World

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

Britain’s civil service is supposed to be the envy of the world, seamlessly executing the will of whichever government happens to occupy the offices of state. But Mr S wonders whether the reality can be rather different. Disgruntled civil servants have toppled more than one over-mighty minister. Others have admitted actively trying to undermine government policy when it comes to Brexit. Much like different nations, Whitehall’s various departments – and the people who inhabit them – have their own eccentricities and foibles. So to help readers out, Mr S has put together a guide for the avid Whitehall twitcher, making it easy to spot the difference between the lesser-crested FCO

It should be obvious by now — but somehow isn’t. Whenever @realDonldTrump says something wild, you can bet the real Donald Trump is contemplating something sensible — and vice-versa. Often the Commander-in-Chief does the opposite to what his social media handle has just said. Trump the Twitterer is the yin to Trump President’s yang. One suspects the Chinese, who invented philosophical dualism, have figured this out by now. That might mean Beijing is less freaked by his latest outbursts than the markets, which are sliding. Coming into the G7 summit this weekend, Trump has been ramping up the trade war: his response to China’s latest tariff escalation. It’s been pretty

Donald Trump’s attempted purchase of Greenland may have fallen through but if he’s still in the market, there’s some prime real estate in the neighbourhood. It’s smaller, yes, but just as cold, almost as sparsely populated and even has its own independence movement agitating for a breakaway. Happily, the president already owns a chunk of the country in question, so he might be able to get the rest for a bargain.  Scotland, not Greenland, is where Trump should redirect his interest. If it’s a few more golf resorts he’s keen on, we can provide the countryside. If he needs space for a military base or two the Highlands offer all

From the moment Donald Trump stepped onto the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president of the United States, there have been people in the Republican party who have sought to bring him down.   During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican national security officials wrote scathing and embarrassing open letters against him. Conventional Republican strategists and commentators like Karl Rove, Bill Kristol and Spectator USA’s own Rick Wilson blasted him as an incompetent, indecent, moron who shouldn’t be ten miles from the Oval Office. Trump’s primary opponents even tried to scuttle his nomination at the convention, an attempt that fizzled out before it really began. Three years later, these Never

Nicola Sturgeon fancies herself as something of an international stateswoman, jetting off to the United States to boost her profile and touring the capitals of Europe in search of allies against Brexit. She is fond, too, of tweeting her commentary on global affairs, in the hope that others may learn from her example so that, one day, they too can lead a country with a £12.6bn deficit that can’t teach its children how to read. A network of de facto embassies has been steadily assembled, nominally to promote trade ties (which the UK Government already does) but in reality to promote Scotland externally as a separate state. Those who point

Joe Biden has led Democratic polls since day one, holding the kind of consistent lead within his party that Donald Trump held heading into the 2016 primaries. The numbers say he will be the nominee. They also say he will beat Trump. They’re wrong: you should still bet against Biden getting the nomination or getting into the White House.  Biden himself knows that his age and state of mind are a problem, and Glenn Thrush’s recent New York Times story showed that Barack Obama knows it, too. “At some point” in 2008, Thrush reports, while Biden was on his way to becoming the Democrats’ VP pick, he “told Obama aides that ‘Barack