46 min listen
The Coronomics series has come to an end after starting in mid-April, at a time when Hong Kong, Britain, the US, and Italy were at much more serious points of the pandemic. On this final episode, Kate Andrews talks to Nick Gillespie, Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, and Jennifer Creery about what their respective governments have learnt during the crisis, and where they went wrong.
Turkey’s strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced that the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again, after 85 years as a museum and a designated Unesco World Heritage site. It will be the fifth church of the same name — all once symbols of the Eastern Roman Empire and priceless cultural treasures — to face the same fate in recent years. Erdogan is facing political threats, from old allies like former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, and from Turkey’s poor economy. He will be hoping that this radical move consolidates his support. It is not certain that it will work. Berk Esen, international relations professor at Ankara’s
29 min listen
Skye McAlpine is a Sunday Times columnist and the author of two cookbooks. She joins Lara and Olivia down the line from Venice, where she grew up. On the podcast, she talks about moving to the city as a child, her favourite Venetian meals, and why, despite being a dinner party maestro, she doesn’t believe in starters. Subscribe to The Spectator’s first podcast newsletter here and get each week’s podcast highlights in your inbox every Monday.
With a huge Covid-induced economic crisis looming, many Spaniards are wondering if, through no fault of their own, they are about to lose their jobs. Among them is King Felipe VI. It’s not that Felipe has done much wrong in his brief reign. Indeed in many ways he has been that historical rarity – a Spanish Bourbon who takes his duties seriously. But there’s a chance that he might soon become the innocent victim of the dynasty’s many shortcomings, and in particular the declining reputation of his father. Felipe came to the throne in 2014 when his father, Juan Carlos I, worried about his growing unpopularity, abdicated. In 2012, an
39 min listen
We’ve been told for years that the magic money tree doesn’t exist – but has the Chancellor just found it? (00:55) Now that Hong Kong has come into closer orbit with Beijing, is Taiwan next? (21:15) And finally, we find out a little about the weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets – see them here! (32:35) With The Spectator’s Economics Correspondent Kate Andrews; Miatta Fahnbulleh from the New Economics Foundation; security expert Alessio Patalano; Taiwan expert Shelley Rigger; pilot and carpet connoisseur Bill Young; and journalist Sophie Haigney. Presented by Cindy Yu.
Kanye West is a great artist. But would he make a great president? Kanye and Trump are certainly similar. They both love publicity and are master self-promoters. So for Kanye, what better way to market oneself than running for the Oval Office? This isn’t the first time the hip-hop mogul thought about throwing his hat in American politics. Kanye said he would be a presidential candidate during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. He said it again when he won the Video Vanguard Award. He dabbled in the prospect in 2018, when he told a radio host that his platform would be part-Trump, part-Bernie Sanders. Kanye even briefly talked about
25 min listen
Douglas Murray writes in the Spectator this week that Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore defended all the right bits of American history. He joins the podcast with Freddy this week to talk cancel culture and how Trump is taking on the left in the right way.
There are far more Chinese students in British universities than there are from the entire Commonwealth. Many universities have been accused of indulging the Chinese regime in return for the students and the money. Now that Beijing has imposed its draconian security law upon Hong Kong, will Hong Kong students in British universities be safe to return in October? Beijing now seeks to control them. What assurances can British universities give Hong Kong students that it will protect them from intimidation from fellow students acting on the orders of the Chinese embassy in London? The new law claims the right to punish Hong Kong people for offences committed anywhere in
It is just over three years since the election of Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France. All of Gaul is united against him. All? No! From a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a remote corner of Occitanie, Jean Castex, the irréductible mayor of the tiny commune of Prades (population 6,124), has emerged in a puff of smoke to become the President’s new prime minister. Castex is a previously almost unheard-of regional politician with a name that sounds as if he has leapt directly from an Asterix comic book. Being prime minister of France is probably the most thankless job in European politics. The president takes the
We self-critical British should never forget that other nations are pretty crazy too. I write this from Andalusia, Spain; and when it comes to cockeyed rules for limiting the spread of Covid-19, the Spanish offer us some stiff competition. One is reminded of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Very gradually (I’d guess) over the months during which Spaniards have been subject to a face-mask regime, people seem to have lost touch with the reasons the rules were laid down in the first place. Practices have simply been absorbed into popular culture, their origins now ignored, forgotten or never understood. We landed in Almeria from Manchester last week and, wearing our
Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to its correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘tear down our country’s history’. And where might the President have acquired such an idea? Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly
The fate of Hong Kong should make us worried about Taiwan. China’s introduction of a new security law for Hong Kong — which hollowed out the spirit of the ‘one country, two systems’ notion — is a powerful reminder of the importance of sovereignty for the Chinese Communist party. We should ask whether Taiwan is next on the list. In the past few months, as the world battled to control the Covid-19 pandemic, Beijing indulged in increased military activity across the Taiwan Strait. The purpose was to remind the newly re-elected Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan is an inherent part of China and that there is no alternative to
Japan has announced a colossal stimulus package (£1.75 trillion) as it attempts to breathe life into its Covid-19 damaged economy. But with its finances already in a parlous state before the pandemic struck, economists and policy makers around the world are nervous about where this dramatic intervention in one of world’s most fiscally conservative nations could lead. One of the biggest problems Japan could face is its own currency. The Yen has traditionally been a safe haven in times of global uncertainty but not, it appears, right now. A fall of nearly 10 per cent against the dollar was recorded in March, as investors rushed to the world’s most powerful
Picture the greatest French criminal barrister of his generation with the physique and cantankerousness of Rumpole-of-the-Bailey and the media-strutting ‘blokishness’ of Nigel Farage. Just imagine this 59-year-old son of an Italian cleaning-lady, great orator, defender of all-comers – including in his own words ‘the gypsy who has just disembowelled an old lady to steal her 40 euros’ – as one of the most outspoken and fiercest critics of France’s highly politicised and insulated caste of judges and examining magistrates. Meet then, the new French minister of justice. Emmanuel Macron’s much-heralded reshuffle has been a damp squib, save for the stunning appointment of Éric Dupond-Moretti, tribune of the plebs to Macron’s Caesar.
25 min listen
In this episode, Mauricio Savarese reports on the latest from Brazil where the battle between the President Jair Bolsonaro and the media heats up. Kate Andrews updates on Britain’s Covid situation with a report from the Times on an estimate for excess cancer deaths in 2021, and Cindy Yu reports on how Beijing’s cluster infection has further damaged business and consumer confidence.
It’s rare for a Government minister to make an announcement that is universally welcomed in the House of Commons. But that’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the foreign secretary Dominic Raab introduced long-awaited sanctions against human-rights abusers. Raab’s announcement appeared on the Commons’ Order Paper under the rather mundane title ‘Introduction of the Global Human Rights sanctions regime’, but what he said will have far-reaching consequences. The measures Raab announced include asset freezes and travel bans against individuals who not only commit human-rights abuses but also those who benefit and profit from them. The names of such individuals will be made public, in a so-called ‘Magnitsky List’. The measures
31 min listen
Vatican officials are anxious to get their hands on an advance copy of The Next Pope, a survey of 19 leading contenders to succeed Pope Francis scheduled for publication next month. The author, Edward Pentin, discusses these papable cardinals in today’s episode of Holy Smoke. The full list is still under wraps, but inevitably we talk about Cardinal Robert Sarah, the African-born apocalyptic visionary whom liberals most fear. (If you doubt that, read this despicable and semi-literate hatchet job on Sarah by Christopher Lamb in The Tablet.) Equally inevitably, we talk about the charismatic and ambitious Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, formerly Archbishop of Manila and now one of Francis’s main
Israel beat the coronavirus. Or at least that’s what the public were led to believe only a few weeks ago. An early lockdown and stringent enforcement measures in March and April not only ‘flattened the curve’ but sent it crashing downwards. With less than 250 deaths and only a few dozen new cases per day, by early May prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference to crow about Israel’s ‘great success story’ and how foreign leaders the world over were calling him for advice on how to battle the pandemic. Fast forward two months and there are over a thousand new infections per day. On a per capita basis
27 min listen
The year-long Hong Kong protests seem to have come to an abrupt end – as China introduces a draconian national security law that punishes criticism of the Chinese government. On the podcast, Cindy Yu talks to academic and former diplomat Kerry Brown and Hong Kong journalist Jennifer Creery about what China wants with the city, and where this will end.
His name is unknown, but resonates like that of a character from Astérix the Gaul. Jean Castex is France’s new prime minister, with a government reshuffle to follow. In ridding himself of the stolid and popular Edouard Philippe, Emmanuel Macron is playing his last hand in the presidential poker game to reset his troubled presidency. In fact Macron has appointed Edouard Philippe’s double. Castex, like his predecessor when first appointed to Matignon is unknown among the public, but an enarque, technocrat, top civil servant, member of the conservative Parti Républicain, with a foot in local mayoralty. A small difference between the two is Castex’s down-to-earth southern accent, something unheard among
