Photo by Jon Tyson

As scribes over here in the UK suddenly ask if the right-wing populist Reform party has peaked, I realise I know almost nothing about politics. Even more so after studying Your Party—the grassroots Jeremy Corbyn-Zarah Sultana construct created with brave enough intentions in July as a new left-wing movement. It wasn’t registered until September, and the name was only agreed on in late November. By then, it had some 55,000 members—not entirely to be sniffed at—plus a small number of MPs and local councillors.

Yet the official launch, as far as I can tell, stripped the party bare, revealing disagreements over how to structure the thing, disputes over membership rules, and complaints of purges of activists linked to other socialist groups—even a public boycott of part of the conference by Sultana herself. Admirable though a movement’s refusal to compromise may be—at least to my eye—Your Party is still fragile and untested. Public trust, unity, and plausible leadership are no small matters when it comes to becoming a serious political force. Even if people admire Corbyn—who sees no vision in the present Labour set-up—and Sultana, herself at serious odds with them—it turns out that not knowing much about politics is sometimes indistinguishable from knowing a lot. Which is not to say we should opt out of politics. It’s just that our understanding of it is invariably limited.

If we tentatively stick our necks out and peer across a politically troubled Europe to Africa and Sudan, we see politics in some places doesn’t even get a look-in. One repeated concern in Sudan is said to be de facto military leader Burhan offering Russia a Red Sea naval base. Meanwhile, the US, albeit long-distance, says it wants a civilian transition without Islamists or former-regime groups and is now considering wider sanctions. And yet, I heard a few times visiting the region, without knowing how accurate it was, that the US didn’t have a policy at all. Its envoy is Trump’s daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, by the........

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