World

The city of Palmyra, recently liberated from Isis, has seen a return to civilisation and culture with a performance by a Russian orchestra. The concert, conducted by a ‘close associate’ of Vladimir Putin, was of course a propaganda exercise – but what a propaganda exercise! It fills me with genuine sadness that no western power would ever think to pull such a stunt, and this reflects a deeper problem with our foreign policy; that is, what are we promoting? Western policy in the region since the start of the Arab spring has been crippled by an absence of clear, set goals, and a lack of confidence in our own ideals; in

I am no admirer of Donald Trump — not because he is a doomsayer and professional patriot but because he is a fake and, worse, he owes me money. A few years back I was telephoned by a friend. ‘I have to give a dinner for Donald Trump,’ he said, dolorously. ‘He entertained me in Palm Beach and now he’s over here.’ The dinner was in a bijou Mayfair restaurant and we were a party of about eight. Let me say one thing for Trump: he isn’t stupid. We had never met, but he spotted me for an Englishwoman right away. The other guests were various members of the London ton,

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Has Erdogan brought Europe to heel? In his Spectator cover piece, Douglas Murray argues that the Turkish President has used a mixture of intimidation, threats and blackmail to do just that and throw open the doors of Europe to Turkey. Douglas says Erdogan is a ‘wretched Islamist bully’ who has shown just how the EU works. But in pushing Europe around, is Erdogan now more powerful than Merkel, Juncker and Cameron? And how does the Turkish PM’s resignation this week changed the country’s

Following Tuesday night’s Indiana primaries, the race for the Republican nomination is effectively over. Talk of Donald Trump being overhauled in a contested convention in July evaporated when Ted Cruz withdrew from the race after seven successive defeats. Compromise candidates have ruled themselves out, and Trump’s former opponents are reluctantly rallying around. It really has come to this: the people of the most powerful country on earth will be asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and her former campaign donor Donald Trump. It cannot be assumed that Trump will be defeated in November. This week, for the first time, a poll put him ahead of her. The world is sooner

When the New Day was first launched in February, Trinity Mirror’s chief executive Simon Fox made clear that the company would close the title if it failed to deliver results. However, Mr S is pretty sure that he didn’t anticipate having to make such a decision quite so soon. Just over two months since its launch and with circulation now below 40,000, Steerpike understands that the New Day‘s final issue will be on Friday. Mr S’s mole says that staff at the ‘politically neutral’ paper have been informed today that it will close and a formal announcement is expected to follow tomorrow. While a spokesman for Trinity Mirror declines to

The world now has two famous managers called Ranieri. One is Lew Ranieri, the corpulent monster of Salomon Brothers’ 1980s New York trading floor. Thanks to Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, that Ranieri is forever associated with ‘Food Frenzy Fridays’ — vast pig-outs of Mexican and Italian takeaway — and the observation by a fellow trader that ‘Lewie would piss on your desk’. He was eventually fired by Salomon and withdrew into sulky seclusion before returning to become even more notorious as the progenitor of the mortgage-backed securities market that nearly destroyed the global banking system. He was named by Time as one of ‘The 25 People to Blame for the

During President Xi’s visit to America last year, China’s leader attempted to win over his American audience with a joke about House of Cards. Referring to the American show which sees Frank Underwood use dirty tricks to get to the top, he said his crackdown on corruption was not aimed at purging political rivals — that this is no ‘House of Cards‘. Unfortunately he had no such gags prepared for his UK state visit in October. In fact, if anything his House of Cards knowledge — or lack there of — proved problematic. Writing in the new issue of The Spectator, Lord Dobbs — the author of the original novel on which

On Friday, Mr S reported that Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder Ntokozo Qwabe had revelled in making a ‘white waitress’ cry at a restaurant in Cape Town. The incident occurred after Qwabe’s friend wrote a note to the waitress explaining they would only tip her when she ‘returned the land’. Qwabe — who studies law at Oxford — has since refused to apologise, instead hitting out at the response by the ‘hysterical white media’. Happily others are feeling more compassionate. After news of the incident broke, Sihle Ngobese sought out the waitress and gave her a tip in protest of Qwabe’s behaviour: https://twitter.com/SihleDLK/status/726124957655257089 Speaking to the South African site News24, Ngobese said that someone

Last year Ntokozo Qwabe made the news as the co-founder of the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford movement. The Oxford law student accused the university of normalising the ‘existence of systemic racism’ and called on them to remove a ‘racist’ statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College. However, the South African student was later accused of hypocrisy when it was revealed that he had accepted a scholarship in the name of Rhodes. With the statue still in place, it appears that Qwabe has traded taking issue with colonialist statues for upsetting ‘white’ waitresses. In a recent Facebook post, Qwabe says he cant’t ‘stop smiling’ because something ‘so black’ and ‘wonderful’ just happened. Qwabe then goes on

‘England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions.’ This classic Eurosceptic statement was made, as Daniel Hannan reminds us in his excellent book Why Vote Leave, by a great European, Charles de Gaulle. He was explaining why France was rejecting our attempt to join the EEC in 1963. The General understood what the European project was, and why Britain was not a

Do you remember the migrants? All those people coming here across land and sea, from North Africa and Arabia and the Indian sub-continent? In boats, sometimes. Occasionally on foot. The BBC used to lead the news with it almost every night. I’m sure I remember them doing that. Tearful migrants who only want a better life, etc. I ask because I have seen a lot less of them recently. And yet I am prepared to bet that the numbers trying to get in have not remotely decreased – probably quite the opposite. So can anyone suggest why this is a less attractive news story to the BBC than once it

Philip Green comes under scrutiny this morning for continuing to haul in vast pay checks for himself and his family while BHS was left floundering in the waters of bankruptcy. According to the Guardian, Green and his family extracted more than £580 million in dividends, rental payments and interest from the high-street former giant before selling its washed-up corpse for a quid last year. The pensions regulator is currently considering coming after Green for £200-£300 million to help fill ‘the black hole’ in BHS’s pension scheme. ‘An institutional overhaul is required,’ writes shadow chancellor John McDonnell in a letter to the Times. He proposes that under a Labour government companies would operate a system whereby