Get the latest gossip
Why can’t politics in the UK or US get to grips with Taylor Swift? Because she is a force in her own right | Gaby Hinsliff
On each side of the Atlantic, so much rests on what she says. She is where pop meets politics now, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
Nor do I think it was simply the lure of free gig tickets that prompted the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, and London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to take an interest in Swift’s protection and the viability of an event worth around £300m to the capital. Still, the resulting deeply silly row allowed editors to run huge pictures of Swift in spangly knickers for days on end, only finally jumping the shark whenBoris Johnson(of all people) used it to accuse Keir Starmer of looking corrupt. When Time magazine chose the 34-year-old singer-songwriter as its Person of the Year in 2023, its profile suggested her power lay in giving women and girls “conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential” permission to believe those feelings actually matter, through her songs.
Or read this on The Guardian
