Europe

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect them to perform such a task? How can one explain the intricacies of supporting transgender opera among the Inuit in such short order? Happily, the new editor is not putting those of us on The Spectator’s payroll through any similar exercise. Nevertheless, something in the global vibe-shift perhaps impels me to mention a little of

President Emmanuel Macron has raised the nuclear card. He has offered to provide nuclear cover for Europe as fears intensify that President Trump is moving further away from Nato and from America’s historic obligations towards European allies. The idea of France, the fourth largest nuclear weapons power in the world, extending its nuclear deterrence is not new. Macron is just one of many French presidents who have contemplated providing a European dimension to France’s force de frappe. However, today the context is dramatically different. For the first time in Nato’s history, the US sided with Russia and not its European allies when the Trump administration refused to condemn Moscow for the

Jordan Bardella flew to America last week on a trip he had long boasted about. The president of the National Rally – and all his party – had been a little put out that the only French politicians invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration were Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo of the right-wing Reconquest. It was with relish, then, that Bardella boarded a flight to Washington to attend the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Here was his party’s chance to announce itself to America, while rubbing shoulders with the representatives of the new zeitgeist: JD Vance, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Giorgia Meloni, Argentine President Javier Milei, Blighty’s own Nigel

Alice Weidel, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, didn’t mince her words. Speaking immediately after the German federal election on national television in Berlin on what’s known as ‘the leaders round’, she claimed that the mainstream conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) merely won a ‘pyrrhic victory’. Its head, Friedrich Merz, had no real choice, Weidel said, but to form a coalition with her radical right party (which scored over 20 per cent of the vote). A three- party coalition, she added, would be ‘a millstone around Merz’s neck’. The AfD will enjoy the luxury of being able to criticise any new government at will Merz was having none

It’s an established fact that most of Britain’s drug trade is controlled by Albanians. There is some competition from Turks and Pakistanis but Albanians dominate the industry with their ‘business-like’ methods. They may soon have another partner in crime. Nigerian gangs are increasingly making their presence felt in Europe: this week they were among 27 people arrested in coordinated police raids in Italy, Spain and Albania. According to Italy’s Carabinieri, the arrests encompassed two drug trafficking gangs, one of which was a Nigerian operation in which they used their young compatriots seeking a new life in Europe to traffic marijuana across the continent. Their base was the bus terminal near

When European leaders discussed their response to US-Russian negotiations about ending the war in Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz felt ‘a little irritated’. France and Britain suggested sending European troops to secure a peace deal. Days away from an election likely to boot him out of power, Scholz found this an ‘inappropriate debate at the wrong time’. It will likely fall to his successor to shoulder Germany’s fair share of responsibility for European security. US and Russian officials have today held the first of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, forcing European countries to determine their role as a matter of urgency. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said ‘European nations

When David Frost led UK negotiations with the EU on a free trade agreement five years ago, he was supported by a 100-strong Cabinet Office team. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘EU reset unit’, also based in the Cabinet Office, is 100-strong too, including two permanent secretaries. Given Labour’s insistence that it is not seeking to renegotiate Brexit, but merely to improve relations with the EU, why appoint such a large, high-powered unit? Setting aside the harsher criticism that the ‘EU surrender unit’ is a machine to reverse Brexit, government ministers and the PM remain tight-lipped about the officially titled ‘European Union relations secretariat’. It does not appear on the Cabinet