World

No president likes to be called a fool, least of all Tayyip Erdogan. He is a man who jails people who make jokes about him, as thin-skinned and paranoid as a late Ottoman sultan. So his reaction to Donald Trump’s letter on October 9, the day Turkey launched its unilateral attack on Syria, was entirely expected. ‘Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool! I will call you later,’ Trump wrote, in his now infamous attempt to hold Erdogan back from another Syrian misadventure. Erdogan’s people say he threw the letter in the bin. The Turkish president later told journalists he would get his revenge: ‘When the time comes

Parliament Square was rammed by lunchtime on Saturday. Whistles tooted. Blue flags fluttered in the breeze. An entrepreneur outside Westminster tube station was selling ‘Dump on Trump’ loo paper for £3 a roll. Many Remainers were draped in EU flags. Others wore floppy azure berets bejazzled with golden stars. A vegetarian chef doled out plates of curry for free, and a female choir delivered a burst of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the EU’s official ditty. Collies and spaniels scampered about sporting dog-coats that urged us to hold a ‘People’s Vote Now’. A witty sausage dog wore a tummy-warmer with the legend, ‘Brexit is the wurst’. Everyone in the crowd seemed buoyant

I recently heard the alarming rumour that Mr Speaker Bercow still has it in his power (a power he used on an earlier occasion) to duck out of his promise to retire. He said on 9 September that he would step down on 31 October, but apparently he may decide at the last minute that his country still needs him. I have no idea whether this speculation is correct. We do all know, however, that Mr Bercow long ago decided that the Speaker can break any convention according to whim and describe his whim as an assertion of the rights of parliament. This article is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator

When they arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday for a five-day tour, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge entered a country in which many foreign sports teams still refuse to play and few tourists dare put on their itinerary. The Foreign Office, while acknowledging things have improved in Pakistan, still advises against all travel to some parts of the country, including the southern city of Peshawar. Pakistan’s image in the West as a lawless place in which no westerner is safe was illustrated by President Trump’s infamous tweet in early 2018, in which he described the country as an unreliable ally that has ‘given the United States nothing but lies and

By now we’re all used to being lectured by woke hypocritical celebs. But Lewis Hamilton’s suggestion that we all turn vegan in order to save the planet takes the biscuit. This is a man who zooms around a track in gas-guzzling speed-machines for a living and he wants the rest of us to eke out an existence on kale and nuts in order to shrink humanity’s carbon footprint? The gall is off the charts. In an Instagram post, Hamilton said adopting a vegan diet is the ‘only way to truly save our planet’. He posted a heartfelt message saying the meat and dairy industries are leading to ‘deforestation, animal cruelty

Donald Trump has consistently supported Britain’s departure from the European Union. ‘Countries want their own identity,’ the president has said, ‘and the UK wanted its own identity.’ Indeed, Trump has been such a forceful advocate of the Leave position that he has announced that he should be called ‘MR BREXIT’. Trump has assured Britons that in a post-EU future they will have a loyal ally in the United States. ‘We’re going to do a very big trade deal – bigger than we’ve ever had with the UK,’ the president said this August. ‘At some point, they won’t have the obstacle of – they won’t have the anchor around their ankle,

As the world’s Catholic bishops meet in Rome to waffle about the problems of indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, events in their own tribe have taken a dramatic turn. Last week, Vatican police raided the Church’s own money-laundering watchdog. Meanwhile, in a simultaneous raid on the Vatican Secretariat of State, prosecutors seized documents, computers, telephones and passports. It seems to be a dirty business. According to the Italian press, police want to know more about a multi-million-pound real estate transaction in Mayfair. Significantly, all the seized documents reportedly relate to the years when Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a close papal ally, was running the Secretariat of State’s offices.  In this

Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria is one of the most shortsighted foreign policy miscalculations in recent memory. The president’s actions leaves the West’s Kurdish allies at the mercy of Turkey. And Trump’s bizarre attempt at justification – claiming that he abandoned the Kurds because they didn’t help the United States in the Second World War – adds insult to injury. After thirty years of the US seeking to present what president George Bush called a “new world order,” a cynical American leadership is retreating – and the country’s friends are paying a heavy price.  Eastern Syria, which was one of the few relatively peaceful areas of the country, was

If the Naga Munchetty fiasco wasn’t cause for enough embarrassment for the BBC, an apparent attempt to censor a script referring to a Sikh Guru’s martyrdom for fear it, ‘might offend Muslims’ should certainly be. The Beeb’s in-house ‘thought police’ have driven Lord Singh to quit a radio slot he’s contributed to for thirty-five years. It’s a sorry state of affairs – not just because it highlights a new high in BBC paranoia on giving imagined offence to imaginary people, but because it demonstrates how historical facts (not just opinions) are not immune to censorship. In the end, the broadcast went ahead. It did not criticise Islam and unsurprisingly received no

It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn’t know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator ‘has never given the slightest cause for concern’, yet on Saturday afternoon France’s anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon’s ‘radical vision of Islam’. The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay. A convert to Islam more than a decade ago, Harpon first came to the attention of the authorities in 2015 when

When I landed in Delhi at the height of the monsoon, the excitement in the city was palpable. The Indian Space Research Organisation was planning the launch of Vikram, the country’s first rocket mission to the Moon. Media coverage was ubiquitous and each report was imbued with a gushing sense of national pride. This great nation was about to take another giant leap into the future. But in modern India, there is also a great paradox. My trip was not about rockets but the much older human activity of dispensing justice to wrongdoers. Having travelled around Britain earlier this year for a BBC series on our criminal justice system, I wanted to

The news yesterday from protests in Hong Kong is extremely worrying and demands a response from UK parliamentarians. This concerns not just the welfare of an 18-year-old, shot in the chest at close range by the police, but also the future of democracy in a country whose history is closely linked with the UK’s. The immediate events leading up to the shooting, and whether the police officer acted in self-defence, will need to be examined in detail. Nonetheless my thoughts, as a parent of two sons, are with the family holding vigil at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Yau Ma Tei. There has been a tragic escalation of tensions, and Hong Kong has become a tinder

I am sure that Tooba Gondal, the latest Isis bride to beg for a return to Britain, would, as she says, rather face justice in a British court than in the detention camp where she is being held in a Kurdish-controlled part of Syria. Maybe she really is the “changed person” she claims to be and she really would, if given the chance, do her best to “help prevent vulnerable Muslims from being targeted and radicalised” – as she wrote in her letter to the Sunday Times yesterday.     But whether you believe her or not – and I have to say I read her pleas with a huge dollop of

If President Donald Trump hoped the release of a memo detailing his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to exculpate him from questions about misconduct in office, his hopes were dashed the moment the public read the transcript.    Suspicions of Trump trading £323m ($400m) in military aid to Ukraine in return for Zelensky launching a corruption investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden have coloured this entire affair. If a quid pro-quo was offered, it would be a severe violation of the American people’s trust and a gross misuse of the president’s powers. That no such quid pro-quo was made explicit in the transcript gave Trump’s defenders