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Speaking of which, who will be President Trump’s treasury secretary, and does it matter? After this week’s ‘locker-room’ revelations, the Donald’s odds of winning have clearly lengthened. But he ain’t out of the race yet — and seasoned Republicans of my acquaintance have been agonising for months over the question of whether to accept jobs in his White House team, or indeed whether to push themselves forward in the hope of influencing it towards sanity. Would that effort be worth the potential pain and embarrassment? It’s indicative of the lame-duck nature of Obama’s second term that Jack Lew, the Treasury incumbent and equivalent of our Chancellor, is all but invisible:

Are former Muslims who ‘come out’ as atheists in Islamic countries becoming the most persecuted minority in the world? And are Western social media turning a blind eye to their plight? Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist who chairs the anti-extremist Quilliam Foundation, thinks so. He and Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, join me for the first episode of Holy Smoke, our new fortnightly religion podcast. Over the last 20 years, religion has become a wildly unpredictable factor in world affairs, toppling governments, re-drawing national boundaries and provoking bitter disputes in Western civil society. Holy Smoke will pose questions that the Western media – including the BBC – are too squeamish to address, or seek to contain by

In the autumn of 2008, a gaggle of American conservatives gathered for a conference at that most godless of progressive institutions, Yale University. The mood was sombre: four days beforehand, President Obama had swept to victory; the outgoing Republican President, George Bush, was shadowed by a Middle Eastern war gone disastrously wrong. The title of the conference, ‘The Next American Conservatism’, already felt like a bad joke.  Outside, protestors gathered. Iraq was a popular theme – I spotted a few ‘no blood for oil’ placards, recycled from Tony Blair’s latest flying visit to campus. Eventually, a pair of students invaded the main hall, cursing and spluttering a demand for both

Being half-Norwegian, I can rarely find anyone in Westminster to discuss the Norwegian papers with. But Monday’s front page of the Norwegian business paper Dagens Naeringsliv has been the talk of the town. Why, because its main headline trumpeted Norway said no’ (in Norwegian, of course). The other lines clarified the story – ‘Brits wanted to collaborate on a new EU deal’, but Norway said no… ‘They didn’t get Norwegian help on Brexit’. What a dream story for those who are still in mourning over June’s referendum. It was quickly picked up by the Guardian, among others.   As the article had it, Liam Fox had been keen to establish a task

Donald Trump probably won the second presidential debate tonight, overall. But overall probably doesn’t matter. The clash between him and Hillary Clinton over the lewd sex-bragging tape will be what people talk about, and he did not come out well on that score. The Donald maybe did enough to stop the Republican Party deserting him en masse, but his campaign still looks like a disaster. Trump arguably lost the night before the debate began by putting on a typically surreal, car-crash-bad press conference with Bill and Hillary’s ‘accusers’ — women who claim to have been sexual victims of the Clintons’ iniquity — just before the debate began. It was a ridiculous stunt, which showed

The Donald Trump story and the Jeremy Corbyn story are same tale told by different countries. A political party reinvents itself in the 1990s, wins power, but then dishonestly drags its nation into a terrible war in Iraq. It becomes widely reviled. The party is still in power a few years later when the financial system collapses. The party takes desperate measures to keep the country’s economy going – rescuing failed banks – but that in turn leads to more unpopularity and distrust among the public. It loses power. In opposition, the party’s base – its core voters – starts to revolt. The party then loses another election. Then the party’s grassroots have a

The funniest thing about the lewd Donald Trump tape is how unshocking it is. It’s less of an ‘October surprise’ more of an ‘October of course’. Everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he is, to use a Donald favoured word, braggadocious about his sexual exploits. The newly unearthed video of him boasting of his sexual misadventures is embarrassing for him, of course, but it’s not much worse than what he said in his interviews with Howard Stern, which has been extensively reported. It will hurt his chances with women voters, and of course grumpy Republicans are using the story as an excuse to try another coup against him,

Welcome to The Spectator’s US Election 2016 site, brought to you in association with City Index. This will be home to the best British coverage of the biggest, maddest and baddest political event of the year. There has been no shortage of British coverage of the race to the White House in recent months; the world is gripped by the Donald Trump phenomenon. What’s been lacking, however, is shrewd, detailed analysis of what is actually happening in the American body politic — apart from, that is, on the pages on The Spectator. We’ve been the only British magazine to cover both Trump and Clinton intelligently and humorously. As far back as August

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week, all killed by aerial bombs. ‘We’re used to bloodshed. We’re adapted to the situation and this style of life now. It’s normal. If you lose someone, then the next day you say, OK, life must go on.’ Ismail spoke to me from eastern-Aleppo, where as many as 250,000 people are under siege by the Syrian regime and ‘living on rice’, as he described it. He is in his late twenties and is one of the White Helmets, the civil defence volunteers who dig people out of the rubble after an