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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

Earlier this month Mr S brought you the news that students at LSE were attempting to ban a free-speech society. Now some lovely folk at the National Union of Students have a new target in their sights: Hope Not Hate. Yes, the founder of the advocacy group — which claims to campaign ‘to counter racism and fascism’ — claims he has been accused of… Islamophobia. Nick Lowles — who previously edited anti-fascist magazine Searchlight — says that NUS students are campaigning against a plan to invite him to speak at an anti-racism event on the basis that he is ‘Islamophobic’. Given that the Hope Not Hate founder claims to have worked to tackle bias against Muslims,

During Russell Brand’s brief foray into politics, the comedian struggled to be taken seriously by members of the establishment. On one such occasion, Peter Hitchens hit out at the BBC for inviting the comedian to discuss drugs policy on an episode of Newsnight. The incident irked Brand so much that he later asked for the scene to be omitted from a documentary charting his career. So Mr S is intrigued to learn that Brand may be taking steps to bolster his academic credentials. Word reaches Steerpike that Brand has been spied looking around the School of Oriental and African Studies — part of the University of London — which counts Aung San Suu Kyi among its almuni. A student

Steven Pinker famously observed in The Blank Slate that ‘Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives happily ever after. Yet when it comes to the science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz.’ The same is true of the politics of human beings, where educated people want stories of individuals overcoming the odds, and hate discussing depressing, but more useful, overall patterns. A good example is the recent meme that among the recent Syrian influx may be the next Steve Jobs, a theme repeated by that hugely profound modern-day genius Banksy. Jobs’s biological father was

If Jeb Bush is to have any chance of winning the Republican nomination in 2016, he needs a ‘media moment’. He needs an exchange of arguments or insults with Donald J. Trump in which he indisputably comes out on top. If you listen to Team Bush’s boosters, that moment happened last night. But they would say that. Trump and Bush clashed fiercely over foreign policy and the legacy of Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush. And the crowd booed Trump. Trump said that the Bush II administration had lied over Iraq. ‘They said there were weapons of mass destruction,’ he said. ‘There were none and they knew there were none. There were no

Events in Europe are unfolding rapidly, and we at The Spectator are looking for writers living abroad who would be interested in contributing occasionally to the magazine and our website. So we’re setting up a writing competition: the Timothy Garton Ash prize for European writing. It will go to the best original essay from any country in Europe, which will be published both in the magazine and online. In 1978, Alexander Chancellor was looking for someone to cover events in Europe – someone actually living out there, rather than the many eloquent writers in London who knew what these countries were like years ago. Things were changing too fast, Alexander thought: The Spectator

While browsing in Barter Books, the wonderful secondhand bookshop in Alnwick that is fast becoming a national institution, I came across a volume of Piers Morgan’s diaries, covering his two years in the United States, judging America’s Got Talent and taking part in Celebrity Apprentice (the Alan Sugar role being played by one Donald Trump). I cannot claim to have been all that keen on Morgan ever since I discovered that in the mid-1990s, when he was an agent of Murdoch, he penned a note to Tony Blair demanding that he silence ‘idiots like Mullin shouting their mouths off about “loathsome tabloids” and my owner’. As you might expect, the

The Conservatives have their black-tie billionaire-laden black-and-white ball tonight – an event shrouded in secrecy. So your spy, Mr Steerpike, is live-blogging it. I’ve already noticed a porn baron or two amongst the guests. But for all of the jolity, where is the cash? The commodity/emerging market crash seems to have hit the pockets of the bidders rather hard. Either that, or they think ten years of Tory government are in the bag. Here’s the live blog:- 10.40pm Things are drawing to a close now – MPs who haven’t been drinking have just done a runner. Perhaps humiliated, on Cameron’s behalf, at the paltry sums that this auction has raised. Cameron himself doesn’t look like