World

Thursday

Bernard Cornwell

Is the Pope a Marxist?

Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard. Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill

Douglas Murray

The derangement of Harvard

It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today. Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli

Katja Hoyer Katja Hoyer

Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army

Confusion abounded this week when the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that Ukraine could use western missiles to hit targets deep within Russia. ‘There are no more range limitations for weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither from the Brits, nor the French, nor from us. Not from the Americans either,’ he said. The problem was twofold. Firstly, that is not the official policy of western allies. Secondly, Germany has not provided Ukraine with any long-range missiles. Partly that is a political choice by Germany, but there is also the fact of the inherent weakness of the Bundeswehr itself. Merz’s new government has recognised the limited nature of his military, vowing

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Liverpool parade crash, Starmer sacrifices Chagos Islands and an octopus invasion

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Are beards a political statement?

Yes, it was right of the police to announce quickly that they did not think terrorism was the motive in Monday’s Liverpool horror, thus heading off potential riots. The police also said the person arrested was a white man. If he had been a black man, would they have said that? If not, why not? Watching film of the incident, I felt uneasily reminded of the scene in Belfast in 1988 when two British soldiers in civvies drove out of a side road and found themselves in the middle of a Republican funeral cortege. The suspicious crowd began to threaten the car. The soldiers lost their nerve, one drawing his

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Europe’s far-left terror threat

France will increase its surveillance of all critical infrastructure after saboteurs wrecked two electricity sub-stations in Nice and Cannes last weekend. The arsonists deprived nearly 200,000 homes on the Cote d’Azur of electricity, disrupted traffic lights, interrupted the Cannes film festival, shut down cash distributors and brought Nice airport to a temporary standstill. Addressing parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Francois Bayrou declared that the attacks are ‘an extremely serious threat to public order, designed to impress and terrify those who organise such events.’ An extreme-left group claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement published on the internet. The sabotage was ‘aimed not only at disrupting the [Cannes] festival, but

Elisabeth Dampier

Germany isn’t really cracking down on migration

Germany’s new interior minister, Alexander Dobrint of the Christian Social Union (CSU), has made quite a stir with his proposals to end family reunification and ‘turbo citizenship’, which allowed people to become citizens after as little as three years in Germany. However, as usual in Germany, under the outrage is a more prosaic reality. Only those without official refugee status will be barred from bringing family members to Germany, and it won’t even apply to those who have already come to Germany to claim asylum. It’s a strange irony that freedom of movement across Europe could end up being curtailed because of the EU’s collective failure to tackle migration. You

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Marine Le Pen has got to go

It’s time for Marine Le Pen to quit and spend more time with her Bengal cats. More importantly, it’s time for the third of French voters who support her to face the reality that her programme is incoherent and unachievable. Her election to the presidency in 2027 would be a disaster for France and a missed opportunity to repair what ails the French republic.  That Marine Le Pen is called ‘far-right’ is a testament to the laziness of journalists This may be a counterintuitive argument at a time when all opinion polls show that Marine Le Pen is the most favoured candidate for the French presidency in 2027. It’s true

Tuesday

Michael Taube

King Charles’s trip to Canada will go down in history

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are in Canada for a two-day visit. It’s their first trip to my country since the coronation. They’ve enjoyed touring parts of the nation’s capital, Ottawa. They’ve met with dignitaries and political leaders, and been greeted by large crowds that, in the words of the Ottawa Citizen, would be described as ‘exuberant.’ The main reason for King Charles’s visit is of historical importance and relevance to both Britain and Canada. His Majesty was invited by Prime Minister Mark Carney to deliver the throne speech for his Liberal government. It’s only the third time in Canadian history this has ever occurred, and the first time in decades. Charles is also the

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

What does Sam Altman want?

27 min listen

Freddy Gray speaks to writer and author Karen Hao, whose new book Empire of AI looks at a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI. On the podcast they discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence on society and democracy and how Open AI founder Sam Altman has become a controversial figure. 

Owen Matthews

Why Putin gets away with humiliating Trump

What happens when you repeatedly defy President Trump’s direct orders? Or lie to his face, again and again? How about when you break promises made to Trump, or slyly mock him publicly?  Not many people on the planet are in a position – or possess the cojones – to put that question to the test. Other than Vladimir Putin, of course, who this week launched his biggest missile strike on Kyiv, even after assuring Trump repeatedly that he was serious about peace. That’s the same Putin whom Trump exhorted just weeks ago to stop bombarding Ukraine’s cities with a hard-to-misinterpret, full-caps instruction: ‘VLADIMIR, STOP!’ Turning fully on Putin and blaming

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is a mood shift on Ukraine underway in Europe?

Following years of requests, pleas and false starts, Ukraine has, it appears, definitively been given permission to fire missiles deep into Russian territory. Since the start of Moscow’s invasion in 2022, Kyiv had been banned from attacking military targets on Russian soil with western-made weapons. Now, after three years of war, it appears Ukraine’s allies have indeed decided to allow it to retaliate as it sees fit. The news of the change of tack by Ukraine’s allies came yesterday from Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor. Speaking at an event in Berlin, the Chancellor revealed that ‘there are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine. Neither by the

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Are British taxpayers funding Hamas?

British taxpayer funds, earmarked for humanitarian aid in Gaza, may have passed through Hamas-controlled structures, according to a report on Israel’s Channel 12 over the weekend. The core of the allegation is not that the UK sought to support terrorism, but that its aid strategy operated in concert with the very machinery that sustains Hamas’s rule. If that proves accurate, what does it say about the integrity of our government’s foreign assistance and the sincerity of its professed commitment to international law? A British Consulate-General policy plan warned that ‘UK Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de facto authority (Hamas) in Gaza which is part of a

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Brigitte and Emmanuel – an anatomy of a slap

Some are scandalised that Brigitte Macron was seen to slap her husband in the face as they prepared to disembark from the presidential Airbus, Cotam Unité, in Hanoi this week. Unité? Not so much. The Elysée is asking us to ignore the evidence and pretend it didn’t happen. Still others may say, someone had to.   The slap was seen around the world or was it a shove, a roundhouse punch or just horsing around, disinformation spread by crazy people, as the president himself claims? The detail hardly matters.   Denial notwithstanding, we saw what we saw and lovie-dovey it wasn’t. So what does it tell us about the relationship between the president

James Tidmarsh

Why France’s taxi drivers are on strike

A taxi drivers’ strike has plunged Paris, Marseille, and other big cities into chaos. Approximately 5,000 taxi drivers have taken to the streets, blocking motorways, torching pallets, and clashing violently with police. On Boulevard Raspail in Paris, police repeatedly confronted protestors with clouds of tear gas. Airports and train stations have been blockaded by angry taxi drivers. At Marseille-Provence airport, thousands of tourists were stranded, including Brits forced to walk along motorways dragging their suitcases behind them just to get to or from the terminal. Convoys of taxis have been crawling along major roads to deliberately snarl up traffic and maximise disruption, in an operation dubbed by the unions as

Monday

Michael Murphy

George Simion: the football ultra who nearly took Romania

Bucharest, Romania Surely it’s only a matter of time before someone writes Children of the Deal: a portrait gallery of populists, showmen and media-savvy impresarios moulded in Donald Trump’s image. When that book appears, George Simion may well warrant the opening chapter. In the basement of a Lebanese restaurant in central Bucharest, he holds court, poised to become Romania’s next president. ‘This is Romanian,’ he says, waving a hand over the mezze. ‘Like the Gulf of America… I’ll have an executive order to declare it Romanian.’ The room laughed. So did Simion. He was joking. Probably. Simion is not, by any conventional measure, a traditional politician. A former football ultra and

Michael Gove

Why is antisemitism so pervasive? Irving v Lipstadt 25 years on

31 min listen

This spring marks the 25th anniversary of the landmark judgment in the infamous Irving v Lipstadt Holocaust denial case. David Irving sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt after she had described him as a Holocaust denier in her 1994 book, for his claims that Jews had not been systematically exterminated by the Nazis. Given the burden of proof in English libel law being on the defence, it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin to prove her claims were true that Irving had deliberately misrepresented evidence. In 2000, the Judge found in her favour. Deborah Lipstadt and the lawyers that represented her, Anthony Julius and James Libson, join Michael Gove

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Could France’s next president come from the Yellow Hats?

When Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene in 2016, comparisons were drawn with a 1950s Frenchman called Pierre Poujade. The BBC called him the ‘grandfather of populism’, the first post-war politician to lead a revolt against ‘being told what it is acceptable to think about issues like globalisation, migration and Europe’. Poujade was a provincial shopkeeper who was so fed up with what he saw as the corrupt and degenerate Paris elite that in 1953 he formed his own party, the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans. In the legislative elections in 1956, they won 2.4 million votes, enough to send 52 MPs to sit in the

James Lewisohn

Danes are baffled by Britain’s hatred of second-home owners

Spring has arrived on the North Coast of Zealand, and my fellow Danes are busily scrubbing down their summerhouses for the season. Villages which were nearly deserted during the winter – Danes can generally only occupy their summerhouses for 180 days a year – are gradually filling up. Sadiq Khan said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium Yet I rather doubt Sir Sadiq Khan, who earlier this month said London’s second homeowners ought to pay “much, much more” than a 100 per cent council tax premium, will be on anyone’s prospective guest list. The current war of expropriation on British second

Saturday

Jason M. Brodsky

Why Iran wants a deal with Trump

For Iran, the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2024 was its worst nightmare. Waking up the morning after the US election, Tehran feared President Trump’s unpredictability – and remembered the hard line he’d taken on Iran in the past and his killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. With Iran already reeling from losing a chunk of its proxy network in 2024, and with its air defences and missiles degraded by Israel, it was in a uniquely vulnerable position. All of this forced a recalibration. Iran’s tactic changed from rebuffing to killing President Trump with kindness. Tehran decided to weaponise diplomacy