Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

6 Nov 2024

Donald Trump’s win marks the beginning of the end of the Ukraine war

Donald Trump’s election victory heralds the beginning of the end of the Ukraine war – and is likely to leave Vladimir Putin in control of most, if not all, of the territory he has seized in nearly three years of bloody conflict. To many Ukrainians, such an outcome will be a betrayal of their struggle, a stab in the back by the West that will sow decades of anger and resentment. To others, though, a swift end to the conflict before more land is lost and tens of thousands more young Ukrainians die represents the best hope of actually salvaging a decent future for their country before their infrastructure, economy,

Katy Balls

Three challenges Trump poses for Starmer

It’s happened. The scenario Labour politicians hoped would not come to pass is now a reality: Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. The official line from Labour is that everything is fine – they will work with whoever hold the office of president. That was the message from Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions as he congratulated president-elect Trump, and made a point of mentioning they had recently had dinner together. However, privately there have long been nerves and concerns as to what a Trump comeback would mean for the Starmer government. It’s already well documented that steps have been taken to try to mitigate the risks.

Patrick O’Flynn

Will Trump listen to Starmer?

Here is a sign of how weak Keir Starmer’s relationship is with the new leader of the free world. Nigel Farage has repeatedly offered to act as a bridge between the UK Labour government and the incoming Donald Trump administration. And for the second time, Farage is celebrating a Trump presidential election victory with the man himself, while the entire British political establishment is out in the cold. Last time round the relationship’s low point occurred when a disobliging assessment of Trump by the then UK Ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, was leaked. Thereafter Trump refused to deal with him and Darroch ended up resigning. This time, things are

Eliot Wilson

Nato should be worried about Donald Trump

When it comes to Donald Trump’s relationship with Nato, there are two principal schools of thought. The first, articulated by Trump’s own former national security advisor, John Bolton, is that the president-elect is hostile to the alliance at an elemental and instinctive level. The second, proposed by those who are favourable to him, argues that Trump’s inflammatory language about Nato’s failures is a performance, which in the past goaded fellow member states into increasing their defence spending. Look not, they say, at what he says, but at the results. It is indisputable that the financial commitments of member states to Nato now are much higher than when Trump first assumed

Simon Heffer

Labour’s war on the countryside

Two miles from where I am writing, the neighbouring village is plastered with posters demanding ‘Say No to Pylons’. The object of loathing is a 112-mile power line from Norwich to Tilbury that would carry wind-generated electricity from the North Sea to a supposed 1.5 million homes. As a concession to the famous landscape of Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border, the cabling will run underground for 3.3 miles. But because of John Constable’s inexplicable failure to paint the rest of the route, people living near the other 108.7 miles must have their vistas ruined by 160ft pylons. The developers claim it is twice as expensive to bury power lines

Matthew Parris

In defence of the liberal elite

You can hear it already. Rising from the tents of the dejected Democrat camp comes the whimper of self-reproach. It’s all our fault. Liberalism created this monster. There’s a distinct whiff of mea culpa in the air. Nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa for the alienation of half the American people. Donald Trump and his mob? It’s the fault of liberals for not feeling Trump-America’s pain. We fed their despair. Nigel Farage and his Reform party? Liberal Britain’s fault for being too stuck up to take Red Wall voters’ concerns seriously. Noses in the air (apparently), deaf to the woes of all those deplorables, and babbling about trans rights, preferred pronouns

Kate Andrews

Why Donald Trump won and the real reason Kamala Harris lost

33 min listen

Donald Trump has won the election and will be 47th President of the United States after winning the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. ‘America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,’ the Republican candidate told supporters. ‘This is a magnificent victory for the American people, that will allow us to make America great again,’ he said at the rally in Florida. It has been total victory, with the Republicans also winning Senate and the popular vote. Kate Andrews is joined by Sarah Elliott and Rick MacArthur to unpack a historic election night.

William T. Vollmann

My friends who vote Trump

On 13 October 2024, I jaunted 20 minutes south down Interstate-5 to the Cosumnes Nature Preserve, whose toy swamp I used to visit with my parents and my daughter Lisa; they are all dead now, and so was my pleasure on that Sunday, thanks to a haze that looked merely dirty until I opened the car door and realised it was smoke again, more smoke, my eyes beginning to burn and my chest to ache: poor sad California! In recent years I sometimes wake up choking; is the house on fire? Oh, no, merely the planet. One of my homeless Republican friends (who stopped speaking to me once he realised

Gavin Mortimer

Donald Trump is Ursula von der Leyen’s worst nightmare

The first European leader to tweet their response to Donald Trump’s victory was Emmanuel Macron of France, pipping Giorgia Meloni to the prize by a matter of minutes. ‘Congratulations,’ declared the President of France. ‘Ready to work together as we did for four years. With your convictions and mine. With respect and ambition. For more peace and prosperity.’ Macron tweeted his congratulations in French and English, whereas Meloni stuck to her mother tongue. ‘Good work Mr. President,’ said the Italian Prime Minister. ‘Italy and the United States are “sister” nations, linked by an unshakable alliance, common values, and a historic friendship. It is a strategic bond, which I am sure we

Brendan O’Neill

Donald Trump and the revenge of the deplorables

So now we know what happens when you sneer at voters as ‘garbage’. When you view them as ‘deplorables’. When you treat them as the dim stooges of demagoguery, the playthings of powerful men. When you brand them ‘low information’ and chortle in your coffee houses about how Donald Trump is ‘preying’ on their ‘hazy understanding’ of political affairs. What happens is that they don’t vote for you. Kamala played the ‘fascist’ card, breezily unaware of what a grotesque slight it is to the voters The past 24 hours in the United States have been nothing short of extraordinary. This is the revenge of the deplorables, to borrow the slur

Steerpike

Six Brits who had a bad election night

So Donald Trump is heading for the White House once again. It’s a result that has stunned much of the British commentariat, many of whom fawned over Kamala Harris when she was unveiled as Joe Biden’s successor. Yet, just like in 2016, Harris could not live up to her cheerleaders’ hype. With both Keir Starmer and David Lammy now forced to issue statements expressing their delight at working with ‘the Donald’, Mr S rounds up the usual suspects who had a particularly bad election night… Carol Vorderman Once the nation’s sweetheart as the beloved star of Countdown, poor old Vorders seems to have gone off the deep end in recent

Stephen Daisley

Will Democrats blame Israel for Kamala Harris’s defeat?

One of the few western nations where public opinion was in favour of Donald Trump returning to the White House is Israel. Israelis trust him as the man who recognised Jerusalem as their capital, moved the US embassy there, recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and said that settlement-building was not per se against international law. So most Israelis regard a second Trump term as good news for their country, its security and its relationship with the United States. That might be the case in what we see from his new administration, but Trump’s re-election could prove in the longer term to be a fracture point between the United

Donald Trump

Full text: Donald Trump’s acceptance speech

Thank you very much. Wow. Well I want to thank you all very much. This is great. These are our friends. We have thousands of friends on this incredible movement. This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before. And frankly this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s ever been anything like this in this country and maybe beyond. And now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal, we going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re

Daniel McCarthy

How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory

Donald Trump’s victory this time may not be the surprise that his 2016 win was, but for his critics it’s even more of a shock. Trump has been impeached, arrested, convicted, shot at, and relentlessly demonised as a ‘fascist’ over the last four years. None of that was enough to stop him. Just the opposite: Trump is more popular than ever, and appears to have won a national majority of the vote for the first time. Just how this happened is a question that will be analysed for weeks and months, or years, to come. But one intriguing possibility suggested by exit poll data is that multiculturalism committed suicide. Trump

Matthew Lynn

Why the market reaction to Trump 2.0 has been muted

Truth Social rocketed. Bitcoin soared in price. The dollar rose, and bond yields were up, while Chinese equities wobbled. Over the course of last night, as it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election, the markets responded to the news. The trouble is, no one really knows what Trump 2.0 means for the global economy. Investors will have no idea until he forms an administration in January The initial price moves were very obvious. With the backing of the main crypto tycoons, a Trump White House will be a lot friendlier to digital currencies, although even that had to be kept in perspective. A 7 per

Ross Clark

The reason Kamala Harris lost

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, watching the mood change in the BBC’s election studio has been delicious. It was like a New Orleans funeral in reverse – a carnival turning a corner and transforming into a wake. This was supposed to be a historic night. But then it wasn’t just the BBC. The liberal media have been at it for days. There was supposed to be a last-minute surge in support for Kamala Harris, driven by record turnout of women coming out to fight for their rights. The idea that American voters would be steered by anything other than their own personal economic circumstances was foolish This was pure

James Johnson

Why Donald Trump is winning

Trump is headed to the White House. As I write, that is the consensus of almost all political experts, including the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, who puts Trump’s chance of victory at greater than 95 per cent. Trump is set to pick up at least one – and possibly all three – of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It is not confirmed yet, but it looks likely Trump will win all seven swing states. Cohn also projects a Trump lead in the popular vote, by 1.2 points. That would be the first time a Republican has won the popular vote since George Bush in 2004. There will be many postmortems

Kate Andrews

Donald Trump is set to win the presidency

In the run-up to the US election, it was expected that the count could take days, possibly a week. Now, it looks like the 2024 election will be decided in a matter of hours. Swing states North Carolina and Georgia have been called for Donald Trump. Fox News reports that the most crucial swing state in this election – Pennsylvania – has been won by Trump. The surprise Selzer poll from over the weekend, showing Kamala Harris three points ahead in Iowa, proved badly wrong: Trump has won the state. The Republican candidate is now only a few electoral votes away from clinching the presidency. The prediction market Polymarket at

Steerpike

Watch: Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell baffled by Trump’s victory

Donald Trump is on course to win the US election – and it’s safe to say that Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell aren’t thrilled about the news. On a livestream of their Rest is Politics podcast, Stewart – who earlier this week said he hadn’t ‘changed my mind on Kamala Harris winning comfortably’ – struggled to process the news that the US election was far closer than he may have hoped. Stewart suggested that Trump’s success in winning the two key swing states of North Carolina and Georgia was difficult to comprehend given how good the Democrats’ ground game was during the campaign: ‘When a result happens, you rewrite history.

Kate Andrews

Election night: early signs suggest it’s Trump’s to lose

21 min listen

Results are coming in across the United States, and the early signs (though it is still very early) look good for Donald Trump. At the time of recording, the betting markets are with him and the famous New York Times ‘Needle’ has swung to a ‘likely’ Trump victory. It is still much too early to call in an election that could drag on for days to come. No media outlet has called it for either candidate yet. To give you the latest updates from the States, Kate Andrews is joined by The Spectator’s team on the ground: Amber Duke is in battleground state Michigan; Matt McDonald joins from Washington DC,

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Wednesday