World

The Daily Telegraph this week has a ‘scoop’ about the UK government giving permission for the Mueller inquiry to talk to former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about his evidence, which said Donald Trump was compromised by the Kremlin. The Telegraph story certainly sets the mood for President Trump’s state visit to Britain in eleven days’ time, and has some important new details, but it is not quite an exclusive. I wrote in The Spectator a year ago that Mueller’s team had been in the UK in late 2017 to question Steele, a meeting that was set up ‘through official channels’. Nevertheless, one of the sources I quoted said that in

President Donald Trump likes to talk. He’s a typical New York blowhard in many ways—obnoxious, loud, self-confident (probably too confident), and not very self-aware. His favourite topic of discussion is the 2016 presidential election and how he shocked the planet by pulling perhaps the biggest upset in modern American political history.   That victory, however, rested on thin reeds. Trump actually received more than 2.5 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, yet won the election thanks to the Electoral College. He was victorious in all the right places, breaking through the Democratic party’s so-called blue-wall in the Midwest by turning out his rural base and winning over traditional, blue-collar voters

‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Scott Morrison beamed. Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister was addressing a victory rally after an upset in Saturday’s federal election. Throughout the campaign, pollsters and pundits had been as one: the Coalition (a centre-right alliance between Morrison’s Liberal Party and the agrarian National Party) was finished and Labor was headed into government after six years in opposition. Morrison was the fractious Coalition’s third prime minister since 2013, his ministry was divided over climate change and Labor leader Bill Shorten had tapped into public anger at the banks and the top end of town. Then they voted. One by one, marginal Coalition seats held firm and

The mass sexual assaults around Cologne’s main railway station on New Year’s Eve 2015 rocked Germany, not just because of their scale (police believe hundreds of men were involved) but because of the sense that news of the attacks was being suppressed, and its links to the migrant crisis then at its peak, denied. In response to public anger, Chancellor Angela Merkel was moved to promise that the crimes would be met with a ‘hard response from the state’. Three years on, what has happened to that response? In terms of resources, German authorities have delivered on Merkel’s promise. It has been followed by one of the most extensive criminal investigations

Conrad Black, who was jailed in the US for fraud and obstructing justice, has been pardoned by Donald Trump. Here Peter Oborne profiles the former media mogul and his wife Barbara in an article published in The Spectator in 2004: A few weeks ago executives were endeavouring to bring home to Conrad Black the full horror of his personal and corporate predicament, when a sight met their eyes. His wife Barbara, clad only in a leotard and shades, had swept into the room. For a moment nobody spoke. ‘Oh Conrad,’ Barbara Black proclaimed: ‘Let’s just get out of here. They hate us.’ Barbara Amiel was born in Watford, and she enjoyed

Sun Tzu said that if you defend everywhere you defend nowhere. Gavin Williamson’s strategy was to attack everywhere: to send the army in against knife crime, to turn every encounter with a Russian frigate into The Hunt for Red October, to threaten to send an aircraft carrier to the China sea and — according to one civil servant — to prepare the British army to ‘invade Africa’. Naturally, therefore, attack-minded Gavin emerged red-faced from a meeting of the National Security Council, at which May overruled a demand to ban Huawei from the UK’s comms infrastructure, and went on the attack. An attack, unfortunately, that had the same impact as the

Is the United States, the oldest democracy in the world, bumbling into a constitutional crisis of its own making?  Like most things in life, it depends on where you sit. For the Democratic Party, the answer is somewhere between a “we are getting there” and a “yes, we are living it.”  Donald Trump is not only violating the traditional norms of the presidency, but is taking a sledgehammer to the walls of America’s constitutional republic in order to protect himself from political embarrassment, scandal, and possible legal jeopardy after he vacates the office. Rep, Jerrold Nadler, the man who would lead a hypothetical impeachment inquiry of President Trump, said on

Endangered species The UN claimed a million species of plants and animals could become extinct. If they all died out, how many would we be left with? — The number of new species being discovered is growing at a faster rate than species are dying out. In 2011, the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre estimated there were 8.7 million species — 7.77 million of which were animals, 610,000 fungi and 300,000 plants. At the time, around 1.2 million species had been discovered and described. — In 2017, Arizona University came up with a new estimate: 2 billion. Between 70 and 90 per cent, it said, were bacteria.   Unequal

As the European parliament elections approach, the continent’s navel-gazing is ever more myopic. Even its two most outward focused states, France and Britain, are consumed by domestic crises. And yet in Europe’s backyard – across the Mediterranean, in Algeria – radical change is taking place with potentially serious ramifications for the European Union and France. Every Friday since February the authoritarian Algerian regime has been the target of tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators on a scale unknown since the country’s troubled independence from France in 1962. The spark was 82-year-old Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement that he would seek a fifth term as president, despite being chronically debilitated by a stroke

Emmanuel Macron, the once golden boy of European politics, could be about to suffer his first electoral humiliation. A black mood has settled over the president. Ministers have been ordered to campaign and tweet as if their jobs depend on it. Which they might. The president himself, dressed habitually like a funeral director, is on his normal hyper-manic schedule. But he fails to inspire and his electoral traction is barely visible. The spectre haunting the Elysée is that in less than three weeks, Macron’s Napoleonic European project, the so-called EU Renaissance, intended to federalise diplomacy, fiscality and defence, will meet its Waterloo. The president’s luck seems exhausted. Where once nothing

Kobi Marimi, the 27-year-old Tel Avivian singer, picked to represent Israel at this month’s Eurovision Song Contest, can’t stop smiling: ‘I love my country. I love Tel Aviv. To know that I’m achieving a dream of mine, to be a part of Eurovision, it’s amazing in itself’, he tells me, with an earnestness that could crack the biggest Eurovision cynic. ‘But to know that I’m doing it in my country, my own city, it’s even greater than that.’ But not everyone is quite so enthusiastic about Eurovision being held in the Holy Land. While politics can’t help but creep into the contest each year, this time around feels different as the Jewish State

When the new Japanese Emperor Naruhito makes his first public appearance, greeting well-wishers at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo today, there is a fear that the official images of the cheering crowds will need to be carefully framed, if not cropped. For among the multitudes of proud, happy Japanese welcoming the new Emperor and the new era with openness and positivity, a darker presence – the notorious ultra right-wing nationalists known as the Uyoku Dantai – are expected to be out in force. The Uyoku are a familiar site on the streets of Japan’s capital and are easy to spot. Dressed in WWII-era military uniforms and carrying the older, more