World

Saturday

William Cook

How Nato is fighting back against Russian fake news

At first, the Spanish marines are just a distant dot on the horizon. A few minutes later their speedboat is on our starboard side. The marines clamber aboard, disarm the irregulars who’ve seized this Romanian frigate, and secure the helicopter landing pad on the windswept stern. Watching from a safe distance, you’d never know this was just a wargame. As a Romanian sailor told me, as I struggled to control my seasick stomach, the way you fight in a real war depends upon the way you train. Welcome to Sea Shield, a naval warfare exercise involving 21 ships and 12 aircraft from seven Nato allies: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Spain, Turkey,

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Italy’s populists have won – but they’re still not in charge

Recently, the ‘populist’ (i.e. electorally victorious) new government of Italy wanted to appoint an anti-euro finance minister and was told by the President of the Republic that it couldn’t. This caused outrage in Italy, and it made rational people here assume that there would have to be new elections, or the impeachment of the president. In fact, however, both sides have won, or at least lived to fight another day. Professor Savona is not to be finance minister, but Europe minister instead, and the populists are still in charge, yet not in charge. This should not be surprising if one remembers Professor Savona’s own dictum that the euro is ‘a

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 June 2018

Home A third runway at Heathrow Airport was approved by the cabinet; £2.6 billion was earmarked for compensation and soundproofing. Northern Rail brought in a temporary timetable that removed 165 train services a day until 29 July, but scores more trains were still cancelled; all trains to the Lake District were cancelled for a fortnight. Thameslink and Southern also wallowed in incapacity. Petrol prices rose by a record monthly sum of 6p in May to an average of 132.3p a litre. The government reduced its holding in the Royal Bank of Scotland from 70.1 to 62.4 per cent, losing £2.1 billion on selling the shares which it bought to save the

Daniel Mccarthy Vs Matt Ridley

Are Trump’s tariffs a good idea?

Yes Supporters of the global free-trade regime that has been built up over the past 25 years like to think of themselves as capitalists. Benevolent capitalists, perhaps — ones who have only the interests of the world’s poorest workers and their own nations’ least wealthy consumers at heart — but capitalists nonetheless. So why is the biggest beneficiary of their world order in fact the last of the great, deadly serious Communist states — the People’s Republic of China? Trump’s tariffs, far from being the end of the liberal economic order, may be the one thing that can save it. That order, after all, to an embarrassing degree depends upon

Owen Matthews

Putin’s rot

This is Putin’s time. Next week, the Fifa World Cup kicks off in Moscow, and the Kremlin has spared no expense to showcase Vladimir Putin’s new Russia as a vibrant, safe and strong nation. Half a million visitors will be welcomed — with the Russian press reporting that the notorious ‘Ultra’ hooligans have been officially warned to behave themselves or face the full wrath of the state. Despite four years of rock-bottom oil prices, Putin has nonetheless found the cash to build or refurbish a dozen new stadiums. Moscow has undergone a two-year city-wide facelift that has left it looking cleaner, fresher and more prosperous than any European capital I

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Read: Daily Mail editor’s resignation letter

Paul Dacre has just announced that he is to step down as editor of the Daily Mail in November, having edited the newspaper since 1992. Mr S has been passed a copy of his letter to staff announcing the news. Dacre says he now plans to take on ‘broader challenges within the company as chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Associated’. Here is the letter: Will it be a case of champagne at the ready at the paper’s fiercest rival, also known as the Mail on Sunday?

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron’s challenge for French lesbians | 6 June 2018

The man who brought France’s Socialist Party to the brink of ruin has no sense of shame. In recent weeks, François Hollande has been plugging his memoirs all over the media and even hinting at a political comeback, much to the “exasperation” of his party, who wish the former president would go quietly into the night. The book, The lessons of Power, is rumoured to have been written with the help of a well-known left-wing journalist, but the delusions are all Hollande’s. His bitterness towards Emmanuel Macron seeps through the prose, and for every swipe at his successor there is also a claim that France’s gradual economic upturn is down

Tuesday

Mark Nayler

‘We demand our right to vote’: what Spaniards really think of their new socialist PM

Spain has a new prime minister, but Spaniards are not happy about it. A WhatsApp message is circulating across the country at the moment, saying: “We Spaniards demand our right to vote. We demand the right to decide who is the president of Spain. ‘No’ means ‘no’ to Pedro Sánchez. If you’re in agreement, pass this message on until elections are called” The message refers to the leader of the Spanish Socialists (PSOE), Pedro Sánchez, who sneaked in as the country’s leader last Friday after his predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, lost a no-confidence vote. While that vote had disastrous consequences for Rajoy, for Sánchez – who tabled it in the first place –

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Italy’s first fight with Brussels be over immigration?

Italy has a new Prime Minister: Giuseppe Conte, who heads up a Five Star / Lega coalition. He presented his list of ministers to President Mattarella this morning and, with the Eurosceptic economist Paolo Savona moved from Finance to European affairs, it was accepted. The way is now paved for this Five Star / Lega coalition to start governing. President Mattarella has succeeded in preventing Savona’s appointment as Finance Minister without collapsing the whole government, which must be considered a success for him. But his victory is not total. Savona is still in the government and will be able to cause plenty of trouble from his role as Europe minister.

Daniel McCarthy

If this is a trade war, the United States will win

Donald Trump is following through on his threat—or promise, as his voters see it—to impose steep tariffs on foreign goods in the name of supporting American industry, starting with levies of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium imports. Allies and neighbours that had been granted temporary exemptions are now set to feel the brunt of the tariffs: Canada is America’s leading source of foreign steel, and Mexico and the European Union will also feel the pain. They’re all threatening to retaliate, and the press is calling this a trade war. If this is a war, it’s one the United States will win. The thing to

Steerpike Steerpike

Jean-Claude Juncker to Italians: work harder, be less corrupt

The cover of this week’s Spectator says “the people vs the EU” and Jean-Claude Juncker is certainly warming to that theme. Just in case the Italians were in any doubt how they are regarded by the president of the European Commission he made it pretty clear yesterday. When asked what the EU could do for Italy, he said that the problem was not the EU’s because it was down to Italians to help the South of Italy – and these Italians, he said, need “more work, less corruption, seriousness”. And no, he wasn’t talking about the government but the actual Italian people. Easier to look down on such people when

Thursday

Hannah Lucinda Smith

How Europe’s Turks could sweep Erdogan to victory

President Erdogan can raise a crowd. As he travels to every corner of his huge country in the month before elections that could return him to the palace for another five years, tens of thousands turn out in sports halls, city squares and purpose-built rally grounds. His acerbic, bombastic public appearances, stage-managed with rock-star entrances and booming music, have become a hallmark of his brand of polished populism. The 15,000-strong crowd who gathered in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo earlier this month might have been smaller than Erdogan is now used to, but their dedication made up for their numbers. Most had come from Western Europe, Turks from Germany, the Netherlands

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Trump’s trade war is back on

The threat of a global trade war is back. The Trump administration has announced that the US will impose tariffs on aluminium and steel imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. The EU is already promising to respond to Trump’s tariffs in kind. It is all too easy to see how this situation escalates. The EU slaps tariffs on bourbon and Harley Davidsons in response, an infuriated Trump then hits a slew of EU products with tariffs and on it goes. The Trump’s administration decision to impose tariffs is a historic mistake. Not only will it make these goods more expensive for the American firms that are using them

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Spectator Books: Carl Hiaasen’s Assume the Worst

In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to the journalist and comic novelist Carl Hiaasen about his latest book, a splenetic broadside against feelgood commencement speeches called Assume The Worst that serves as a joyous corrective to “you can be anything you want to be” boosterism. Our conversation ranges to his take on the state of journalism and politics, the time Donald Trump chatted up his wife, and (for fans) the possibility of a return of Skink… Listen to more episodes of Spectator Books and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Douglas Murray

The people vs the EU

This week the EU revealed its true nature. Rather than hand power to a Eurosceptic, the Italian President Sergio Mattarella defied the democratic process, and the wishes of most Italians, and put a puppet in place. Once again a major European democracy has seen the results of a legitimate vote dismissed; swept aside because the EU can’t countenance dissent. It’s hard not to conclude that those who voted Leave in our own referendum so as to ‘take back control’ had a point. The governing elite in Europe simply can’t afford to relinquish control. They can’t let real people have a real say in who leads them because the grand EU

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

The south of France

‘Saint-Tropez?’ said the French mother of a friend. ‘C’est un peu… “tacky”.’ She was distressed to think of our taking a house there — really, we were nearer Saint Paul de Vence, where they make artists, than San Trop, where they make tanning lotion — and suggested we stay with her in Provence. She promised lavender fields, cathedrals, boules in shady squares. ‘Vraiment civilisé.’ There are two souths of France. The tacky and the civilisé. Those who go to Aix (for Cézanne), Arles (Van Gogh) and Avignon (popes) think themselves a baskets–and-espadrilles cut above the Odabash girls and Vilebrequin boys of Cannes, Saint-Tropez and Cap d’Antibes hoping to be asked

Stewart Dakers

Another country | 31 May 2018

One day there won’t be anyone to deliver the mail any more, and then what will the City types do? I heard this prediction more than 20 years ago when I worked behind the bar at one of the pubs here in my rural town. At the time I considered it melodramatic, but now it seems like straight prophecy. Quite out of sight of central London — and other metropolises — the English countryside is suffering from a terrible immigration problem. These migrants don’t arrive on the back of lorries or in overcrowded boats, but in removal pantechnicons and SUVs, carrying laptops and trailing children. Unable to afford the space

Tuesday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

A ban on wood burners would kill off our country pubs

If stoves and fires come under attack, country pubs and restaurants will collapse. This will happen, I suspect, even if Mr Gove does not ban them, because he is opening up a new world in which they will come under official disapproval. Before long, it will be alleged that pub staff suffer from the equivalent of passive smoking because of open fires, and landlords will face lawsuits which bring village inns to their knees. We shall not even be free to relieve our feelings by burning Mr Gove in effigy, since he is setting out to ban bonfires too. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, which appears in

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Gavin Williamson gets ‘terminated’

Gavin Williamson – who told the Russians to ‘shut up and go away’ – is usually the one dishing out the rebukes. Not today. The Defence Secretary met his match in the form of Good Morning Britain presenter Richard Madeley after he repeatedly refused to answer a question on whether he was right to use ‘Trump-ish language’. Richard Madeley: Do you regret using that language? That is the question. Gavin Williamson: Well, what was right was we came together with our allies and made it absolutely clear to Russia… Richard Madeley: All right, interview terminated because you won’t answer the question. Good luck with the African elephant project, that is an

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Erdogan’s influence is spreading across Europe

Two video clips did the rounds in the French media at the weekend. One went global, that of the heart-warming heroism of Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant who rescued a small boy dangling from a balcony in Paris; the other, being more feel-fear than feel-good, didn’t capture the world’s attention in quite the same way. This film was shot in the south of France, in a suburb of Avignon, and showed a group of men surrounding a newspaper kiosk. They were there to protest at a large poster advertising the latest edition of the current affairs magazine, Le Point, the front cover of which was adorned with a photograph of the Turkish president