World

Tuesday

Anna Arutunyan

Why Putin needs Prigozhin

It’s been a tense couple of weeks for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman and founder the of Wagner Group of mercenaries. Russian troops and Prigozhin’s mercenaries have been closing in on the strategic town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, capturing territories around it. On 10 January, Prigozhin boasted that his forces had ‘taken control’ of Soledar, even as fighting continued inside the town and Ukraine disputed the claims. Two days later, Russia’s defence ministry announced that the ‘liberation’ of Soledar was complete. In a separate statement that same day, claiming to respond to various media inquiries, the ministry clarified that the urban territories of Soledar had been captured thanks to the

Monday

Winston Marshall

Bjorn Lomborg: climate change alarmism and the true cost of net zero

55 min listen

Winston speaks with sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, And Fails To Fix The Planet. They discuss climate change and climate change policy. Lomborg explains how net zero and the Paris agreement will do more harm than good and suggests some alternative sustainable development goals which would balance environmental protection with human prosperity.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Covid’s legacy: how will China remember the pandemic?

48 min listen

Three years ago, as people across China welcomed the Year of the Rat, a new virus was taking hold in Wuhan. In London, the conversation at my family’s New Year dinner was dominated by the latest updates, how many masks and hand sanitisers we’d ordered.  Mercifully, Covid didn’t come up at all as we welcomed the Year of the Rabbit this weekend, though my family in China are still recovering from their recent infections. The zero Covid phase of the pandemic is well and truly over. So what better time to reflect on the rollercoaster of the last three years? In exchange for controlling the virus, China’s borders were shut

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden has some difficult questions to answer

Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken on a slight change of punctuation: ‘People know I take classified documents. Seriously.’ He certainly does. He takes them everywhere. Most recently, classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a foreign policy thinktank in Washington, DC established by Biden in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The documents raise additional questions. Why were

Sean Thomas

East Asia’s mask obsession is a catastrophe the West must avoid

In the Red Square Rooftop Vodka Bar of the sleekly towering Novotel Hotel, on soi 4, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, it feels like the last three harrowing years never really happened.  By day the sunny rooftop poolside is strewn with happy Europeans, Americans, Brazilians, Indians, consuming excellent wagyu burgers and freely flowing margaritas. As the sun sets, it gets even better, because dusk is the best time of day in Bangkok: the city revives from its sunstruck torpor, the girls in their dancing skirts alight from the Skytrain, the hawkers sell mango, durian, papaya, sliced fresh for twenty baht. The lights of the skyscrapers glisten like looted jewels. Gin tinkles in

James Snell

Ukraine is paying a heavy price for Nato’s dithering

It is winter in Ukraine. The ground is frozen and hard. Groups of soldiers on both sides struggle in the cold. The Ukrainians insist they have one advantage over the Russians: their soldiers, unlike mobilised Russian troops, have some effective winter clothing.   Traditionally, armies stop moving in winter. They hunker down. It’s less true in Ukraine, where winter does not mean paralysis for civilian or army life. But in much of the country, the frontline does appear frozen – figuratively and literally. But winter ends quickly, especially in wartime.  Western intelligence agencies believe that a new Russian offensive is in the offing. They say a new attack will begin in either

Robin Ashenden

Putin’s desperate recruits are in a life-and-death scramble for kit

As Vladimir Putin seemingly dithers over the question of whether to send a further 500,000 of his citizens onto the battlefield this winter, one reason against – as reported on Coffee House – is surely a lack of basic equipment for them. Since the ‘partial mobilisation’ of up to 300,000 hapless men last September, there have been numerous reports of the army’s failure to properly kit them out. Russian soldiers have been sent to the front with children-sized gloves, uselessly thin rubber boots and, for facial protection, paintball masks. ‘They think we’ll walk around in this sh** like in Star Wars,’ one Russian soldier jokes in clip recorded by those

Philip Pilkington

Why Britain will lose from America’s trade wars

Davos this year marked the start of a great economic divorce of the United States and Europe. Katherine Tai, the US trade chief, said that globalised capitalism is not working anymore. It leaves workers behind and gives fuel to populists, she said. Really, the Biden administration wants reassert US dominance in the world, and is using the country’s economic weight to do it. The Europeans, meanwhile, seem happy to become more protectionist too, with France’s Europe minister Laurence Boone calling the new US stance a ‘wake-up call’ and saying that Europe should respond in kind. Europe’s leaders are reacting to the reality that, with high energy prices, their manufacturing cannot remain competitive

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

It’s time to make Boris Johnson special envoy to Ukraine

The videos showed a typical summit: Volodymyr Zelensky next to Ukraine’s flag and Boris Johnson next to the Union Flag. But there’s a difference. Johnson is no longer the prime minister and was visiting Kyiv as a private citizen – yet was greeted and treated like he was still calling the shots. A video of the meeting, with rousingly patriotic music, has been released. ‘I will do whatever I can’ says BoJo: but with what? In what capacity did his summit with Zelensky take place? Some may see this in the context of an attempted Boris Johnson comeback, but in the leading article in this week’s Spectator we make the case

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s protestors are just getting started

There was another protest in Paris on Saturday. According to the organisers, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise, 150,000 turned out on a crisp winter’s afternoon to opposeEmmanuel Macron’s pension reform. The French President wants to lower the retirement age from 64 to 62. But independent analysis put the numer at the protest at 14,045. It was the latter. I was there. I’m now something of a seasoned observer of the French street protest. From Yellow Vests to Covid Passports, and from the far right to the far left, I’ve rubbed shoulder with all manner of disgruntled French citizen. Yesterday’s protest was one of the jollier. I wouldn’t go so far as

Julius Strauss

The night train to Kyiv

After several months in the UK, the lady sleeping on the opposite bunk on the night train to Kyiv told me she had had enough. Welcomed under the Homes for Ukraine scheme into a small English village, she had watched as the thermostat in the house was turned down and then turned down again. ‘Finally they set it to 15 degrees’, she said. ‘I know they were trying to save money but for all the water bottles I used I just couldn’t keep warm. I decided life back in Kyiv had to be better.’ An hour before our conversation I had arrived at Lviv station in western Ukraine. I sat

Saturday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Why did Jacinda Ardern resign?

24 min listen

Kate Andrews talks to Fraser Nelson and the New Zealand based journalist and author Andrea Vance about the surprise announcement from Jacinda Ardern that she will be leaving the world stage next month.

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Sorry, folks, Donald Trump isn’t going away

Almost all of us can recite the reasons why Donald Trump’s political career should be over. We hear them again and again. He lost the presidency in 2020 after four exhausting years. His angry fans stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a now infamous day in American history. He lost his media clout after being banned from Facebook and (until recently) Twitter. He has clung to his ‘election denial’, as Democrats like to call it, and that makes all his political antics now seem petulant and tired. In the mid-terms in November, a fair number of the candidates he backed lost crucial senate and gubernatorial races which his party

Thursday

Sam Collins

Jacinda Ardern over-promised and under-delivered

And just like that, she’s gone. In one of the biggest shocks to hit New Zealand politics since that late night in 1984 when a clearly inebriated Robert Muldoon called a doomed snap election, Jacinda Ardern has announced her resignation as New Zealand prime minister after five years in power.  Some may argue that she is ‘getting out at the top’. But anyone with serious knowledge of New Zealand politics can recognise the sight of a prime minister getting out before an election they feel they are unable to win. Kiwi political leaders (as with our cousins in Australia) have a proud tradition of leaving office (either voluntarily or not)

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The unhinged environmentalism of Al Gore

Lucky old Americans. They only had to put up with one fruitcake as president, in Donald Trump. It could have been worse. But for a few hanging chads in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, they could have ended up with Al Gore.  It isn’t just the hanging chads, though, that have become unhinged, but Gore himself. In an extraordinary speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, an increasingly crimson Gore angrily berated the rest of the world – Greta Thunberg and other youthful activists excepted – for failing to realise just how close we are to climate apocalypse. ‘People are familiar with the thin blue line which astronauts

Wednesday

Iain Macwhirter

Gender wars: the Union’s new battle line

When Rishi Sunak had dinner with Nicola Sturgeon last week, the idea was to show he was interested in a friendly relationship: a ‘constructive dialogue’. Liz Truss had dismissed Sturgeon as an ‘attention seeker’ who was ‘best ignored’, but Sunak preferred a more positive approach. He was keen to pose for pictures afterwards. This new friendship lasted four days. Sturgeon is now accusing Sunak of ‘a full-frontal attack on the democratically elected Scottish parliament’ because he has become the first Prime Minister in history to veto a bill passed there – the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. Sturgeon has put on a virtuoso performance of grievance. It’s ‘an outrage’, she

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Putin about to gamble on a second mobilisation wave?

Is Vladimir Putin finally about to announce a second mobilisation wave? Ukraine has been warning for weeks that up to half-a-million more troops could be forced into the army. Jitters are growing in Russia that a call-up might be imminent: rumours are circulating that the Kremlin might shut Russia’s borders and resort to a second round of mobilisation. The Kremlin has denied these reports: but Putin is increasingly getting desperate. He needs to find a way to turn this war around. He also needs to fulfil defence minister Sergei Shoigu’s quota that an army of approximately 1.5 million is needed ‘to guarantee the fulfilment of tasks to ensure Russia’s security’ –

Owen Matthews

Boris Bondarev: Why more Russians aren’t defecting

Boris Bondarev’s Twitter profile sums up his past, present and future in three short phrases: ‘Russian diplomat in exile. Stop the war. The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – a quote from Wilfred Owen’s 1918 denunciation of patriotic hypocrisy. Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 42-year-old Bondarev quit his job as an arms control expert at Russia’s diplomatic mission to Geneva in protest. None of his colleagues in Geneva, or anywhere else, followed suit (at least not publicly). Does that make Bondarev the only Russian diplomat with a conscience? ‘It’s not about conscience,’ Bondarev tells me by Zoom from an undisclosed Swiss location where he now

Douglas Murray

If not Biden, who?

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two events. The first was the unveiling in Boston of a new sculptural tribute to the civil rights hero. Unfortunately, depending on the position from which you view this inept work of public art, it resembles either a man holding his head in despair or some people holding aloft a giant turd. The second incident was Joe Biden doing what he does best. The President was careful not to politicise the day – apart from attacking the Republicans. But during his remarks he also noted that it was the birthday of

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What Boris Johnson should do next

If you were rich, foreign and globally mobile, would you choose to move to the UK? The trend, it turns out, is the other way: according to migration consultants Henley & Partners, we’ve seen a net outflow of 12,000 millionaires since 2017, with 1,500 departures last year. And it’s pretty obvious why. If tax is your top concern, a tightening of non-dom rules and the near-certain prospect of a Keir Starmer government abolishing non-dom status altogether would loom large. If you’re Asian, you may think Australia looks more welcoming. If you’re European and offended by Brexit, you might prefer Ireland or fashionable Portugal. But actually we’d be mad not to