World

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and Writers for America’ in support of Donald Trump. It includes the editors of five of the country’s leading conservative journals of ideas: R.R. Reno of the Christian conservative First Things; Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, the right’s leading journal of the arts; Charles Kesler of the Claremont Review of Books; the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell; and me, the editor of the American Conservative. (Notably lacking are names from America’s oldest conservative magazine, National Review, which has been as hostile to Trump as the columnists of the New York

Governor Mike Pence can debate — who knew? Donald J Trump’s running mate has been fairly invisible so far this election — his star eclipsed by the great orange fireball that is Trump’s ego. But in last night’s vice-presidential debate, he shone. He was more political (in a good sense), more eloquent and more statesmanlike than his adversary. His performance was, in other words, the opposite of Trump’s in last week’s presidential debate. Tim Kaine, Hillary’s vice-presidential pick, didn’t do well. He seemed nervous and over-rehearsed: he fired off too many attack lines too quickly, and his tactic of always savaging Donald Trump rather than discussing the issues made him

Being Vice President of the US ranks as one of the worst jobs in the world. It comes with practically no power yet carries enough responsibility that it can kill your future career prospects. Cactus Jack Garner, the 32nd man to hold the post, famously described the position as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’. And they still have to work for it. Tonight we get to watch Tim Kaine, for the Democrats, and Mike Pence, for the Republicans, go head-to-head in the one – and only – vice presidential debate of the campaign. For 90 minutes, they’ll have to slug it out on live TV for the right to that

Matt Ridley, well known to Spectator readers, is giving the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Annual Lecture on 17 October, at the premises of the Royal Society. The venue has annoyed New Scientist magazine. How dare the great home of science give house room to ‘those who deny climate science’, asks the paper’s ‘biology features editor’, Michael le Page. He hates the ‘false balance’ which presents opposing views. Revealing his own opinions to be more political than scientific, he cites the example of the US presidential election, where ‘the media’s abject failure to tackle Trump has let him get within spitting distance of the presidency’. Perhaps I am biased, since I

Iceland wants to sue Iceland for misuse of its name. The former is a north Atlantic island whose fishermen-turned-financiers set standards of irresponsibility in the mid-2000s that made Wall Street’s Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros look like small-town building societies, attracting £20 billion of British depositors’ money into their mismanaged banks as they launched their own national economy into a mad caricature of boom and bust. The latter is a British supermarket chain, founded by Malcolm Walker in Oswestry in 1969 and offering a value-for-money -frozen-food range that is well appreciated by budget-conscious family shoppers. I’d say if anyone has a claim for reputational damage, it’s Iceland the retailer that

Make a car? Sure. Win a Word Cup? Yup. Write a symphony? Without doubt. There are lots of things that you rather have a German doing than anyone else in the world. But there are also a few things you’d rather they didn’t. Right now, rescuing a bank is right at the top of the list. All this week, the financial markets have been gripped by the slow-motion car-crash of Deutsche Bank. An institution that was once the mightiest in Europe, and a by-word for financial stability, is now teetering on the edge of collapse. Its share price has halved this year, and today is hitting a fresh 30-year low.

Monday night’s US presidential debate should convince a majority of American voters that Hillary Clinton is their only credible choice for the White House. Yet it may well fail to do so, in the new era of ‘post-truth politics’. The historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that on both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a retreat from reason, an attempt to reverse the onset of the 18th-century Age of the Enlightenment, which banished superstition and religious faith as a basis for reaching conclusions. The progress of Donald Trump supports his thesis. I have just spent a fortnight in southern California, researching a book on the Vietnam war, and saw

So, Donald Trump was being honest when he let it be known that he hadn’t swotted up for the first presidential debate. He was horribly unprepared, and it showed. The great reality TV star put in a really bad live performance in front of 100 million-odd viewers. Hillary Clinton was Hillary Clinton – smug, annoying, not half as clever as she thinks. A better debater would have demolished Trump – he gave her enough opportunities — but she did not. Still, she was well-drilled and she sounded professional. Trump sounded incoherent, even by his low standards. He made a complete mess of almost every point. Or, as one Republican insider put it to me in a text message, ‘He

Tonight’s first televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, on Long Island, New York, is expected to generate a ‘Super-Bowlesque’ audience. Analysts say that up to 112 million viewers could tune in, a figure that Donald Trump will interpret as an indication of his immense popularity. Even on this side of the Atlantic, a large number of people will stay up to the early hours (2am – 3.30am) to see the Donald versus Mrs C, such is the excitement surrounding the presidential election. So what can we expect? Here are six things to look out for: 1) Clinton will try so hard to appear healthy that she will end

Mark Twain once said that if you give a man a reputation as an early-riser he can sleep in till noon. The same is true of calling someone ‘a moderate’. Call someone ‘a moderate’ and they can rant like a fascist any day of the week without reprimand. President Rouhani of Iran has been called a moderate by most of the Western press and most of the Western governments. And so when he appeared at the UN this week and railed once again about the ‘Zionists’ controlling the U.S. Government including the U.S. Congress, it barely raises headlines. Surely a ‘moderate’ wouldn’t make such outlandish claims? And so the extremist

A Methodist church in Hinde Street, London, is exhibiting ‘You cannot pass today: Life through a dividing wall’, a reconstruction of a border control point between Israel and the occupied territories. The purpose, needless to say, is not to show how to deal with a terrorist threat, but to attack Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. A Jewish human rights group which has written to protest has been told, soapily, by the minister, ‘I respect your passionate concern for these issues…This exhibition… has been carefully curated… to promote reflection and prayers for peace.’ I have noticed these wall protests popping up on campuses etc., and they never seem either reflective or prayerful.

When we were putting together the latest issue of Spectator Life, we had a debate about whether to put Donald Trump on the cover – not out of any political squeamishness, but because the article about him by Alex Connock is 26 years old. Back in 1990, Alex was a cub reporter for an American weekly magazine and was sent to Atlantic City to write a piece about Trump’s latest casino. The billionaire took a shine to him and made him an offer that, as a journalist, he couldn’t refuse: to join him and Michael Jackson on a trip in a private jet. Alex’s account of that adventure is so