World

The biggest victim of the failure of Thomas Cook is the worldly reputation of its eponymous creator – a sober cabinet-maker from Leicestershire whose pioneering and fantastically successful package tours used a network of temperance hotels.  His name is now synonymous with a company whose senior executives paid themselves millions while it crashed and burned. That there is something rotten with aspects of company law is obvious from the fact that taxpayers are going to be stung for up to £600 million to fly 150,000 stranded British holidaymakers home. Why is there no mechanism to claw back those millions paid in bonuses over the past decade while the business was

Drones have come of age in the war on terror. When the United States and Britain invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the technology was barely out of the lab. Today, these flying machines represent a huge security threat. If reports are to be believed, a Houthi rebel-launched drone attack in Saudi Arabia last weekend shut down 5 per cent of the world’s global oil supply and caused the largest spike in the price of oil since the first Gulf War in 1990. This is what the future of warfare looks like. So far, drones have been mostly on our side: used, very effectively, to disrupt and damage terrorist networks. The campaign

Proceedings in the Supreme Court are typically being reported as if judges are making an impartial assessment of the constitution. It would be more true to say that they are asking whether or not to give themselves more power. Perhaps they will uphold the established constitution, or perhaps they will concoct sophisticated legal-soundings reasons for appropriating the powers that lawfully belong to parliament and the people themselves. Only recently, the most senior judges understood clearly what was at stake. Lord Bingham, who retired as a judge in 2008 having been Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice and Senior Law Lord, said in his book The Rule of Law, that:

Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation, however, wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke last weekend. The volley of missiles screeching into Saudi airspace may have also ruined French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to deescalate tensions in the Persian Gulf and save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from a slow and agonising death. The French president has been hard

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has admitted she felt sympathy for the officer who said Carl Beech’s claims were ‘credible and true’. Speaking to Nick Ferrari on LBC, Dick said when she heard the officer’s comments she ‘just felt for him immediately’. Convicted paedophile Beech was jailed for 18 years in July after he was found guilty of perverting the course of justice and fraud. In 2014, Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald said Beech’s account was ‘credible and true’. Speaking about the moment when she heard McDonald on the radio, Dick said: “I remember thinking, oh no, I know he didn’t mean to say that. What he will have meant to say was this person

Lord Hall of Birkenhead is feeling pretty bullish about the quality of the organisation he leads. “We’re not Netflix, we’re not Spotify. We’re not Apple News,” the BBC’s director general will apparently tell the Royal Television Society on Thursday. “We’re so much more than all of them put together.”     To which the obvious answer is: if you are so confident that the public loves your product, then why are you so frightened about exposing it to commercial competition? Surely, Lord Hall would be relishing the opportunity to get rid of the tax on TV-ownership which funds the BBC and fund itself in the way that all other TV and radio

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences — always a questionable proposition — he challenged Bernie Sanders in Thursday night’s Democratic nomination debate in Houston in a way that Sanders has never really been forced to grapple with during either of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s position meant that she didn’t need to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she tried, she would’ve almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described ‘socialist’. That’s common knowledge by now, of course, but it’s a salient point for Bernie’s rivals to press him on. Democratic voters generally like Bernie, but his ‘socialism’ could give them

This is a thought-experiment. Imagine the following scenario: A Conservative Prime Minister is dishing out peerages. Among the people given a lifelong right to sit in the House of Lords and vote on new laws is a lobbyist who has conducted a long campaign to diminish women’s rights under the law. The lobbyist, leading an organisation that describes itself as a ‘professional lobbying group’, has particularly targeted the Equality Act 2010 for change. A quick primer on the law: The Act is the basis for most equality law and practice in the UK. It says that in general, people should be treated in the same way whatever their sex, race,

John Bolton is out. It was a long time coming — Trump resisted hiring him in the first place, passing him over in favour of a military man, H.R. McMaster, at first. Bolton is a near-synonym for war and regime change, a hawk’s hawk. That was an obviously awkward fit for a president who got elected by campaigning against America’s Mideast wars. But just because John Bolton is gone doesn’t mean Boltonism is. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo is hardly less hawkish, just less principled. And Pompeo is the worse for mixing human rights-moralizing with his bellicosity: he represents an opportunistic confluence of humanitarian hawkishness and neoconservatism. It’s the optimal formula for being

Hurricane Dorian had hardly struck the shores of the Bahamas before Twitter began to fill up with comments willing it to carry on and flatten Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago estate in Florida ‘to teach the climate change denier-in-chief’ a lesson. Others eviscerated Florida senator and former governor Rick Scott for suggesting on Fox News that ‘we don’t know what the cause is’ of a run of strong hurricanes.  From Al Gore to David Attenborough, footage of hurricanes is used as a staple background for films about climate change, the inference being that the viewer is watching the effects of a dreadful, man-made disaster which would not have occurred had

Saxony is Germany’s most troublesome state. For the past four years, this former part of the communist east has been hit by riots, weekly protests and been a symbol of the stubborn economic gulf between the country’s east and west. Now, a state election in the region on Sunday brings a fresh challenge for Angela Merkel, where her CDU party has spent the campaign jostling with the far-right AfD for the top position in the polls. Although the AfD have now fallen a few percentage points behind Merkel’s party, they are a real threat to the CDU, who have governed the region for 30 years. As this year’s European election campaign segued into

Political debate, as we are forever being told, has become coarser in recent years. But there is a bigger change of which rather less is said. Debate seems to focus less and less on actual arguments and more and more on seeking to deny the legitimacy of those who are speaking. Never mind what they are saying – what right do they have to be granted this forum? This phenomenon is never more prevalent than when Nigel Farage pops up on the television, and Twitter is instantly filled with people demanding to know: “who does he represent?”. “Never elected to UK parliament on the seven occasions he tried and with