World

‘We ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about’, Arthur Koestler declared in The God That Failed, the volume of essays by lapsed communists that appeared in 1949, the year that the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb and China went communist. There’s a certain loftiness to Koestler’s statement that can be rather grating, as though the formal badge of entry to opposing the dark side requires having submitted to darkness in the first place. Indeed, at the outset of the cold war, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who never flirted with the left (unlike many of his British contemporaries) expressed his qualms that more

At last, at last, President Donald J Trump has a big win. After the humiliating failure of his attempt to re-re-reform American healthcare, he has now passed his enormous $1.5 trillion tax overhaul through Congress. It is his first significant legislative accomplishment and it is, as he would say, yuge. The Republican splits that emerged over the Obamacare repeal bill threatened to stop his tax plans too. In the end they didn’t. Trump, keen to stress his own generosity, has called it a ‘an incredible Christmas gift for hard-working Americans’ — he’s even posted a little Christmas Tax Cuts video gif on Twitter — and no doubt, with the flush

Matt Hancock, a government minister, has felt obliged to declare formally, ‘Objective reality exists.’ To his credit, he confessed to a certain shamefacedness about this but he added that he believes he had a duty to reassure us. I find it hard to understand what Mr Hancock’s statement means. By ‘objective reality’ does he mean truth? If so, then the proposition ‘There is such a thing as truth’ is self-evident – a necessary proposition – because if someone attempts to refute it and says, ‘There is no such thing as truth,’ then either that proposition is true or the one who states it is wrong. In either case, there is something that is true. Actually, Mr

This week’s Books Podcast — the last before the Christmas break — sees the Spectator’s office flooded with elves. The QI Elves, to be precise. Four of these adorable, trivia-mining creatures — hosts of the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast — join me to look back over some of the more arcane details to emerge from 2017, and to discuss their boldly titled new production The Book of the Year. From tropical weevils to the difficulty of performing mouth-to-mouth on an aardvark, via the number of floors to be found on a Trump tower, their findings will offer essential resources to the Christmas conversationalist. You can listen to our

It’s starting to look as though the historic mission of Donald Trump, who was a registered member of the Democratic party as late as 2009, is to revive American liberalism. On Tuesday night, Trump, who earlier in the day had tweeted ‘Roy Moore will always vote with us’, accomplished his most improbable feat since winning the presidency. He helped hand over a Senate seat in Alabama, sweet home Alabama, the reddest of red states, to the Democratic candidate Doug Jones, a supporter of abortion rights and stricter gun controls. And so there was no sweetness for Trump last night. Instead, he had to eat bitterness, as the Chinese saying has it. A

The last Isis-held town in Iraq, Rawa, has fallen; across the border in Syria, the Russians declared a ‘total rout of the terrorists’. But this tough fight, which has taken three-and-half years, could all be in vain: the coalition which has driven Isis out now faces the gloomy prospect of winning the war and losing the peace. While Isis has been defeated, the next big challenge – how to address the Iranian drive for dominance in the Middle East – goes unanswered.  By ignoring this issue, the West is failing to learn one of the key lessons of the last three years: don’t treat each country as a vacuum. Isis’s ability to spread

At first sight, the evidence presented in David Anderson’s report into the four terror attacks committed between March and June sounds damning. The security service, MI5, had had three of the six attackers on its radar. The Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, who murdered 22 people, had come to the attention of MI5 in 2014. As recently as the beginning of this year, he had been implicated in criminal activity, which MI5 officers now admit might have led to his attack being thwarted had it been investigated. Khuram Butt, one of the attackers at London Bridge, had been under investigation for two years, yet still he and his two accomplices were

Here we go again. Donald Trump decertified the Iran nuclear deal in October. Now, in another audacious foray into Middle East diplomacy, Trump is waving goodbye to the waiver about moving the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It appears that the former real estate mogul will embark upon one last construction project. If he couldn’t build in Moscow, why not give Jerusalem a go? Overnight, an international Nimby crowd has formed to decry the move. The Palestinians are announcing that it’s the ‘kiss of death’ to any negotiations about a two-state solution. The Saudis have voiced their firm opposition. Theresa May thinks that ‘The status of Jerusalem should

Last week’s white paper on industrial strategy put forward a few useful ideas but ignores the main structural problem we face: the ‘financialisation’ of the economy. At a time when we urgently need to invest to raise productivity, PLCs have been putting over half their profits into buying back their own shares. This practice used to be against the law. Under common law it was treated as a kind of market manipulation. Company law, including the 2006 Companies Act, still has some hallmarks of this assumption but a radical change was made in the Companies Act of 1981. Before that, British companies were not permitted to purchase their own shares. Reliable estimates

For the whole board of the Social Mobility Commission to resign with its chairman, Alan Milburn, condemning the Prime Minister’s commitment to the agenda is pretty damaging. But this attack was inevitable, for reasons that haven’t (so far) been picked up by the newspapers. Ever since Theresa May took office, she has shown almost no interest in the Social Mobility Commission, set up under the coalition years. No10’s approach seems to have been one of strategic neglect. Alan Milburn’s five-year term came up for renewal last July: Justine Greening, the minister responsible, was keen for him to stay. But No10 refused, and asked her to come up with other names.

President Donald J Trump likes nothing better than winning, and he has just had the first major legislative win of his presidency. An enormous $1.4 trillion tax cut has now been passed by the Senate. No Democrat voted for the bill, yet still it passed by 51 to 49 votes. This avoided the anticipated legislative deadlock that would have meant Vice President Mike Pence having to break a 50-50 tie. The bill will now be voted on in the House of Representatives on Monday, where the Republicans have a much larger majority. By getting his tax cut through Congress, Trump answers one of the most stinging critiques of his presidency

As I rode the metro to work this morning, an elderly gentleman holding a sign that read, `Manafort-Flynn. Who’s Next?’ boarded my car at the Judiciary Square stop. It’s a question the Trump administration may be pondering as well. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has flipped former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty today to lying to the FBI, speculation is rife about whom he target next, with much of it centring on Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the president. Thus Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports that Kushner is being fingered as the person who ordered Flynn to create a backchannel to Russia. For now the administration