All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Many Labour supporters are quietly allowing themselves to celebrate: if Liz Truss does win the Tory leadership, a Labour government, they think, is much more likely. It may well be so. Among the general public, Truss is on many measures the least popular of the last three Conservative contenders who fought it out last week.
What is America? The answer to that simple question can get you into a lot of trouble. Or it can propel you to the Oval Office. You can try to run away from the question with adverbs. ‘Well, historically, America was the name a European mapmaker slapped on the unexplored continents across the Atlantic.’ Maybe
13 min listen
Isabel Hardman speaks to Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Matthew Parris about the influence Margaret Thatcher exerts over the Conservative leadership race.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke magnanimously while receiving his Hungarian counterpart Péter Szijjártó in Moscow this week. He promised that the Kremlin would ‘consider’ Hungary’s request for significantly increased gas deliveries, after Viktor Orbán’s right-hand man said his country won’t manage without more Russian resources as Europe faces a deep-freeze this winter. It’s hard
Could Russia triumph? There’s a growing sense that, as the months wear on, Ukraine’s resistance is faltering. The West is losing interest in the conflict and the unthinkable is being said: Putin is winning the war on and off the battlefield. The image of countless hordes of Russian troops grinding down the Ukrainian defences with a
The combination of ’40°C temperatures’ and ‘England’ feels about as natural a pairing as ‘English football’ and ‘winning’; God simply did not intend the two to go together as they did this week. And although it feels odd to have to point it out, there’s nothing conservative about believing climate change isn’t a problem. Turning
If the chaos of recent weeks in British politics has clarified anything, it’s the almost complete schism between Conservative MPs and the party’s members. That Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have made it to the final round of the Tory leadership contest, ahead of their more popular rivals, paints the Conservatives as a party that no longer
Vladimir Putin’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the start of the Ukraine war was supposed to project power. Instead the Russian president appears to have been left red-faced at a summit in Iran this week after his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, left him waiting in front of the TV cameras. For
Russian president Vladimir Putin has always enjoyed trolling European leaders. As relations between Moscow and Berlin deteriorate over reduced natural gas supplies and Ukraine-related sanctions, Putin is now brazenly gaslighting his German counterpart, chancellor Olaf Scholz. But it’s a move he could come to regret. Putin suggested this week that Germany should give the shelved Nord
Liz Truss may have been a Remainer but she has learned the political lesson of the EU referendum in the way that her genuine Brexiter opponent has seemingly failed to do. The point is that in today’s milieu, and especially with an electorate of 160,000 largely Brexit-supporting Tory members, power is with the insurgent. In
Rishi Sunak’s big pitch this weekend is to grip the NHS waiting list crisis. It makes political sense, given the terrifying size of these lists now, with some trusts declaring their waits ‘unmanageable’. By the time of the next election, the crisis in the NHS is going to seem monstrous. Ethical concerns tend to end
HSBC was being more than a little disingenuous when it claimed on Thursday that Communist party cells don’t have much influence on the businesses in which they are installed. Try telling that to Xi Jinping, under whom the CPP has extended its tentacles into every aspect of nominally private businesses in China. The British bank
If there’s one thing that gives a bad name to gender stereotyping it’s the Disney princess: a combination of hideous synthetic fabric and a noisomely winsome concept. And yet the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques at Disney Parks are popular with families as a place where their offspring can get dressed and styled as their favourite Disney
Could a general of the SBU, the security service of Ukraine, really have helped Russia take the city of Kherson? Could a colonel have tipped off the Russians as to where the Ukrainians had lain mines north of Crimea? The Ukrainian government certainly appears to believe that fifth columnists within the SBU have been Moscow’s
A collective sigh of relief went through Berlin this week as Russia resumed its gas deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after a scheduled ten-day maintenance break. But even with the immediate crisis averted, Germany remains palpably jittery: it is unclear whether it will have enough gas to get through the winter. Threats from Vladimir Putin
One of the key dividing lines of the current Tory leadership contest concerns economic policy. The gap between the candidates is not actually very large, but of course political arguments often magnify small differences. And in this case there quite an important philosophical difference that could have significant consequences over the longer-term. Broadly speaking, Rishi
44 min listen
Freddy Gray talks to the CEO of Truth Social, Devin Nunes, about the new network as it launches in the UK, and whether the owner Donald Trump will be seeking to launch himself back into the political arena.
Most Tories are focusing on the leadership race but for some there are other concerns. Take the five MPs who last year were sanctioned by the Chinese state. Tom Tugendhat, Neil O’Brien, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nusrat Ghani and Tim Loughton were among a group of nine UK citizens to face sanctions in March for
This afternoon Kyiv and Moscow signed a UN-backed agreement to free up at least 20 million tons of grain from blocked ports. Ukraine said it would not sign a deal with Russia directly, only with Turkey and the UN. As Wolfgang Münchau noted this morning, it marks the first successful mediation between the two sides
Queues stretching back for several hours. Children going crazy in the back seat. Cars breaking down in the heat, and holidays thrown into chaos by delays at the terminal. Anyone who imagined that they were making their lives easier by avoiding the airports and driving to continental Europe this summer will have had a nasty
The death of Ivana Trump last week reminded me of a story I had always meant to check. I rang its central figure, Sir Humphry Wakefield, who was forthcoming. In the late 1980s, Ivana, then married to the man she called ‘the Donald’, was doing up the Plaza Hotel in New York, which her husband
16 min listen
Over the next few weeks, Conservative party members will cast their votes on who they want to be the next Prime Minister. YouGov has released another poll suggesting that members have placed Liz Truss 24 points ahead of Rishi Sunak. ‘This shows the difference between the parliamentary party from the membership at large‘ – Isabel
The congressional inquiry into 6 January’s storming of the Capitol is having a break. In its last prime-time hearing of the summer yesterday, the Committee – Donald Trump calls it the ‘Unselect Committee’ because none of his apologists are on it – gave him one more kicking. The Democrats have made a mistake in not
When Prince Harry and Meghan ‘stepped back’ as working royals, you’d be forgiven for thinking we would see and hear from them a little less. Not so. This week, the Duke of Sussex has repeatedly hit the headlines. Not content with delivering a stern (and far from well received) speech at the United Nations, in which he
Here’s a quick test: do you feel, in your bones, that we’ve entered into a new inflationary era or is this just a blip? If you feel we’ve entered into a new inflationary era, you are an economic conservative. You may believe in secular inflation thanks to the following: Brexit, trade wars, de-globalisation, Covid and
It’s a tough time for struggling families across the country. Inflation, price increases, a cost-of-living crisis and taxes going up. But one place where belts are remaining decidedly un-tightened is the editor’s office at the Guardian, where champagne corks have been popping at the latest company accounts. For Katharine Viner– the editor-in-chief of the progressive periodical
This piece is taken from The Spectator’s archive 40 years ago this week. At the time, Charles Moore was the magazine’s political columnist, aged 25 (he became editor two years later). Here, he writes about the importance of Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric, one year before her 1983 election win. Those who are paid to survey the wicked
Could masks be making us sick? That’s the suggestion in a Japanese study, published this week in Nature’s Scientific Report’s journal, which looked at bacterial and fungal growth on face masks worn during the pandemic. The results may put you off your tea. The study looked at the masks of 109 people and shows that
It’s been five weeks since Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 89 seats in the French parliamentary elections and thus far no one has goosestepped into the National Assembly. This has come a shock to the left who have spent a decade warning that a vote for Marine Le Pen’s party was a vote for
The opening of talks on a UK-Israel free-trade agreement (FTA) is a welcome development for both countries. The negotiations, launched by Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan in a meeting with Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely on Wednesday, follow a bilateral roadmap on cyber, tech and defence drawn up last year. As it stands, UK-Israel trade is worth
For now, Berlin can breathe a sigh of relief: after a ten-day shutdown for maintenance, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is back online. Russia is once again heating German homes, fuelling German industry, and using German money to finance its war in Ukraine. But this happy exchange may not continue; the pipeline is still operating
With two years to go until the next election, constituency battles are well underway across the country. Labour candidates are scrapping it out with one another for selection in winnable seats, with one such case being Chingford and Woodford Green. This London seat was just 1,263 votes off going red last time, with the added
