Politics

In early January 1997, I met my boyhood hero. It was in the grounds of his wintry dacha outside Moscow. A man in late middle age, though still sprightly, he wore a padded anorak against the cold and a dark patterned scarf. Snow lay fat on the bony branches, with more softly falling. His boots creaked over the frost on the pathways as we wandered and chatted: me in my broken Russian, he in his easily recognisable, gentle southern accent. It had been five years since he had signed away the Soviet Union at a pen stroke, and a little longer since he had been de facto discarded from genuine

The Ukrainian armed forces launched a long–awaited offensive on Kherson this week. However, the counter-offensive was signalled for so long by both Ukrainian and western sources that the Russian army had plenty of time to significantly reinforce its positions there, meaning that the Kherson front is now more heavily manned by Russian troops than most other stretches of the frontline. Ukrainian government sources have requested a total blackout of media reports from the frontlines so exact details are sparse. But what is clear is that the Russian movement of forces has already had two positive effects for Ukraine, even before the actual counter-offensive operation was launched. The first has been

Readers must understand how the jargon of political chicanery has corrupted journalism if they are to make sense of the coming Truss premiership. Unless you grasp the slippery, new meaning of ‘pivot,’ media coverage will leave you clueless. To give you a taste of what is to come try this sentence from the Politico website. Liz Truss may have to ‘pivot away once the battle for members’ hearts has been won’. Pivot? Is our next prime minister a machine part that will bend the body politic with the prevailing wind? Or try this from the Independent: ‘Therein lies the truth about the coming pivot… The only question is how skilfully she

France is home to roughly half-a-million Jews. The country’s Jewish community is the largest in Europe, and the third largest in the world behind Israel and the United States. You might assume then that Jewish life in France is flourishing. But you’d be wrong. Over the weekend, news broke of the murder of Eyal Haddad, a Tunisian Jew living on the outskirts of Paris. What happened is still shrouded in mystery: the family’s lawyer denied earlier reports that the victim’s body had been burned and that the perpetrator had confessed to killing Haddad over a 100 euro debt, and because he was Jewish. But what we do know is this: Haddad was killed with

Whoever wins the Tory leadership on Monday will face a mountain of problems from day one. War, inflation, spiralling costs and a mutinous party: the in-tray will be veritably groaning. One issue that won’t perhaps be at the top of the list will be the future of the Prime Ministerial TikTok account: 10downingstreet. Officials have spent the past 11 months running the account, uploading videos of Boris goofing around to the page’s 292,000 followers. His presumptive successor though takes a rather more dim view of TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance has been criticised for its ties to Beijing. During the course of one leadership debate, Liz Truss said with regards

How do you solve a problem like Jean-Marie? That is dilemma facing Marine Le Pen as her National Rally party prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of its creation next month. The party has evolved a great deal in that time, especially in the decade since Le Pen succeeded her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of a party that for most of its existence has been known as the National Front. The rebrand to the National Rally occurred in 2018, the most significant action taken by Marine Le Pen in her bid to leave behind the malodorous legacy of her father. The former paratrooper launched the National Front on 5 October