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Peter Hartcher Political and international editor October 11, 2025 — 5.00am

“The train coming down the tracks isn’t the one that you expected. It’s not the one advertised on the board,” says actor Benedict Cumberbatch playing the role of a pro-Brexit strategist.

“Well, tough,” he says. “It isn’t even the one that I imagined. But I accept it. And you can’t stop it,” he says in the 2019 movie Brexit: The Uncivil War in the persona of the notorious Dominic Cummings, adviser to Boris Johnson. “There is a new politics in town. One that you cannot control.”

Andrew Hastie is fond of quoting the scene in private. To him, it encapsulates the current state of Western democratic politics.

The same nativist impulse that drove Brexit and tod

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