World

Will the Trump presidency be replaced by the Winfrey one? The hunt is on for a celebrity to take on Donald Trump and right now America has been seized by feverish speculation that Oprah Winfrey is it. On Sunday night, Winfrey accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, where she delivered a speech that pointed to ‘a time when no one will have to say “Me Too” ever again’. ‘A new day’, she said, ‘is on the horizon’. The kudos keep pouring in. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, an inveterate Never Trumper, called it ‘spine-tingling’. She’s certainly locked down the Hollywood contingent: Reese Witherspoon said: ‘It sounds

I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China Editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC. The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure. In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a

I just exulted to my wife that Simon Evans had been on Radio Four’s The News Quiz. He’s a very funny man, Evans, but is also regarded as Britain’s only right-wing comedian. There are actually quite a few others – Leo Kearse, for example. Anyway, Evans was in excellent form, defending Donald Trump and describing the NHS as a Socialist Utopia which did not work. The audience wasn’t sure what it should do, and Evans was of course ribbed for his opinions by the other three panellists and indeed the compere. Which is when I thought: hang on, why should I be grateful to the BBC for allowing one single

The most piquant part of Michael Wolff’s gossipy new book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House, is the ease with which he insinuated himself into the White House. Wolff explains that Trump initially thought he was interested in landing a job. When Wolff said he actually wanted to write a book about the administration, Trump expressed bafflement that anyone would want to write one but said it was OK for Wolff to talk with administration officials. Fox News is reporting that the communications team ‘urged all of the senior advisors to cooperate. They thought this was going to be a positive book for the President’. So Wolff apparently

Forget North Korea for a moment — President Donald J Trump today launched a devastating assault on Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, and the man often credited as the architect of his success. Replying to bitchy comments Steve Bannon reportedly made in Fire and Fury, a new book about the Trump White House by arch-muckraker hack Michael Wolff, Trump exploded. His comments are worth reading in full: ‘Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating

It has not gone unnoticed that a number of commenters to my occasional Spectator blogs harbour keen, if not outright enthusiastic, views of the current occupant of the Oval Office – a touching display of faith that suggests there truly is something special about the relationship between America and the United Kingdom. So in the conciliatory Christmas spirit, I wish to offer five ways that the Donald could surprise his critics and come out on top in the new year. First, the stock market. The professional naysayers are almost unanimous in saying that the era of big gains is over. Then again, they said that last year. What if Trump’s

Last month I spent an afternoon in the company of a 91-year-old German called Karl-Heinz. He was a teenage paratrooper in 1944, whose war ended when he was shot in the face by an American sniper the day after D-Day. Karl-Heinz hated the Nazis, but they for their part respected the martial prowess of the parachute regiment. On several occasions, he told me, he was approached by the SS while about town in his uniform, but their attempts to recruit Karl-Heinz into their ranks failed. He didn’t fall for their guff about true Germans only serving in the SS. ISIS is to Islam what the SS was to Germany and

In the historic heart of Riga, Latvia’s bustling capital, there’s a boulevard that doubles as a timeline of this proud country’s turbulent past. When Latvia was part of Tsarist Russia, it was called Alexander Street. In 1918, when Latvia won its independence, it was renamed Freedom Street. In 1940, when the Red Army invaded, its name was changed to Lenin Street. In 1941, when the Wehrmacht marched in, it became Adolf Hitler Street. When Latvia was swallowed up by the Soviet Union, it became Lenin Street once more, and in 1991, when Latvia regained its independence, it became Freedom Street again. 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of Latvian independence. There