World

Saturday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The European left’s fascism fantasy

France, Sweden, Italy, Finland and now Spain. The demise of the left in western Europe continues apace and yet their only solution is to seethe about fascists in a make believe world of their own.   Nine months after Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime Minister – remember the hysterical warnings about her being Mussolini in heels – the only horror the Italian left has experienced is electoral wipeout. At last weekend’s local elections, Meloni’s conservative Brothers of Italy party romped to victory in many towns that were once staunchly Socialist. As a jubilant Meloni crowed: ‘Strongholds [of the left] no longer exist.’ Nine months after Giorgia Meloni was elected Prime

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians are worried about the state of their bomb shelters

Russia fired more than 576 missiles and drones against Ukraine last month; Kyiv was shelled two days in three. Ukrainian air defence works smoothly, shooting down nearly 90 per cent of missiles – but even a successful intercept can lead to debris, causing death. This happened yesterday, in a case that is causing a national scandal. As the siren sounded over Kyiv, a man, his wife and his daughter headed with their neighbours to their shelter in Desnianskyi district – only to find it locked. The man, known as Yaroslav, ran to find someone to open it up. ‘People knocked and knocked again for a very long time. And no

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Australians mock UK trade deal

Huzzah! The momentous day has arrived at last: finally Britain can reap the Brexit benefits and enjoy some delicious free-trade Tim Tams. For today is the day the UK’s trade deal with Australia comes into force. Unfortunately it seems that not all our friends down under aren’t, er, quite so sold on the mutual benefits that this new trade deal will bring. Announcing the news this morning, Karl Stefanovic – the host of the Today show on Australia’s Channel 9 – seemed distinctly unimpressed by what the UK would be bringing to the table. Explaining that some British products would become cheaper as a result of the deal, Stefanovic exclaimed

Stephen L. Miller

Does Donald Trump have anything new to offer?

It’s no secret that I’m not a personal fan of former president Donald Trump – but through the years I feel I’ve been mostly fair to him, his presidency, his accomplishments and his failures. Something, though, dawned on me during his friendly Fox town hall with Sean Hannity on Thursday night, which wasn’t really a town hall, due to not being live and no audience questions until the last ten minutes of the hour. I’ve been critical of Trump and have praised him, but I’ve rarely ever been bored by him – and that was my impression coming away from his first real sit-down with Iowa voters.  What struck me about this ‘2024-facing’

Daniel DePetris

Macron has a point about Russian war crimes

French President Emmanuel Macron tends to rock the boat whenever he opens his mouth, saying hard truths that many of his European colleagues, both at the state level and in the European Union’s gargantuan bureaucracy, would rather be left unsaid. Examples are legion: his insistence in 2019 that Nato was going ‘brain-dead’; his proclamation in June 2022 that Russia shouldn’t be humiliated if Europe wants to preserve working relations with Moscow after the war ends; or his comments last April urging Europe to grow a backbone and refrain from blindly following the United States into a confrontation with China over Taiwan.   Should the thirst for justice override the possibility, however faint, of peace? Macron’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Biden falls over (again) at Air Force graduation

President Biden continues to project strength ahead of the 2024 election — by tumbling on stage at the US Air Force Academy Graduation. The 80-year-old commander-in-chief fell today while handing out diplomas to graduating cadets in Colorado. Rest assured, he was quickly helped up and escorted off stage by three Air Force officials.  The White House has blamed the fall on a sandbag placed by the podium. ‘He’s fine. There was a sandbag on stage while he was shaking hands,’ White House communications director Ben LaBolt tweeted after the incident. Mr S isn’t sure how the sandbag got there but could have sworn he heard the familiar cackle of one

Thursday

Terry Barnes

Ben Roberts-Smith and the murky debate over accountability in war

Today in Sydney, Australia’s most decorated soldier, former Special Air Services corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC, was found by a civil court, on a balance of probabilities, to be a likely war criminal, a murderer, a liar and a bully. Roberts-Smith is a huge man, towering over all around him. When he was presented alongside other Victoria Cross winners to the late Queen some years ago, he loomed over her by a good eighteen inches.  Can we ever fully understand what goes on in people’s minds in war? His reputation as a battlefield soldier was fearsome. The mere sight of him charging towards the enemy must surely have intimidated the Taliban

William Moore William Moore

Red Rishi

39 min listen

On this week’s episode: Price caps are back in the news as the government is reportedly considering implementing one on basic food items. What happened to the Rishi Sunak who admired Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson? In her cover article this week, our economics editor Kate Andrews argues that the prime minister and his party have lost their ideological bearings. She joins the podcast, together with Spectator columnist Matthew Parris, who remembers the last time price caps were implemented and writes about it in his column. We also take a look at the experience of being addicted to meth. What is it like, and is it possible to turn your

Nigel Jones

Could Russia try to assassinate British officials?

You only have to hear the words of Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President and Vladimir Putin’s long term chief sidekick, to realise just how far Russia has propelled itself from the circle of civilised nations. Putin’s Russia not only uses state assassinations as an instrument of policy, but jokes and boasts about it too Dmitry Medvedev has recently made a habit of outdoing even his boss in blood curdling rhetoric. His latest outburst is typical: a direct threat to the lives of British officials. Britain, he declared, is waging an ‘undeclared war’ on Russia through its support for Ukraine, and because of that all British officials have now become ‘legitimate

Stephen L. Miller

Is Trump taking Hillary’s road to oblivion?

A few months back I asked a question of Donald Trump: does he know why he’s running to be president again? He made one major speech of which even some of his most ardent followers questioned the enthusiasm. Since then he has occupied the depths of Truth Social and not much more.  After his announcement to seek the presidency for a third time last November (he ran as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, remember), he has held one campaign rally, one town hall on CNN, made one stop in Iowa and another where he canceled a much-hyped rally. He has spent much of his time taking shot after shot

Wednesday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

A dispatch from Ukraine

Last week, I visited Ukraine – Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk. Impressions crowded in. Here are a few: When the Russians attacked Kharkiv last year, they strafed a Holocaust memorial on the way into town. It is particularly poignant to see the monument’s large seven-branch candlestick reduced to five branches. Across the road is Kharkiv’s vast municipal cemetery. The war dead are immediately visible among the acres of graves. They lie together, in a square. Above each tomb flutters the Ukrainian flag, as if the dead are mustered for battle. I counted more than a thousand of them, and I am afraid the numbers are fast growing elsewhere. That night, I

Ian Williams Ian Williams

Gag order: China’s stand-up comedy crackdown

‘The Chinese Communist party is probably the funniest thing that exists,’ the dissident artist Ai Weiwei once told me, ‘but it doesn’t have a sense of humour.’ The brave band of comics in China’s fledgling stand-up comedy scene are discovering that poking fun at the grim-faced old men who run the country with an ever-tighter grip is a dangerous pursuit. Last month, at a comedy club in Beijing’s Dongcheng district, 31-year-old Li Haoshi mocked a military slogan coined by President Xi Jinping. Li said that ‘Forge exemplary conduct! Fight to win!’ reminded him of his two dogs chasing a squirrel. A clip of the show spread rapidly online. The Beijing

Sasha Lensky

Russian children are being groomed for the war in Ukraine

As we pass the 15-month mark of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it’s clear the Putin government is in a fix. It cannot win this war nor afford to lose or stop it. But with another mobilisation politically risky and tens of thousands of Russian citizens now fallen on the battlefield, it’s evident they will need all the volunteers they can lay their hands on.   There is a problem facing the regime: the war itself is significantly less popular with the young in Russia than with the middle-aged and elderly. Over half the 55+ age-group in the country support the current war, while for 18- to 24-year-olds the figure falls to 26 per cent.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Does Biden actually care about gay rights?

Joseph Robinette Biden, a practising Catholic, has travelled a long way when it comes to gay rights. In 1996, as Senator for Delaware, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked the federal recognition of same-sex unions. Two years earlier he voted to cut funding to schools that taught the acceptance of homosexuality. In the 1970s, when asked about homosexuals in the US military, he replied: ‘My gut reaction is that they are a security risk but I must admit I have not given this much thought… I’ll be darned!’   Saudi Arabia is the world’s second-biggest oil producer and so it gets a pass. Uganda has little to

David Loyn David Loyn

Why Iran and the Taliban are clashing over water

Remarkable as it may sound, it looks as if a border skirmish this week between Iranian and Afghan border guards, which involved at least three deaths, was about water. This is not the first border clash as tensions grow over scarce water resources between Iran and the 20-month old Taliban regime, although it is the first that is known to have cost lives.   Earlier this month, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi raised the issue of the 1973 water treaty, designed to share access to water from the Helmand river, which flows across the border. He claimed that the Taliban were violating terms of the agreement, under which Afghanistan is committed

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s failure to tackle migration is a warning to the Tories

Perhaps the most illuminating comment made by Nigel Farage during his discussion with Fraser Nelson on Spectator TV earlier this month was when he reflected on the Brexit campaign. ‘I remember being told, by [Daniel] Hannan and Boris Johnson, “no, no, don’t discuss immigration in the referendum”,’ reminisced the former leader of UKIP. ‘”We’ll lose the referendum. Some of our very posh friends don’t like this sort of thing”.’  It’s not just posh Tories who blanch at the mention of the ‘I’ word; so do posh socialists, which explains why immigration is now out of control in the UK. The vast majority of MPs, if not all strictly ‘posh’, certainly

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Moscow is now a target in Putin’s war

Russian drones attacked Kyiv last night, the 17th such assault this month. But this time there was a difference: just after 4 a.m, Moscow came under what seemed to be a retaliatory attack. Most of the 25 drones were shot down by the city’s air defences, but three managed to get through. As Russia has found in Ukraine, this ratio is not unusual for drone attacks.  Of the drones that did succeed in flying over Moscow, one failed to detonate but the other two hit buildings in the New Moscow area of the city. Footage has surfaced on Russian social media purporting to show drones flying over Moscow suburbs in

William Nattrass William Nattrass

Czech Foreign Minister: Ukraine needs to ‘transform’ before it can join the EU

It doesn’t take long for visitors to Prague to figure out how the locals feel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fifteen months since the war started, yellow and blue flags still seem to flutter in almost every city centre street.   The current Czech government – an ideologically varied five-party coalition united by its pro-EU and pro-western outlook – has played its part in supporting Ukraine’s successful war effort. As a proportion of GDP, Czech military aid to Ukraine has been among the most generous in the world. And when I meet Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský, who is set to meet UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly this week, he is unequivocal

Seth J. Frantzman

How Saudi Arabia reinvented itself

In mid-May, Saudi Arabia welcomed Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad to the Kingdom ahead of an important meeting of the Arab League. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was also welcomed and invited to the League meeting. The two leaders visiting the country at the same time symbolise Saudi Arabia’s increased role in regional and global diplomacy. Helping to bring Syria’s regime in from the cold can be seen as Riyadh’s willingness to confront western consensus on Syria, while hosting the Ukrainian leader looks like a way to show that the Middle East can play a role in a key conflict reshaping the world today.  Saudi Arabia has reinvented itself in the last few years. The country

Monday

Jim Lawley

What the rise of Vox means for Spain

Vox, the most right-wing of Spain’s mainstream political parties, has emerged considerably strengthened from Sunday’s local and regional elections. With the left-wing vote slumping badly, the Partido Popular, the largest right-wing party, also had an excellent night, but crucially it will need the support of Vox to govern in many regions and town halls.          These elections then suggest that Vox may be a highly influential (albeit junior) partner in the central government after the general election which, it has just been announced, will be held on 23 July. At present it is the third-strongest party in the national parliament with 52 of the 350 seats, while the Partido Popular