World

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is it only left-wing leaders who are allowed to be young?

There was a time when the French left turned its nose up at all things American. Too low-brow for them. Not now. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race has caused much joie de vivre in left-circles. For Mamdani, his youth is a virtue, but with Bardella it’s a weakness Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Gallic Bernie Saunders and the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise, described Mamdani’s win as ‘very good news’. The general secretary of the centre-left Socialist party, Olivier Faure, posted a smiley face on X above a headline in Le Monde, hailing Mamdani as ‘the youngest mayor in New York history’. Mamdani referenced his

Jacob Heilbrunn

Nancy Pelosi was a ruthless operator

Nancy Pelosi’s career ends as it began. She entered Congress in 1986 during the Reagan administration and is ending it under the most influential Republican president since the Gipper. On Thursday she released a six-minute video announcing her retirement in 2027 from Congress, the latest octogenarian to depart it. No sooner did she announce that she would not seek reelection, than Donald Trump crowed that he had outlasted her. Old age, it seems, is no barrier to a slanging match. A few days ago the 85-year old Pelosi called him an ‘evil creature.’ Now Trump, on the verge of becoming an octogenarian himself, returned the favour. She was evil, corrupt

Michael Day

Is it too soon to say the truth about Dick Cheney?

Long before Donald Trump arrived on the political scene to warp all international diplomacy and finance around him, there were US administrations creating greater calamities. George W Bush’s first government, from 2001 to 2005, was one of them. Dubya wasn’t a sleazy grifter or a weapons grade narcissist. But on his watch the United States did, with its war on Iraq, bring chaos to the Middle East and spark an explosion of Islamic terrorism for which we’re still paying the price. Cheney was a man devoid of empathy, who used US superpower to slay hundreds of thousands of people and smash things Of course, the Iraq invasion wasn’t his idea.

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Germany ready for military service?

It’s finally crunch time for Boris Pistorius’s plan to reintroduce military service in Germany. Following a delay of several months thanks to the country’s snap federal election campaign at the start of the year, the defence minister’s new ‘Modernisation of Military Service’ draft law is currently being debated in Berlin. Under Pistorius’s proposals, all 18-year-olds will be asked to complete a questionnaire that will gauge their willingness and ability to carry out military service. For men, the quiz will be compulsory; for ‘other genders’ – including women – it will be optional. Those who declare themselves willing to serve will be invited for a formal assessment for recruitment into the

James Tidmarsh

The tragedy of the Shein takeover of Paris

The most glamorous department store in Paris, the BHV Marais, a vast art deco landmark stretching along Rue de Rivoli facing the Hôtel de Ville, is leasing space to Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion giant. Once a symbol of Parisian refinement, BHV now finds itself hosting a brand that epitomises disposability. This has sparked demonstrations outside the store and drawing sharp criticism inthe French press. France can’t save its shops, its factories or its dignity because it no longer believes in the value of producing anything at all This isn’t just another retail opening, it’s cultural surrender. It is proof that Paris, once the world’s fashion capital, is now renting out

Ian Williams Ian Williams

China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisers reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Train stabbing attack, Mamdani takes New York and the Andrew formerly known as prince

Home The King ‘initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew’, who is now known as Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor; his lease on Royal Lodge, Windsor, was relinquished and he made a private arrangement with the King to live on the Sandringham estate. His former wife, Sarah Ferguson, will find her own accommodation. Their daughters remain Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice. Richard Gott, who resigned as literary editor of the Guardian in 1994 after The Spectator accused him of having been in the pay of the KGB, died aged 87. Gopichand Hinduja, the head of Britain’s richest family, died aged 85. Eleven people were

Andrew Gimson

Is Zack Polanski our Zohran Mamdani?

Like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Zack Polanski offers the thrill of cost-free rebellion. Mamdani leapt to prominence at the end of June by unexpectedly winning the Democratic party nomination in the New York mayoral race, and doing so as an avowed socialist who claims that by taxing the rich he will relieve ‘the despair in working-class Americans’ lives’. Polanski has made waves since the start of September as the new leader of the Green party of England and Wales, using a rhetoric calculated to appeal to left-wing activists, while proclaiming himself the champion of plumbers and hairdressers. He has conjured up an alliance between utopian socialists like himself and

Tim Shipman

Gilded age: the lessons from Trump’s second term

Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do it,’ Scotland’s First Minister suggested, ‘you might as well go big.’ This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers on his

Wednesday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Is New York finished?

New York has elected Zohran Mamdani — and Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Spectator writer, warns the city is heading for trouble. She tells Freddy Gray why she thinks Mayor-elect Mamdani’s agenda on crime, housing and education could undo decades of progress, and why this moment feels like “a student activist government taking over a real city”.

Douglas Murray

New York is not the city that Mamdani pretends it is

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian organised a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of Islingtonians telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s New York mayoral election might have had a similar result. Interviewed shortly before Zohran Mamdani was elected, the mayor of London praised the Democratic

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Ile d’Oléron attack and Islamism’s ceaseless menace

A man shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ drove his car into a crowd on France’s Ile d’Oléron this morning. At least ten people on the popular holiday destination – situated off the Atlantic Coast – were injured, and three are in a critical condition. Police arrested the driver, a 35-year-old man with a history of petty crime. A search of his vehicle revealed some gas cylinders. Among the injured is 22-year-old Emma Vallain, a parliamentary assistant to Pascal Markowsky, an MP in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. A rising star in the party, she took part in a televised debate at the weekend about the current political deadlock in France. Jordan Bardella,

Edward Howell

China’s South Korean espionage campaign is growing bolder

It is rare to see Xi Jinping burst into laughter. But something must have tickled China’s Paramount Leader when he met South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju, South Korea. The summit will largely be remembered this year for Donald Trump’s tête-à-têtes with East Asian leaders, whether Xi Jinping, Lee Jae-myung, or Sanae Takaichi – despite the US president deciding to give the actual summit a miss. Yet, in what was a bumper week for South Korea, the summit’s host, other bilateral meetings must not go unacknowledged. When Lee met Xi Jinping on Saturday, few expected the two leaders to

Charles Lipson

The far-left have taken over the Democratic party

If you think America doesn’t permit assisted suicide, you haven’t been watching the New York mayoral election. The city is deliberately killing itself. The country’s largest city, its financial and media capital, had a choice among three truly dreadful candidates: a deeply-tarnished former governor, a Republican who runs in every election except Homecoming Queen and had no chance of winning this one (but refused to withdraw), and a young socialist with a winning smile, dreamy programmes, Islamist allies, and zero administrative experience. Predictably, New York voters chose the absolute worst. Zohran Mamdani won handily. Now, they’ll have to live with Mamdani’s socialist programmes, which fail everywhere and break the bank

Heather Mac Donald

Zohran Mamdani will destroy New York

William F. Buckley Jr once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilisation about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn. American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offence? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Women’s rights have been broken on the wheel of the trans ideology Ms Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Keir Starmer is letting China abuse our libel laws

The enormous cost of British libel law is a threat to national security. For the sake of enriching London barristers, Keir Starmer is preserving an unreformed and rapaciously expensive legal system that is wide open to abuse by oligarchs and dictatorships. And he knows it. When he was a young barrister in the 1990s,Starmer represented Helen Steel and David Morris. McDonald’stried to crush the two environmental activists because they had criticised its treatment of animals. The 1997 ‘McLibel’ affair remains notorious as the longest trial in British history. ‘This case shows the absurdity of the libel laws,’ Starmer said at the time. Now almost 30 years on, he is prime minister,

Tuesday

Eleanor Jolliffe

We should mourn the loss of Rome’s medieval towers

The Torre dei Conti, next to Rome’s Forum, partially collapsed yesterday. A construction worker who was carrying out restoration work on the tower was trapped and eventually killed, but this is not the first time the Torre dei Conti has been involved in the death of Romans. The 45 or so remaining medieval towers of Rome are not high on the list of most visitors to the city, but they stand testament to a fascinating, violent and formative period of Rome’s history. The Torre dei Conti was built in the thirteenth century by the Conti family, the family of Pope Innocent III, as a fortified residence to defend and strengthen their

Eliot Wilson

Trump’s nuclear weapons testing is a dangerous idea

It is often difficult to discern the exact meaning of President Trump’s public statements. He does not consider words carefully, being a politician of pure and visceral instinct, but he is also not especially articulate, and this can produce ambiguous jumbles of language. Last week, minutes before he met President Xi Jinping of China at Busan Airport in South Korea, Trump made an extraordinary statement on his Truth Social platform: The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country… Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War

Margaret Mitchell

Was Dick Cheney a hero or a villain?

Former US vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defence under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration. Throughout his life, Cheney held that what he had done was necessary What is perhaps his most lasting legacy is the ‘Cheney Doctrine,’ which influenced America’s decision to engage in wars in the Middle East. He campaigned for a military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which drove his conviction that any country, organisation or individual