World

Living in France is a lottery. The chances of getting a losing ticket are very slim, but a chance it is all the same. Twenty four hours before the slaughter in Nice, I took my daughter to the Bastille celebrations in the southern suburb of Paris in which we live. The centrepiece of the celebration was a parade through the town centre finishing in the town square. On arrival the kids in the parade leapt up on stage and sang La Marseillaise before trooping off into the embrace of their parents. Next up on stage was a pop band, and as they launched into their first number my 11-year-old daughter

After weeks of speculation and teasers, hints of A-list stars and promises of razzle dazzle, the programme for the Republican National Convention finally arrives on the eve of proceedings. At the last possible moment. And if you were expecting Donald Trump to remake the GOP election-year gathering in his own image, well, you won’t be disappointed. In fact the week’s convention is looking a lot like an episode of a new reality TV show: At Home with the Trumps. Six are among the 20 headline speakers. On Monday we have his wife and possible future first Lady Melania discussing how to ‘make America safe again’. Until now she has preferred

Late on Saturday night, just 24 hours after the attempted coup, hundreds of supporters of President Erdogan swarmed into Taksim Square – the pulsating heart of secular, modern Turkey – to celebrate their victory with shouts of Takbir – ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God is Great’. Already the story – so hard to piece together – was being put in stone by the AKP mob. ‘We are here to tell the world that we won, and we are the real Turkey. This is a victory against those traitor Gulenists.’ Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric based in Pennsylvania, was once a key ally of Erdogan but relations have been fraught for several

In the end Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick emerged in typical style, blurted out on Twitter. On Thursday night, as the horrors from Nice played out on TV screens, the bombastic billionaire said he was cancelling Friday’s event to unveil his running mate. A rare moment of sensitivity. It didn’t last. Hours later he ended speculation with a Twitter announcement. ‘I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00am,’ he wrote. It marked the end of what CNN had clumsily dubbed the VPprentice, with Trump publicly announcing his three final candidates almost as if it were a reality TV

After some confusion, it is confirmed: Donald Trump has picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice-presidential running mate. After the terrorist attack in Nice last night, the Trump campaign announced, somewhat melodramatically, that it had postponed its Veep announcement  ‘out of respect’. This led some pundits to suggest that all the reports yesterday saying that Trump had settled on Pence as his running mate had been misinformed. Well, they weren’t: Mike Pence ticks a lot of right-wing boxes, and helps Trump appeal to old-fashioned Republican voters. Pence is a straight conservative, Reaganite figure. ‘Get government out the way’ is his core message. He is House Speaker Paul Ryan with a bit more All-American

A lorry has ploughed into crowds celebrating Bastille Day by the beach in Nice;  there are reports of at least 80 people killed. I am currently in the city, having watched the fireworks in the crowd on La Promenade des Anglais near the sea, where the attack took place. I was just walking home when the screaming began, and people started running from the main square. The streets were full of people running in panic and sirens ringing: no one, at present, knows what happened. At first there were reports of a dozen dead; now it’s several dozen. One of the papers here, Nice Matin, has published a photograph of a

Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mark Carney’s clash at this morning’s Treasury Committee was a masterclass in passive aggressiveness veiled in pleases and thankyous. From the words being said, it wasn’t clear there was any enmity in the room. But Carney’s expressions couldn’t have made things clearer: there is certainly no love lost between these two. Before the referendum, Rees-Mogg said Carney had come under ‘undue influence’ during the referendum campaign from the Treasury. Today, the Tory MP went on the attack in the politest way possible as he tried his trump card question once again about whether Carney would have conducted himself in the same way during a general election. Last

The Dallas shooting brings together two of the worst problems in American politics: racial mistrust and guns. It also shows that both problems are intractable. Most Americans like the idea that if something’s wrong they can fix it. Hard experience suggests otherwise. First, race. The old heritage of slavery, followed by a century of segregation and the continuing reality of widespread racism, often makes the rhetoric of equality and democracy ring hollow. White fear of blacks is common, and has contributed this year to Donald Trump’s success. Second, guns. The Constitution’s Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms. Written in the 1780s to promote an effective militia, it’s

All hail social media. In January, I lost my beautiful pussycat Mr Mew, and I have spent six long months worrying about him. But last week he came back. His return is entirely thanks to nice people on Facebook and Twitter posting pictures and then alerting me when a sad, similar looking stray was found living rough a few miles away. Mr Mew is a bit starved and missing a few teeth, but I’m hoping that with love, food and shelter he will soon be restored to his former slinky self. And I’ll never be rude about social media again. I will, however, allow myself to be rude about the

From ‘Preparation for peace’, The Spectator, 1 July 1916: All industrial development relies in the last resort upon human energy, and the amount of human energy existing in this country has been enormously stimulated by the war. The country is awake, and will remain awake. But this readiness of every man and every woman to ‘do their bit’ in the battle of peace (if we may be allowed so mixed a metaphor) will not save us from great suffering in the first few months that will follow the cessation of hostilities and the return of the troops, if we have not tackled the problem beforehand, but have lulled ourselves with

There’s a delicious irony to Remainers’ branding of Leave voters as confused individuals who have simply made a desperate howling noise, whose anti-EU vote was a ‘howl of anger’ (Tim Farron) or a ‘howl of frustration’ (JK Rowling). Which is that if anyone’s been howling in recent days, it’s them, the top dogs of the Remain campaign. They are howling against the demos; raging against the people; fuming about a system that allows even that portly bloke at the end of your street who never darkened the door of a university to have a say on important political matters. That system we call democracy. In all the years I’ve been

It was meant to be a relatively quiet event. A few fans gathering to take part in a global listening party in support of the new album by Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool. Instead what happened last Friday – and what followed over the weekend – has drawn attention to the changing nature of Istanbul. For centuries this Turkish city has been a melting pot of cultures. Two continents living side by side, separated only by the Bosphorus strait. It’s not unusual for Istanbulian’s to have breakfast on the European side, lunch on the Asian side, only to pop back to Europe for a night cap. And to the untrained eye this city is

A young British man was arrested last night in Las Vegas at a Donald Trump rally. He is accused of trying to seize a police officer’s gun and assassinate the Republican candidate for President. According to the BBC report: ‘He had reportedly tried to seize the gun after saying he wanted Mr Trump’s autograph at Saturday’s rally. ‘He said he had been planning to try to shoot Mr Trump for about a year but had decided to act now because he finally felt confident enough to do so, court papers say.’ We will have to wait to see how the legal case against this 20-year old British man plays out.