World

Brendan O’Neill

The real reason some Brits don’t like Trump

Why do certain Brits hate Donald Trump so much? Duh, it’s obvious why we hate him, they’ll say. It’s because he’s a migrant-bashing, country-bombing, far-right-enabling nightmare of a president who threatens to plunge the world into a 1930s-style politics of hate. It’s the duty of every decent Brit to hate this dangerous orange oaf, they insist, as they prep their placards and dust down their pussy hats for tomorrow’s anti-Trump ‘carnival’ in central London.  Okay. But President Obama mistreated migrants, too. Footage of Border Patrol agents firing tear-gas canisters at migrants at the Mexico-America border last November made headlines around the world and was incessantly tweeted by Trump-phobes as proof

Freddy Gray

Donald Trump should not stoop to Sadiq Khan’s level 

In July last year, when Trump last visited Britain, I wrote a post saying ‘Admit it, Donald Trump is right about Sadiq Khan.’ The two men had just had one of their already numerous Twitter spats and it seemed a point worth making.  Trump just landed in London again this morning. Sure enough, the Trump vs Khan outrage ritual is underway. Yesterday Khan tweeted: As Trump landed, he snapped back:  If the President only realised how unimportant the role of London Mayor really is — American mayors such as de Blasio have far more clout — he might be less inclined to rise to Khan’s bait. But it’s just the

Hong Kong’s first political asylum seekers

Hong Kong’s freedoms, autonomy and rule of law face ever-increasing threats, but there is a twin set of legal dangers that pose the most serious risks for the city’s way of life: an old colonial law that needs reform, and a new law that should never be introduced. Last week, two Hong Kong activists, Ray Wong and Alan Li, announced that Germany had granted them political asylum – the first ever asylum seekers from Hong Kong. For a city that has for decades been a destination for refugees fleeing mainland China, Vietnam, Pakistan and other parts of the world to be producing its own asylum seekers is a sign of

Steerpike

Will Trump and Boris meet next week?

Trump and Boris; Boris and Trump – the two men have a lot more in common than funny hair, an appetite for women, and a magical ability to offend left-liberal sensibilities. But the hot question in Westminster at the moment is whether these two big beasts will meet when the American President visits London next week. Will they? Won’t they? The British press is teeming with reports that Trump and Boris are to meet privately, possibly at a meeting mediated by Nigel Farage. The new Special Relationship, populism-style. Mr Steerpike understands that, on the American side, officials are standing by to organise the meeting, but it hasn’t been formalised. Boris’s

The Trump card

The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland. The financial markets were in crisis and David Cameron had resigned in a panic. The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said that Britain had ‘collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically’. The then candidate (still not even party nominee) Trump put it differently. ‘You just have to embrace it,’ he said. ‘It’s the will of the people. I love to see people take their countries back.’ Perhaps his advice should have been taken more seriously. Huge numbers of people, including many Americans, think that Trump is unfit for the

Joanna Rossiter

#MeToo and Martin Luther King

That Martin Luther King was unfaithful to his wife has long been public knowledge. But new revelations from King’s biographer David Garrow in the Times suggest that King’s sexual behaviour towards women is far more compromising than previously thought. According to Garrow, the FBI bugged King’s Washington hotel room and recorded him boasting about his sexual misdemeanours in a tone that echoes Donald Trump’s so-called ‘locker room banter’. Worse still, Garrow cites a memo that claims King ‘looked on, laughed and offered advice’ as a Baptist minister friend raped one of his female parishioners. These allegations are obviously deeply serious; they would have made for shocking reading even before the #MeToo

Company names

Poor Mr Bergstresser. He put up the money to start the financial reporting company but his name wasn’t as snappy as those of his two partners, so ‘Dow Jones’ it was. At least he got the rewards, though, unlike Mr Taylor: the grocer sold out to Mr Waite and Mr Rose after just a couple of years, hence Waitrose. Other ‘people’ never existed in the first place. Faber & Faber was started by Geoffrey Faber on his own: he added the second name to sound more respectable. And there was no Mr Aston — Lionel Martin raced his cars at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. His wife realised that the combination

Trumped

The Queen has seldom had more holes in a state banquet seating plan. The leader of the opposition, the shadow foreign secretary, the Speaker and the leader of the Liberal Democrats have all ostentatiously refused ‘Her Majesty’s command’ to attend her banquet in honour of Donald Trump next week. The fact that the dinner is in honour of our greatest ally — and in the week we celebrate D-Day — seems to matter less than virtue points on social media. Few will appreciate the irony of this petty posturing more than the Queen herself. For it is that same tranche of the liberal elite who remain responsible for the worst

Mary Wakefield

Vegans should go cat-free

Is it ethical for vegans to own cats? It’s an interesting question because vegans look set to take over — there are more than 3.5 million now, up from 500,000 in 2016, and a fifth of us say we’d eat less meat if only we could be bothered. Veganism is the life-style choice for the thoughtful and planet-conscious. The only thing more 21st century than veganism is cats. Cat ownership in the UK is growing at almost as impressive a rate. A quarter of all British adults have cats. There are 11 million of the sinuous little horrors weaving in and out of our homes. More Brits own cats than

Philip Patrick

Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump’s budding bromance

Whenever I see pictures of Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe together I hear the theme music from the Neil Simon comedy The Odd Couple. For Trump and Abe are indeed the Felix and Oscar of global politics, a gently comic double act with starkly different but oddly complimentary personalities and all the appearance of a twilight years bromance. The pair met soon after Trump’s inauguration when Abe rushed stateside to be the first foreign leader to pay his respects to the new president. Since then the relationship has blossomed, and they’ve met frequently, and conversed on some 40 separate occasions. There have been some choice comic moments along the way.

Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen’s return is good news for Emmanuel Macron

If there’s one politician in Europe as triumphant as Nigel Farage right now it’s Emmanuel Macron. The European election results were not, as many outside France have declared, a humiliation for the French president. On the contrary, they were a success. Publicly the Elysée described the result as “honourable”, but in private the president was reportedly cock-a-hoop. “Basically, we’ve won, it’s a triumph and Macron is jubilant,” said one of his staff. While his LREM party may have trailed Marine Le Pen’s NR by a narrow margin (23.3 per cent to 22.4), Macron’s eyes were on another opponent. Seven years ago the centre-right Les Republicains [LR] were the ruling party in

Lionel Shriver

Adversity is the new diversity – and it disadvantages everyone

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort. Yet

Iran alone: Tehran’s perspective on escalating hostilities

On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian long view; neither the Macedonians nor the Mongols were able to extinguish Iran’s vigour and creativity, which reasserted themselves as soon as the invaders had moved on or been assimilated by the superior civilisation around them. ‘Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone (sic),’ was how Zarif concluded his aspersion on American

Jonathan Miller

France’s results are a humiliation for Macron

It was with a mounting sense of disbelief that I counted the votes this evening in my commune in southern France. I’d expected a repudiation of President Emmanuel Macron, but not on this scale. “Catastrophe,” said the centrist deputy mayor as he scanned the voting tallies. At the end of the count, Macron’s list managed an embarrassing 14 per cent, against Le Pen’s, on 36per cent; a result that was repeated in countless other communes from north to south. Macron has his strongholds too, but Le Pen ended uk finishing first across all France with 23.3pc of the vote to his 22.4pc. Did Macron have a ground game, that nobody

Narendra Modi is the powerful leader India craves

Looking back on Narendra Modi’s first five years in office as India’s Prime Minister, it’s hard to find good news. Record-high joblessness, a stagnating economy, and continued widespread government corruption. With any other person, this would spell electoral defeat, but not for Modi. This week, the 68 year-old leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power for a second term, outperforming his results in 2014 that led him to power and picking up more than 300 seats in the Indian Parliament. His first victory had been a complete shock. For an almost uninterrupted 60 years, the Congress Party had controlled India and its parliament with a

The Democrats’ dilemma: is it time to impeach Trump?

You won’t find a more committed and passionate opponent of president Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. than Nancy Pelosi (witness yesterday’s blowup at the White House, in which the president walked out of a meeting on infrastructure over Pelosi’s earlier comments about a Trump-ordered coverup).   The two-time Speaker of the House and long-time politician from liberal San Francisco is the opposite of the president in many ways. Whereas Trump takes pride in being the bull in the china shop, Pelosi is a highly-calculating politician who thinks long and hard before she settles on a course of action.   Trump is a nationalist (some would say quasi-nativist) at heart; Pelosi,

Iran alone

On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian long view; neither the Macedonians nor the Mongols were able to extinguish Iran’s vigour and creativity, which reasserted themselves as soon as the invaders had moved on or been assimilated by the superior civilisation around them. ‘Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone (sic),’ was how Zarif concluded his aspersion on American

Donald Trump vs British spies

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

Lionel Shriver

Adversity is the new diversity

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort. Yet