World

Tuesday

Eliot Wilson

RAF chief puts pressure on Starmer over Storm Shadows

I don’t know what the Ukrainian for ‘Well, duh’ is, but it might well have been heard in Kyiv yesterday. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, observed that Ukrainian forces resisting the Russian invaders needed to be able to strike at their enemies well behind the border. ‘Ukraine cannot put up a shield to protect themselves against the 30,000 glide bombs lobbed into the Kursk oblast. Instead, what they need – and what we would need – is the ability to strike the aircraft launching these bombs on the ground.’  When he was asked to respond, the prime minister was

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The Marsh family and the sad spectacle of Trump-bashing Brits

There is something slightly uncanny about the musical Marsh family of Faversham in Kent, who recently gathered millions of YouTube views with ‘Gimme Hope Kamala’, their rewrite of Eddy Grant’s ‘Gimme Hope Jo’Anna’. They are a combination of two big fads of the 70s, The Partridge Family and Jonestown. Mad Ma Marsh in particular has the shining eyes of someone appearing in a slightly different kind of video, containing the words ‘My captors are treating me very well and I now fully support their valiant armed struggle’. If you really did believe fascism was returning, dropping a comic song on the internet would probably not be your first action The musical endeavours

John Keiger John Keiger

The irony of Starmer’s Armistice Day visit to France

Yesterday morning, the British Prime Minister travelled to Paris at the invitation of the French President to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Sir Keir Starmer was the first UK leader to attend an Armistice Day ceremony in Paris since Winston Churchill did so alongside General de Gaulle in 1944. Yet there is a degree of irony in these displays of Franco-British unity marking the war’s end. Despite having fought side-by-side for the conflict’s duration, and notwithstanding the integration of their economies to an unprecedented degree, at the war’s end the two countries reverted to traditional rivalry. One of the areas where

Monday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Why Beijing is wary of a Russo-North Korean alliance

56 min listen

There have been reports that some 11,000 North Korean troops are present in Russia and preparing to take part in the Russian invasion. While not acknowledged by either country, if true, this would mark a historic milestone: the first East Asian state to send troops to Europe since the Mongol Empire.  And yet, both countries’ most powerful neighbour and ally – China – has remained suspiciously quiet about this new development. Beijing’s silence may well express a deep distrust and unease that actually characterises China’s relationship with its so-called allies. To get into the recent developments and what we can learn from the history of the relationship between these three countries, the

Raquel Rosario Sánchez

How Trump won over Latino voters

A huge surge of support from the Latino community helped Donald Trump to victory in the US election. I could never envision myself voting for Donald Trump. But my aunt in New York, who became a citizen many years ago did just that: last week she cast a ballot for the Republican candidate. So why did she, and so many other Latinos, turn to Trump? There has been an outpouring of racism and xenophobia from liberal circles aimed at the Latino community for choosing to back Trump. Jokes about mass deportation and accusations of how ignorant, uneducated or misogynist the community is for voting Republican are thriving. But my aunt isn’t a stupid woman who doesn’t know

James Snell

Why was Europe not ready for Trump?

Donald Trump has won his third presidential election and across Europe heads are exploding. This should not be the case. Many European leaders were briefed earlier this year that a Trump victory was more likely than not. But wishful thinking appears to have defeated grim experience in many minds and many civil service buildings. To hear the Europeans tell it, they are now confronted with a unique threat. The last time Trump was in office, Ukraine had been fighting Russia since 2014, but its survival was not hanging by a thread. It was not seriously likely that Russia would invade Moldova, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, as now seems possible. Finland

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

How did pollsters get Trump’s victory so wrong?

Was Donald Trump’s win unexpected? Not if you followed the betting markets, which had Trump at a two-thirds chance of winning days out from the election. The polls, on the other hand, told a different story. Analysis of polls carried out in 15 competitive states in the three weeks before last Tuesday’s election shows that whatever the method of polling used, there was a clear and consistent bias in favour of the Democrats. Pollsters spent an estimated half a billion dollars (£388 million) on this election, but most polling methods were still biased towards Kamala Harris by around three percentage points. One method – recruiting participants by mail – managed

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Keir Starmer’s pointless meeting with Emmanuel Macron

It’s extremely difficult to imagine that today’s meeting between Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron produced anything substantive beyond a photo opportunity at the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 106th anniversary of the 1918 armistice. This year is also the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale and it suits both Starmer and Macron to big up the idea of Franco-British friendship, not that there has been much substance to it of late. Various bromides will certainly appear in the read-outs of the meeting but in substance nothing will have been achieved Downing Street briefed before today’s meeting that the agenda would cover the victory of Trump, and his threatened tariffs, and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why Farage should – and shouldn’t – be UK ambassador to Trump

It is very kind of Nigel Farage to offer his services as a kind of intermediary between our government and the new American president. Keir Starmer certainly needs one, because protest though he might, nobody believes the line that Donald Trump is hugely impressed with the Labour government or that JD Vance has a new best friend in the magnificently dim David Lammy. I fear that Farage’s yearning to be in Washington DC rather than the agreeable Thames-side resort of Clacton-on-Sea spells trouble for Reform For eight years, Labour has behaved abominably towards Trump, flinging at him every conceivable insult, a number of its MPs demanding he not be allowed

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Ukraine will be worried if Trump has called Putin

When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last Wednesday, one leader’s message of congratulation was conspicuously absent. It took the Russian president Vladimir Putin more than 24 hours to pass comment on Trump’s win. He eventually praised the President-elect as ‘courageous’ and stated he had ‘nothing against’ Trump trying to resume contact with him. Putin, however, wouldn’t be calling him. Many in Ukraine have been concerned that Trump might seek to do a deal with Moscow over Kyiv’s head Well now it appears Trump may well have made the call. It has been reported that last Thursday, the President-elect picked up the phone to Putin, warning him ‘not to

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Peanut the squirrel shows Elon Musk is wrong about the mainstream media

Was it Peanut wot won it? One of the stranger and more incendiary aspects of the run-up to the recent US election was a Twitter/ X howl-round about Peanut the squirrel. The house where Peanut lived was raided, and this blameless rescue-rodent euthanised, after a complaint was apparently filed to a government agency by a neighbour. And Peanut’s story went super-viral.  The shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to ‘news’ can leave any or all of us riddled with bullets. Just ask Peanut Rather than seeing it as a local hard-luck story, many social media users supposed this to be a paradigmatic instance of what was at stake in the election. This wasn’t human

Sunday

John Keiger John Keiger

What the First World War can teach us about the Third

It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into war in 1914. The history of the Great War has captivated and divided historians since Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired that fateful shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Only later did we come to realise the full significance of that date. British military historian of the First World War and Conservative cabinet minister, Alan Clark, recorded the moment in his diary on Tuesday, 28 June 1983, with characteristic wit: ‘Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of the

David Christopher Kaufman

Trump’s plan to make America safe again

Donald Trump’s critics like to paint his supporters as hardcore right-wingers. The truth is rather plainer: many of those who voted for Trump are refugees from the conservative establishment desperate for a leader unafraid to speak their truth.  We Americans are scared. Literally  Shamed by the elites, mocked for their beliefs – sidelined by rising ‘wokeness’ and DEI-culture for being white or straight or male – they saw in Trump a man-of-action sympathetic to their back-to-basics worldview. Tired of being told what to say and how to feel, Trump’s supporters were ready to reclaim their voices in the safest space possible: the ballot box. The anti-elitist populism that swept Trump

Matthew Lynn

Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is a masterstroke

Elon Musk contributed huge sums of money. He campaigned relentlessly. And his social media network X provided a platform for the candidate. Of all the architects of Donald Trump’s return to the White House this week, arguably none was more influential than Musk, and certainly none were playing for such high stakes. If he had lost, the X owner would have faced a furious regulatory backlash. As it happens, however, the election has been a triumph for Musk – and will make him more powerful than ever. Even from this side of the pond, it was hard to escape Musk’s presence during the US election. The entrepreneur behind Tesla and

Saturday

Sam Meadows

How Javier Milei found $18 billion

When Domingo Cavallo implemented at the start of December 2001 a restriction on cash withdrawals, he unwittingly unleashed a month of rioting and looting across Argentina that would leave 39 people dead. Police brutally cracked down on protests that quickly spread as the country’s economy fell to pieces. The basket of laws enforced by the then-finance minister became known as the Corralito and were a desperate response to a devastating – and worsening – economic crisis. A series of setbacks had caused both individual Argentines and companies to convert their pesos into dollars and get them out of the banks. Some 25 per cent of the country’s cash had been spirited away

William Cook

Two forgotten men brought down the Berlin Wall

Here in Berlin, 35 years ago today, at a dull press conference in a dreary conference room a short walk from my hotel, an East German politician made a rookie error which brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime later, it’s easy to forget that this seismic shift was the result of a bizarre accident – the unlikely collision of two snap decisions by two men whose names are now almost forgotten. As Berlin throws a party to celebrate the 35th anniversary of what Germans call the ‘Friedliche Revolution’, how many of these revellers are aware that their ‘Peaceful Revolution’ was shaped (or even caused) by the impulsive actions

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Sean Thomas, Imogen Yates, Books of the Year II, and Alan Steadman

30 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood analyses what a Trump victory could mean for the Middle East (1:16); Sean Thomas gets a glimpse of a childless future while travelling in South Korea (8:39); in search of herself, Imogen Yates takes part in ‘ecstatic dance’ (15:11); a second selection of our books of the year from Peter Parker, Daniel Swift, Andrea Wulf, Claire Lowdon, and Sara Wheeler (20:30); and notes on the speaking clock from the voice himself, Alan Steadman (25:26).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Friday

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Will Trump make good on his election promises?

32 min listen

Kate Andrews, standing in for Freddy Gray is joined by Nick Gillespie, host of The Reason Interview and Freddy Gray himself. They discuss whether Trump 2.0 could be different in his final time in office. Will he ‘drain the swamp’? And will the Democrats learn the lessons from their election loss?

Lara Brown

Labour must learn from Kamala Harris’s transgender muddle

Donald Trump’s remarkable election victory has been rightly attributed to the long shadow of inflation combined with mass illegal immigration across the southern border. While these factors dominated the national swing, an under-discussed element of the Republican campaign was the relentless targeting of voters in swing states with paid advertising linking Kamala Harris to radical trans ideology. Why was this – and what lessons should be drawn for Labour in the UK? The ads were simple. Their tagline: ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ The ads were simple. Their tagline: ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ They showed clips of her, from

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Did Christianity create secular humanism?

33 min listen

Since the election of an overwhelmingly secular Labour government, people who describe themselves as humanists have a spring in their step: for example, there’s a prospect that humanist weddings will be legally recognised in England and Wales (they already are in Scotland). But what exactly is a humanist? Definitions vary and there’s a heated debate about to what extent the ethical but firmly atheist beliefs of the rather loosely organised modern humanist movement are descended from Christianity. In this episode of Holy Smoke we’ll hear from Andrew Copson, CEO of Humanists UK since 2010 & President of Humanists International, and the theologian and Spectator contributor Theo Hobson, author of God created Humanism: