World

Saturday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Josh Hawley and the new world of book cancellations

Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that’s set to change. This is the news that Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who indulged Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being ‘stolen’, has had his book deal with Simon & Schuster terminated. It might not be a book-burning per se, but it’s certainly the 21st-century, polite-society equivalent of it. Simon & Schuster said it decided to pull Hawley’s forthcoming book, titled The Tyranny of Big Tech, in response to the ‘disturbing, deadly insurrection’ at the Capitol on Wednesday, and what

Friday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Should Trump be impeached?

32 min listen

Freddy Gray talks to historian and Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley about the crazy week in US politics that has just happened – they discuss whether there’s any point in impeaching Trump now; the importance of understanding exactly what happened on Wednesday; and what will happen to the Republican party after Trump.

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Beijing revels in Washington’s chaos

The events on Capitol Hill were always going to be met with schadenfreude — perhaps even glee — amongst autocracies in one-party states. They suddenly had the best ammunition they could have hoped for. From Turkey and Zimbabwe to Russia and Iran, state media and spokespeople latched on, turning the language often thrown at them back at America — calling for ‘restraint’ and ‘dignity’. For the Chinese government, which has been no stranger to violent mass movements in recent years, the analogy was obvious. Hong Kong’s legislature had been stormed just last year, with pro-democracy activists forcing their way into the building and vandalising the walls with anti-Beijing slogans. Beijing

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Christina Lamb Edition

55 min listen

Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who has reported on conflicts and politics across the world for more than three decades. Her latest book is Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, highlighting especially the treatment of women in war.

Thursday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Why Merkel and Putin are cooperating on the Sputnik vaccine

Churchill, FDR and Stalin could cooperate against Hitler, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that even amidst talk of a new Cold War, sanctions and more than a little sanctimony, people in the West are willing to make deals with Moscow in the name of fighting the new global threat, Covid-19. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine may have been rushed through its certification at home and been the subject of some overblown nationalist hype (not that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been entirely free of the latter), but so far it appears to be a serious and effective jab, with a potential 91.4 per cent efficacy. Although based on a different

Keith Sutherland and Alex Kovner

Macron’s vaccine ‘citizen panel’ is doomed to fail

France has a problem when it comes to the coronavirus vaccine. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has so far only given out around 5,000 vaccines, and France has one of the lowest levels of trust in the coronavirus vaccine in the world, with only 40 per cent of the public saying they want to be inoculated. Faced with this trust deficit, Macron has proposed a 35-member ‘citizen panel’ to oversee France’s vaccination programme. The body, made up of a random selection of French citizens, will be responsible for monitoring and advising the government when it comes to the vaccine roll-out. Vaccines are the perfect storm for distrust of public authorities. Each recipient

Alex Massie Alex Massie

After Trump’s carnage, Joe Biden is the president America needs

A day of infamy but also a clarifying one. The scenes at the US capitol building yesterday were both a wholly predictable and a predicted finale to Donald Trump’s wretched presidency. Predictable because it was obvious four years ago – at least it was obvious to those who cared to open their eyes – that Trump was a festering threat to America’s great democratic experiment. And predicted because everything Trump has said and done since losing the presidential election in November led inexorably to this final, shabby, shameful coda to his presidency. For if you spend years lying to people and years telling them they are being cheated, you cannot

Constantin Eckner

Germany’s latest restrictions are stoking division

Germany’s new lockdown has hit its people like a lightning bolt. On Tuesday, Angela Merkel and the 16 federal state leaders decided that those in coronavirus hotspots should not be allowed to travel beyond a nine-mile radius (15 kilometres) if they don’t have a valid reason.     Valid reasons include a visit to a doctor’s office, shopping for necessities and commuting to work. Yet many Germans feel that the new regulations are arbitrary and affect rural areas much more than cities. The nine-mile radius as a metric is added to the edge of the town, meaning that those living in a large city still have a lot of space where

John Deverell and Molly Mulready

The UK must stop arming Saudi Arabia

We have both proudly served Her Majesty’s government — one of us as an army officer and defence attaché to the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia, the other as a lawyer advising successive foreign secretaries on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. We did not undertake this work with illusions about the reality and cost of armed conflict. We did however work on the understanding that the relevant law — including in the Geneva Conventions and long-standing rules on arms exports — would be adhered to by our government. But that is not currently the case, and we are shocked at the British government’s conduct when it comes to arms sales.

The Spectator

Trump’s final outrage

A mob descended on Capitol Hill last night acting on lies and disinformation, but there was no foreign actor to blame. This hostility was homegrown and came from the highest echelon of government. The President of the United States has been stoking fear, division and doubt since his defeat in November’s election, and yesterday it bubbled over into an attack on the very heart of American democracy.  Trump had been speaking at a ‘Save America’ rally where he invited crowds to march on the Capitol. ‘You’ll never take back our country with weakness,’ he told them, ‘you have to show strength’. Trump’s supporters showed their ‘strength’ by disrupting a debate over the

Matthew Lynn

The EU has botched its vaccination programme

It was the most excruciating moment of Ursula von der Leyen’s short tenure as President of the European Commission. On Friday morning she hastily put together a press conference to counter the growing media storm across Europe over the EU’s handling of vaccine procurement. She doubled down on ‘solidarity’, announcing that the Commission had managed to secure more doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, but also that the EU would stick absolutely to buying together. ‘We have all agreed, legally binding, that there will be no parallel negotiations, no parallel contracts,’ she insisted testily. ‘We’re all working together.’ At the same moment, however, her former colleagues in Berlin, where she was

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The Democratic takeover is nearly complete

In the days following the US presidential election in November, political centrists reached a hasty verdict. Never mind all the squabbling about voter fraud — they had won. The extremes had lost. Donald Trump, the maniac, was out; Joe Biden, the moderate, was in. Yes, the increasingly radical Democratic party still controlled the House of Representatives, but as long as the Republicans won one of two Senate run-off races in Georgia in January, the crazies would be checked by a Republican majority in the Senate. The markets rallied. All was well in establishment la-la land, despite the pandemic. Well, guess what? On Wednesday morning, it became clear that the Democrats

Jacob Heilbrunn

The fallout from Trump’s American carnage

Congratulations, President Trump! It took a while but you’ve finally achieved the American carnage that you purported to descry in your inaugural address four years ago. It would be hard to think of a more symbolically apt end to your presidency. Trump’s shameful, revolting and tawdry taped message late on Wednesday urging his supporters to disband devoted more urgency to calling the election a fraud than condemning their storming of the US Capitol. All that was missing was the claim that there are good people on both sides. Trump has already failed. He is no 18th Brumaire but a tinpot authoritarian Trump long ago forfeited any claim to dignity. The idea

Douglas Murray

Only Trump is to blame for the Capitol chaos

On a recent visit to Central Europe I heard a joke that was going around in those parts, as well as further East. The joke — such as it was — was that America spent so much time trying to export democracy in recent years that it forgot to keep any for itself at home. The joke isn’t great, but it is telling. And it is a tale whose ugliest reverberation could be seen on Wednesday when supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC. After a year of protests, these protests — in support of the President — will join the many others from the last

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

The pro-Trump mob are trashing the Republic

Watching television news, captivated by the images of pro-Trump rioters, looters, and frankly losers storm the Capitol building in service of a lost cause, I could not but help think about the old analogy that best summarises the Donald Trump era: it’s like a train-wreck; it’s hard to watch, but you can’t look away. Unfortunately, the train-wreck we are talking about today is the American Republic, which was thrown into complete and utter disarray when thousands of disgruntled, angry, maskless Trump devotees broke the barriers outside the Capitol Building, breached the doors, chased police officers up the marble staircases, and made the House and Senate chambers their own personal lounging

Joe Biden

Joe Biden: this is an assault on American democracy

Below is an edited transcript of president-elect Joe Biden’s remarks this evening, after a pro-Trump mob stormed Capitol Hill: At this hour, our democracy is under an unprecedented assault. An assault on the Capitol itself. An assault on the people’s representatives, on the police officers sworn to protect them, and the public servants who work at the heart of our Republic. An assault on the rule of law. An assault on the most sacred of American undertakings: The doing of the people’s business. Let me be very clear: The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America. This is not who we are. What we are seeing

The Spectator

The mob takes over Capitol Hill, in pictures

There have been extraordinary scenes at the United States Capitol this evening, after a pro-Trump mob stormed Capitol Hill and gained access to the Senate Chamber. There have been reports of violent clashes with police and it has been confirmed that one person has been shot. The violence follows a pro-Trump rally which took place in Washington, DC on Wednesday to protest the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Members of the US Senate were forced to evacuate the Chamber after the mob managed to break into the building. The National Guard have been called in to restore order. Below are a selection of images from the incident,

Johnny Patterson

The EU must ditch its deal with China after the arrests in Hong Kong

Earlier this morning, 53 democrats from Hong Kong were arrested. Their crime? Trying to win last September’s elections. As absurd as it sounds, the new reality in Hong Kong is that it is now effectively a criminal offence, under the National Security Law, for the opposition to have the audacity to try and boost its representation in parliament. ‘The operation today targets the active elements who are suspected to be involved in the crime of overthrowing, or interfering (with)…the Hong Kong government’s legal execution of duties,’ said John Lee, Hong Kong’s security minister. But, as he later suggested, in reality this meant that those who were arrested were simply trying to win a majority

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan’s cherry blossom scandal has tainted Shinzo Abe’s legacy

Japan may have avoided being locked down this winter, but is its longest serving PM Shinzo Abe about to be locked up? That is the alarming prospect that faces Abe as he struggles to explain his role, and that of his advisors, in a scandal that has beset him in and out of office for over two years. The allegation is that events organised for Abe’s constituents and assorted followers, including cherry blossom viewing parties, held between 2016 and 2018, were subsidised by his support group to the tune of around of around 30 million yen (£210,000 pounds). The undeclared payments, it is claimed, were in contravention of election law.

Constantin Eckner

Merkel’s government faces civil war over vaccine failures

European health ministries have not been happy places of late. Earlier this week, the German daily Bild reported a spat between national governments and the EU, frustrated at the bloc’s failure to procure vaccine doses in any serious numbers. That failure has now ricocheted back from Brussels, destabilising Germany’s increasingly fragile coalition government. So infuriated are Angela Merkel’s junior partners that they are now calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Germany’s vaccine failures, centring on one of her possible successors. Problems began when health ministers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands (the four countries with the most advanced pharmaceutical industries in the EU) joined forces to try to get