The Lowdown from Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen talks to author, intelligence expert & one-time career diplomat Arthur Snell Donald Trump appears to have unequivocally sided with Vladamir Putin's malignant regime in Moscow and has made clear his intention to fuck over Ukraine, Europe and the UK - jeopardising the security of all and making World War 3 much more likely? How can the West react? It's not too late for Europe & Ca...

John McTernan - the ultimate Labour insider - talks Tories & Reform Nick Cohen talks to John McTernan - , the political strategist and commentator, and a former senior advisor to the Labour Party. John was Tony Blair's Director of Political Operations from 2005-2007 before acting as special advisor to two cabinet ministers under Blair's Number 10 successor - Gordon Brown. Other roles since the...

Is our rules-based world finished? This week, Nick Cohen discusses the current & disturbing breakdown in international law - in the week indicted alleged war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu was the first overseas guest of convicted felon President Donald Trump with author & campaigner Steve Crawshaw, the author of the just published Prosecuting the powerful: War crimes & the pursuit of jus...

Nick talks to Naomi Smith of the campaign group Best for Britain on the dead hand of Brexit On the fifth anniversary of Brexit, Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 talks with Naomi Smith, @pimllicat chief executive officer o f Best for Britain which is campaigning for a re-building of the important relationship the UK once enjoyed with its closest and biggest trading partners in the European Union. Brexit is d...

Nick Cohen talks Trump with U.S. expert & historian Andrew Gawthorpe Nick Cohen talks to Andrew Gawthorpe - historian, substacker and researcher of the modern and contemporary United States at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands - about Donald Trump's cataclysmic first week in the White House. Trump in full Caligula mode at home... The first week of Trump's 2nd presidency is turning ou...

Trump Terror will turn U.S. into world's biggest banana republic Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 dials up Washington to speak to namesake & fellow commentator Ben Cohen, editor of The Daily Banter website @thedailybanter about the coming Trumpian Terror, that starts in earnest following this week's presidential inauguration. The world is likely to witness the emergence of the U.S. as the world's bigges...

How does Starmer handle the threat posed by Trump & Musk? This week Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 talks with Steve Richards @steverichards14 , political commentator, author, broadcaster & historian about the threat posed to the Labour government by in-coming U.S. president Donald Trump & the menagerie of far-right weirdos like Elon Musk who has been launching a barrage of inflammatory tweets...

Dark money for dark times Nick Cohen talks to investigative reporter & author Peter Geoghegan, the UK's leading journalist exposing the dark money and cash from right wing extremist billionaires that's been driving UK politics since the ill-fated 2016 Brexit referendum. Brexit & Trump-related funding that have poisoned UK & U.S. politics Peter @PeterKGeoghegan explains how Donald Trump...

Reading the runes for 2025 Nick Cohen reads the runes for 2025 with fellow Substackers and writers - Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker and Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone . Early reviews for 2025 are already in, and they're not looking great! 2025 promises to be full of nasty surprises - particularly following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the U.S.'s 47th presidents. Pardons for the thugs and insurrecti...

2024 - That was the year that was! For a moment, tune out of Cliff Richard and Slade Christmas hits and Fairytale of New York, and instead tune into The Lowdown from Nick Cohen as he chats over the shitshow that was 2024 with Lowdown stalwarts Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone & Tim Walker, @ThatTimWalker on a whole list of topics including Trump, Gaza, Ukraine, Brexit, the bungling of a new new Lab...

Nick Cohen chats to Peter Oborne, Conservative commentator, reporter and author extraordinaire about the growing threat posed to the UK by the radical right in politics, press and from the other side of the Atlantic. Labour and Tory failure to tackle Farage is driving Reform surge Something died inside Peter Oborne @OborneTweets when he saw Sir Keir Starmer recently bound across the floor of the H...

Nick Cohen chats with Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate about the fight against the forces of online hatred and extremism that pose such a threat to western values, democracy and civilisation. What can the West do to face down the out-of-control moguls who control the social media giants and profit from a tidal wave of digital hate and extremism? A lost trut...

Nick Cohen chats to Lowdown favourite - the brilliant Guardian columnist & author Rafael Behr - about the gloomy outlook for the world with Donald Trump threatening the end of the world order for the West that has weathered 80 years of post-war crises - alongside a rampant radical right at home that is trying to delegitimise Labour's mandate to govern. Danger to Tories in being pro-Trump Rafae...

Nick Cohen @NickCohen4 - chats about the British radicalised right will respond to the 2nd coming of Donald Trump with Nick Tyrone - the author, activist, policy advisor and commentator and keen observer of the Tory party whose Substack column as Neoliberal Centrist Dad - nick.tyrone.substack.com - is a must read for those of us desperate for the return of sanity to our national political discours...

In the 2nd of a 2-part interview, Nick Cohen asks author, academic & commentator Yascha Mounk where next for Trump and his MAGA cult following? Already the President-elect is creating his cabinet of freaks, buffoons and creeps. Trump has already been humiliated in his original choice for Attorney-General - the firebrand former Congressman Mat Gaetz - who's now crashed and burned amid a flurry...

In the first of a special 2 part interview, Nick Cohen and author and political scientist Yascha Mounk explore how centre and left progressives got it so wrong in their fight against Donald Trump and an insurgent radical right. Democrats misread minorities @Yascha_Mounk , Professor of Practice at John Hopkins University in the U.S., argues that the Democrats wrongly assumed that they would have a...

Nick Cohen chats with Tom Baldwin, journalist, author, biographer of Keir Starmer and former Labour spin doctor about how the new government handles future challenges from Donald Trump to clearing up the omni-shambles left by 14 years of Tory incompetence. HANDLING THE ORANGE MENACE Tom @TomBaldwin66 says Starmer will probably adopt a strategy of subtlety with Trump, saying, "The way to deal with...

SO, HOW DID WE ALL GET IT SO WRONG? Pollsters and pundits predicted a close-run race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but the consensus was that Harris had led consistently in the polls and that her victory seemed assured given the massive financial resources at her disposal, the apparent momentum and the slickness of her campaign, particularly compared to the bizarre circus of her opponent...

Nick Cohen chats to Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker - journalist, columnist, commentator and playwright - about the appalling state of British journalism and how our news agenda is being driven by an increasing deranged, obsessive and extremist Tory press, mainly doing the bidding of their creepy billionaire non-dom proprietors. Brexit, Trussonomics, Boris Johnson and his buffoonistas, Austerity - you n...

Nick Cohen chats to Washington-based journalist & substacker Ben Cohen about the November 5th presidential election - considered the most fateful and important poll in recent U.S. history, possibly since the election of 1861 that ushered in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. Ben @thedailybanter says dodgy billionaires and rightwing pollsters are trying to con people...

Nick Cohen chats to The Guardian 's celebrated and much loved Guardian parliamentary sketch-writer John Crace about the pitiful state of UK politics over the last 14 years - dominated by the interminable shitshow of Brexit - a calamitous epoch that's seen John stick his pen into a line of Tory duds from Cameron to Sunak. It's been such a dog's breakfast that John has long come to the conclusion th...

Nick chats to the Swedish Axel Gordh Humlesjö, the award-winnning Swedish investigative journalist and author about Vladamir Putin's agents have corrupted the West's banking system to fund the an illegal and genocidal war against Ukraine and their own fraudulently funded life-styles. Axel @axelhumlesjo co-authored The Honey Trap , a book that exposed how Putin's Kremlin laundered billions through...

Nick Cohen talks to Phillips P. O'Brien - the American author, historian and professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews about the West's bungling over Ukraine. First the West's so-called "intelligence community" catastrophically miscalculated Ukraine's ability in fighting Russia, believing Putin's criminally insane invasion of February 2022 would be over almost before it starte...

The political commentator and Tory observer Nick Tyrone @NicholasTyrone reports back directly to Nick Cohen from the Conservative Party Conference in a wet and windy Birmingham where four rather mediocre and charisma-lite candidates are vying to be - astonishingly - the 6th Tory leader in 8 years! Nick found the Tories weirdly euphoric at suddenly finding themselves not in charge of sorting out th...

Nick Cohen chats with Simon Nixon, one of the UK's foremost and finest economics writers about the UK'S deep economic hole and what if anything can be done to get the country out of it. Simon spoke from Riga in Latvia where he was attending a business conference. Sir Keir Starmer has been in Brussels recently as part of a charm offensive to reset the relationship with the European Union, so reckle...