World

Carrie Gracie is more or less in the right, but I did laugh out loud when I heard her, on the BBC programme she was herself presenting, say that her resignation from her post as China editor over the equal pay issue had brought wonderful sympathy from ‘across the country and internationally’, as though speaking of the plight of the Rohingya. People who earn six-figure salaries and are allowed, by the organisation which employs them, to complain on air to millions about an aspect of their pay are not easy for most of us to regard as persecuted victims. Even Ms Gracie’s ‘resignation’ from her Beijing post seems to permit

Here’s an aspect of Donald Trump’s personality that I’ve never got past: his hatred of dogs. When Trump tweeted on 5 January that his former aide Steve Bannon had been ‘dumped like a dog’, he recycled an insult he has hurled more than a dozen times since declaring for president, according to the indispensable TrumpTwitterArchive.com. After the 2016 election, a wealthy Trump supporter offered the new First Family a gift of an especially adorable Goldendoodle. On a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the supporter showed a photo of the dog to Trump. The President-elect asked her to show the photo to his then ten-year-old son, Barron. ‘Barron will fall in love with

Like every journalist in Washington, I’m enthralled by the new Michael Wolff book, Fire and Fury, which depicts Donald Trump as a president in steep mental decline, derided and despised by his entire entourage, family included. I read with perhaps special attention because I have a book of my own about the Trump phenomenon being released on 16 January, just over a week after Wolff’s. The experience is a little like being the next presenter at the Golden Globes immediately after Oprah Winfrey’s speech. Wolff is interested in personalities, not politics. But while Trump may be stupid or crazy, the people enabling him are neither of those things. The lucky-bounce

Donald Trump is playing hard to get. Asked yesterday at the White House whether he would meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for an interview, Trump began back-pedalling on his previous and emphatic ‘100 per cent’. Now, Trump said, ‘we’ll see what happens’. For good measure, he threw in a few of his favourite terms of opprobrium such as ‘witch hunt’ and ‘Democrat hoax’. And in a tweet he lambasted ‘Sneaky Dianne Feinstein’ and said it was high time for Republicans to ‘take control’ of the Russia investigations. Feinstein is a liberal grandee from California, whose putative sneakiness consisted of releasing a 300-page interview by the Senate Judiciary Committee with Glenn

How the mighty have fallen! Only a year ago, Steve Bannon was being feted as the power behind the Trump throne, the stubble-faced grey eminence who would start a trade, if not an actual, war with China and create a new Republican Party that was based on populist rather than corporate interests. Now all that is gone. After a very public defenestration by Trump, which has resulted in him being ousted from Breitbart, Bannon stands almost bereft on the right. Even his former protege and ally, Steve Miller, stuck the shiv into Bannon, declaring on CNN that he is an ‘angry, vindictive’ person whose ‘grotesque comments are so out of

How quickly Steve Bannon’s dark star has collapsed. Not so long ago, friends and enemies talked him up as a media genius. He was a political guerrilla operative you underrated at your peril. He was ‘Trump’s Rasputin’, or ‘President Bannon’, the man who really controlled the White House.  Then he lost his job in said White House, fell out with Donald J Trump, and now, a few days after the publication of his comments in Michael Wolff’s book, he has stood down as head of Breitbart news.  The power that Bannon represented turned out to have been the Mercer family, who had bankrolled Bannon, Breitbart and Trump’s campaign. They decided that their relationship with President of

It’s fair to say that Michael Wolff’s explosive biography of Donald Trump has caused a stir ahead of its publication. It’s a struggle to find a news site that isn’t splashing on its claims – from Trump’s supposed desire to lose the election to Steve Bannon’s comments on Russia. Despite the US President’s lawyer has issued a cease and desist letter to block the official release of Fire and Fury, the publisher has decided to release the book today four days ahead of schedule. Hacks are now at pains to show that they managed to bag their copy ahead of schedule. Although the Times has the official UK serialisation, the Guardian

Yesterday, the Greater Manchester Police tweeted out the above picture claiming that that ‘the only legal place’ to put a SatNav is ‘the bottom right hand side of your windscreen… everywhere else is illegal.’ It was quite untrue. Deliciously, the picture showed a suspicious mark on the middle of the car windscreen that looked very much as if the police themselves had been holding their SatNav in the wrong place (see enlargement below). When this evidence was widely shared, and mocked, the Tweet was deleted without comment. A shame, because it’s a great example of how the absence of any modern law on driving, mobile phone and SatNav use is leaving