World

The finance director of EDF, the French energy giant, has quit over its plans to build George Osborne’s new pet project : a new power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. At first glance, this seems odd: isn’t the whole problem that the Chancellor has pledged so much taxpayers’ money to this white elephant so the public will be royally ripped off to the benefit of French (and, recently, Chinese) investors? When it’s up and running, yes. But meanwhile someone has to build this, and there have already been delays and cost multiplications. Osborne has sold a third of the stake to the Chinese – not known for their prowess in

As so often, The Simpsons were years in advance of actual political facts. In the programme about ten years ago, Lisa Simpson, for reasons I have now forgotten, becomes President of the United States. She sits in the Oval Office and is briefed by aides on the mess she has inherited from one President Trump. Trump made the great mistake, she is informed, of ‘investing in our nation’s children’. The country is bust and ‘Our free breakfast program merely created a generation of super-criminals.’ Among commentators on either side of the Atlantic, one of the few to see the coming of Trump was the former owner of this paper, Conrad

I don’t know whether men blessed with enormous manhoods are more likely to make effective leaders; social scientists probably lack the necessary data to draw any correlations between length and girth, and things like GDP per capita or the underlying rate of inflation. A few newspaper articles recently suggested that Hitler had a micropenis, but for all we know he may have been an outlier. Based on my own prejudices, I would imagine that men with quite authoritarian, right-wing political views aren’t especially blessed in that department, nor do they probably make the most satisfactory lovers, but that’s just one of thousands of possibly irrational beliefs I hold. Size does

Mitt Romney launched an outspoken attack on Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, branding the billionaire businessman a ‘phony’ and a ‘fraud’. He said Trump’s promises are as ‘worthless as a degree from Trump university’: Romney, who ran for the Presidency in 2012, went on to say Donald Trump had inherited his business and slated his past ventures: Elsewhere, during a joint press conference with David Cameron, Francois Hollande said he didn’t want to scare anyone but insisted there would be ‘consequences’ if Britain left the EU. The French president added that ‘there is no solution where there is no consequences’: Whilst during the same event in France, David Cameron reiterated his

This is written from a small and dank room in the state of Arslikhan, as Private Eye calls it. My boss at the Sun, Tony Gallagher, has done an interview with the Press Gazette. His two chief points are that a) journalism is a trade not a profession and b) the BBC does not break stories, or does not break many stories. You will be unsurprised to know that I make the bloke right on both points. But are these two facts not related? Here’s what Gallagher had to say about journalism: ‘You become a journalist by practising it not by learning it in a classroom. I think one of

Angela Merkel gave a defiant interview last night in which she defended her handling of the refugee crisis. She declared, ‘I have no Plan B’—worryingly, I suspect this is true. But how much worse the refugee crisis could become worse is made clear in leaked minutes of a meeting between the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker. As Bloomberg columnist Marc Champion points out, Erdogan is determined to get far more out of the EU than the 3 billion Euros it is currently offering. He tells them that if the offer is for only 3 billion, the conversation might as well end there: “We

It is recognised that the era of television has made it well-nigh impossible in Britain and the United States for a balding leader to win an election if pitted against one with more hair — Callaghan/Foot/Kinnock v. Thatcher, George H.W. Bush v. Clinton, Hague/Howard v. Blair, McCain v. Obama. (The only exceptions I can think of derive from the power of incumbency — George W. Bush v. Kerry, Obama v. Romney.) Now the voters’ jaded palate seems to be no longer content with a full head of hair alone, but wants it to be strikingly memorable as well, not to say strange. Hence the rise of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Obviously Boris would beat Jeremy Corbyn on this account. If Mr

Badda Bing. Chris Christie has just endorsed Donald Trump for president, and suddenly Republican politics looks like a particularly nasty episode of the Sopranos. As he paid homage to the new capo di tutti capi, Chris Christie called Trump ‘the person who will do exactly what needs to be done to make America a leader around the world again’. He talked about his ‘long friendship’ with Donald Trump, and said that Trump was ‘the last person’ Hillary and Bill Clinton wanted to face in the presidential election. The scene had a certain gangster atmosphere. The endorsement might explain a few things. It explains why, to the surprise of many, Christie refused to go

Tonight’s Republican CNN debate should be, to use the Donald Trump word, yuuge. I don’t mean to sound like a boxing promoter; I know that TV debates, especially Republican ones, are overhyped. They often turn out to be little more than soundbites and fury, signifying nothing. But anybody who thinks a bad debate can’t harm a political candidate should see what happened in New Hampshire, when Marco’s Rubio hilariously robotic performance in the Saturday night TV showdown helped push him down to fifth place. Since Donald Trump looks increasingly certain to be the Republican nominee, his rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, desperately need to do something special to hurt him. The CNN

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is running scared. The other week, he apologised to Dr. Ben Carson but refused Carson’s pleas that he discipline his staff for suggesting to Iowa caucus-goers that the neurosurgeon had dropped out of the running for president. On Monday, Cruz fired communications director Rick Tyler for distributing a video with bad dubbing that suggested Marco Rubio was mocking the Bible. In fact, correct transcription showed the Florida senator and fellow Republican presidential hopeful praising the Good Book. The episode suggesting a candidacy in trouble. In campaign speak, Cruz “underperformed” in the South Carolina primary Saturday. Though he lost out for second place by about 1,000 votes

Bernie Sanders’s quixotic tilt at the White House needed an upset in the Nevada Caucuses tonight. But Hillary Clinton won. Now the Former First Lady, after a wobbly few weeks, is very much back in what Americans call the catbird seat. Sanders’s populist success has been staggering, but he has never quite threatened to destroy the Democratic elite in the way that Donald Trump is trampling all over the moribund Republican establishment. It’s been well-documented that he is struggling to win over enough Black and Hispanic Democrats, who tend to be more loyal towards the party machine than their white contemporaries. The entrance and exit polls from Nevada suggested that