netrebko while the Ukraine war continues? The answer could in theory be yes, were she to repeat her opposition to the war, but on the current evidence it is no.

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Royal Concertgebouw / Mäkelä review – Proms showcase legendary orchestra and its star signing

Royal Albert Hall, London
The masterly Amsterdam ensemble were at the Proms for two concerts with their Chief Conductor Designate Klaus Mäkelä. In works by Berio, Mahler, Mozart, Prokofiev and Bartók there was dazzling playing and immaculate attention to detail

The 2025 Proms are turning towards the final stretch. That means it’s time for more visiting orchestras. The Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Melbourne Symphony are among this week’s arrivals. But the past weekend belonged to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. No visit by Amsterdam’s finest is to be missed, but these two Proms in less than 24 hours brought something more – the starry presence of Klaus Mäkelä, who becomes the RCO’s chief conductor in 2027 and who currently has the musical world at his feet.

The obvious challenge in judging whether the two will become a perfect fit is that the RCO are simply so good. The warmth and precision of the Amsterdam string sound is legendary, while the RCO offers listeners wind playing to die for. So strong is the squad that, like a top football club, many principals who played in the visit’s first concert of Berio and Mahler were rotated in the second, consisting of Mozart, Prokofiev and Bartók.

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