World

Donald Trump has been putting the cat amongst the diplomatic pigeons—again. His tweet suggesting that Nigel Farage should be made the UK’s ambassador to the US couldn’t have been better designed to wind up the UK government by reminding everyone that it is the leader of Britain’s third party—not the Prime Minister—who knows the president-elect best. Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016 It also, to put it mildly, rather undermines the current UK ambassador, Kim Darroch, but given Theresa May’s team’s unhappiness with him they

Discovering my sons’ school had invited back former pupil Milo Yiannopoulos as a guest speaker was the highlight of an otherwise terrible parents’ evening. I chatted with the Head of School about the teenage Milo and whether there had been any clues as to his future transformation into a darling of the alt-right and anti-hero of American college campuses. This was a great opportunity, we agreed, for current students to challenge such a notorious figure. I also mumbled something about the school being brave. But I don’t think either of us, at that point, realised quite what a torrent of criticism the school would be expected to withstand. Today we

At least two former Spectator figures understood things about the recent American contest which eluded most commentators. The first is our former proprietor, Conrad Black. Disagreeing with the anti-Trump conservative National Review, for which he writes, Conrad filed a powerful piece at the time of Trump’s nomination: ‘What the world has witnessed, but has not recognised it yet, has been a campaign of genius.’ He enumerated virtually every issue where Trump was nearer to the voters than Democrats, the media, and other Republicans. The second is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nowadays the Telegraph’s international business editor. In the 1980s, Ambrose wrote wonderful pieces from central America for The Spectator, the only British

There are plenty of theories about how Donald Trump pulled off his shock victory. But however he did manage to achieve one of the unlikeliest political upsets in history, one thing seems clear: social media won the day for the Donald. The starting gun was fired when Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’. Clinton wasn’t talking about the egg-faced trolls of Twitter when she made this remark, but it was a moniker they happily took up. It also gave this loose outfit the confidence of mainstream recognition – enabling Trump supporters to kick-start their most important election mission: starting arguments with Democrats. They never won these rows

For all the top jobs being dished out by Donald Trump, there’s one figure close to the president-elect that worries me more than the others. Steve Bannon’s appointment as Chief Strategist might have fired up the Twitter mob, but it’s the elevation of Jared Kushner as Trump’s unofficial chief consigliere which seems most troubling of all. After all, however you spin it, having your son-in-law apparently calling the shots means Trump is following in some worrying footsteps. While some have cheered Trump’s victory for the rude awakening it gave to soft-hearted liberals, Kushner popping up at Trump Tower for the Donald’s first meeting with a foreign leader – Japan’s PM Shinzo

‘America’s journey into the great unknown’, screamed a headline greeting Donald Trump’s election as next President of the United States. Most of us call it the future, which has a long and distinguished tradition of being unknown. In the ancient world there was quite an industry in attempting to foretell the future: oracles, auguries, dream interpreters and so on. But to rely on the supernatural was to put one’s trust in something equally unknowable, and the great Greek historian Thucydides (5th century BC) proposed a better way: as doctors’ evidence-based analysis of the course of an illness enabled them to generalise about the course of any future example, so human