World

The Daily Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that Michael Spencer, the chief executive of Icap, has been blocked for a peerage by the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac). All the indignation just now is against David Cameron’s resignation honours list, packed with his ‘cronies’, who allegedly include Mr Spencer. It is misdirected. The real anger should go against the pharisaical bureaucracy which has been imposed upon patronage. No one is allowed to know why Mr Spencer has been blocked, yet the world knows that he has been because, supposedly, he has ‘the wrong sniff’ about him. His company was fined by regulators for transgressions in relation to Libor, but he

Remain calm Sir: I am sorry that the redoubtable Martha Lane Fox is still angry at the exaggerations made by the Leave campaign (Letters, 30 July). I expect that the 17 million people who voted to leave are also still pretty angry at the exaggerated claims of Remainers. House price crashes, everyone £4,500 a year worse off, a revenge budget and even a third world war. And of course, the threats from elite corporatists. Vested interests, perhaps? It’s interesting to see how many of the big corporations that  threatened Armageddon prior to the vote are now voting with their money to stay. The investment adviser Tim Price says he has

Donald Trump doesn’t seem the forgiving type, so it’s no surprise he hasn’t let Barack Obama’s comments yesterday stand. Obama said Trump was ‘unfit’ to be President – so what did the Republican candidate have to say in response? He answered in the only way he knows how, by flinging mud back at the person who called him out. Here’s what he said: ‘Well he’s a terrible President, he’ll probably go down as the worst President in the history of our country. He’s been a total disaster, you look at what’s happened to the Middle East, what’s happened to Syria and his ‘line in the sand’.’ It’s unlikely Obama will

Barack Obama has said Donald Trump is unfit to be President in his most resounding criticism yet of the Republican candidate. In a strongly-worded statement, Obama said Trump – who he couldn’t bring himself to name – was ‘woefully unprepared’ for the top job. Obama’s intervention is extraordinary and it’s difficult to think of a precedent for a sitting President condemning in such terms one of the frontrunners who could replace him. But whilst Obama fans will cheer from the sidelines, in reality his decision to wade in won’t help. Firstly, it will make it harder for any Republicans to now withdraw their endorsements of Trump. If they were to

A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone insisting Islam has nothing to do with the Islamist attack the national and international media gets to run almost as big a story suggesting that although Islam is not part of any problem, it is, however, a very major answer to almost everything. Fortunately the slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel last week has already got

This year’s US presidential election campaign has broken the mould, apparently. Never before have two ‘anti-establishment’ candidates in the shape of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders put up such a challenge, one securing his party’s nomination and the other coming close to doing so. It is all a symptom of the ‘anti-politics’ mood that has swept Western democracies. There is just one thing wrong with this analysis. If Americans are so fed up with the established parties, why is there no credible third party candidate who is going to come within an ace of challenging the two main candidates? It ought to be a golden opportunity for outsiders. Not only

There are certain things about political conventions you only notice when you are watching on TV – like Bill Clinton seeming to fall asleep momentarily during his wife’s speech last night. And there are things you only notice when you go along to conventions and spend your afternoons out on the street, under the hot sun, waiting for something to happen. Any of the journalists working in Cleveland and Philadelphia in the past fortnight had a curious thing to relate: lots of things happened on the streets of Philly, and almost nothing happened in Ohio. Before we leave behind the conventions and head into three months of stage-managed swing state rallies, it’s worth asking

At the beginning of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France’ and its ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. It was not only an abstract concept: the picture in his mind was of ‘the Madonna in mural frescoes’. What is President Hollande’s certain idea of France? Presumably it cannot be the Madonna, since Hollande is the child of French laïcité, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between religion and the republic. But what happens when, in the name of one religion, men in France enter the temple of another and slit the throat of a priest, as happened this week near