All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The hasty withdrawal from Kabul has inevitably been compared to the Fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. Pictures of a Chinook flying over the US embassy in the Afghan capital to pluck staff to safety did bear something of a resemblance to the airlift of 1975. But is the comparison fair?
This week Labour has been making much hay out of the Afghanistan debacle. Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy is all over the news berating Boris Johnson for not taking enough refugees, not being prepared for the collapse of the Afghan army and for not sacking Dominic Raab over his holiday shenanigans. There have, admittedly, been few actual policy suggestions
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Pressure on the Foreign Secretary is piling up after the Daily Mail revealed today that Raab had rejected the strong advice of Foreign Office civil servants to call his counterpart in the Afghan government before the weekend, to ensure the safe departure of interpreters from the country. Instead, his junior minister Zac Goldsmith took the
If politics is show business for ugly people, then parliament is the stage on which they shine. And since 2014 – when the first major Hollywood film was shot at the Palace of Westminster – Commons bosses have raised desperately needed funds for the site by charging media crews access to shoot here. Despite fears that such plans
Has the emergence of the Delta, or Indian, variant reduced the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and if so by how much? The fear that the Delta variant might be partially escaping our vaccines has often been expressed in recent weeks, especially given that highly-vaccinated countries such as Israel and parts of the US have suffered
In his ruthless demolition of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s new Churchill biography in last week’s Spectator, the historian Andrew Roberts pours scorn on the ‘insinuation that Churchill had fascist leanings in the 1920s’ as it is not supported by ‘any actual evidence (for there is none)’. Well, however justified his hatchet job of Wheatcroft’s book is in
To understand how Afghanistan is going to change in the future, you have to first understand what the ‘Islamic Republic’ established by the United States was like. Even before the Taliban took over, Afghanistan’s democracy had been deteriorating for some time, with three presidential elections in a row ending in bitter controversies over vote rigging,
Before the vaccine roll out, it’s easy to forget now how much faith was placed in NHS Test and Trace. Announcing the new system in spring last year, the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock lauded contact tracing, claiming it would enable an NHS clinician and the person with the virus to work together ‘like detectives’ to identify
When MPs returned to parliament on Wednesday to debate the situation in Afghanistan, it was Joe Biden who received the most criticism during the debate. But a close second in the firing line was the UK Foreign Secretary. After Dominic Raab waited until Sunday night to fly back from his holiday in Crete, opposition MPs were
As the debacle in Kabul unfolds, in Washington and London the mud slinging about who is to blame is beginning. British Generals are blaming ‘spineless Johnson and Biden’ and the ex military MP, Tom Tugendhat, contends that we should have stayed put. That the spectacular ending of Afghanistan’s brief interlude in ‘Western Liberalism’ appears to
‘Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan and it’s time to end the forever war’. So said Joe Biden earlier this year when he announced his decision to pull US troops out of the country. The scenes of chaos that have followed that departure makes it vital that this myth –
Scotland’s grim reputation for abnormally high drug fatalities has become embedded in the public consciousness over the past year. The fact that fake benzodiazepines (‘street valium’) can be procured for 50p a pill on the streets of Dundee and Glasgow is now common knowledge, as is Scotland’s unenviable place at the top of Europe’s drug
Today’s Commons debate on Afghanistan was unusually and surprisingly good. It had the benefit of speeches from many MPs who had themselves served tours of duty in the country, or were veterans of military action elsewhere. It had the advantage of a former Prime Minister speaking with all the authority of someone who knows just
Dominic Raab’s speech closing the Commons debate on Afghanistan provided a neat summary of the government’s response to the crisis: defensive, sketchy on detail and irritated by valid criticism. The Foreign Secretary’s name had cropped up repeatedly today in the chamber as opposition MPs slammed his decision to stay on holiday as the Taliban surged
After seven and a half hours, the House of Commons debate on Afghanistan has finally concluded. Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab will not have fond memories of the day. Keir Starmer, in front of a packed House of Commons for the first time in his leadership, delivered a respectable performance, replete with jabs at the
The situation in Afghanistan has suddenly dominated the debate in the middle of a sluggish German election campaign. Candidates to succeed Angela Merkel are having to declare their positions. Military intervention is out of the question without US backing. The question then becomes a repeat of the Syrian crisis: will Germany once again open its
Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?The President: No, it is not. Q. Why? The President: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable… Q. Do you trust handing over
An ounce of emotion, it has been said, is worth a ton of fact. Tom Tugendhat’s remarkable speech to the Commons today was delivered with a current of emotion – pathos, as scholars of oratory call it – that was all the more electric for its restraint. His jaw clenched and trembled; his voice, now
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This morning was the first time that we saw the chamber of the House of Commons full since the pandemic began. MPs were called back from recess to discuss the worsening situation in Afghanistan. Emotions and tensions ran high on both sides, some directed at the government, some at the Prime Minister and some at
Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, grief and rage. The feeling of abandonment, not just of a country but of the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals from Poole to Dunblane; I’ve watched good men go into the earth, taking with them
In the last decade or so, a sinister group of individuals from a range of organisations have spent their energies trying to rein in the free press. Specifically they try to stop the reporting of stories that might portray any follower of Islam in a negative light. So, for instance, when someone goes full ‘Allahu
If you’re an Afghan translator sheltering in a Kabul compound, life must seem pretty grim. The Taliban’s triumph has brought with it the restoration of sharia law – a throwback to when the movement ruled Afghanistan 20 years ago. The only difference between then and now seems to be their warriors’ concerted PR push, with journalists on the
Tom Tugendhat has just delivered what should be the defining speech of this recall of parliament. The Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee spoke in pin-drop silence about his own emotional response to the events in Afghanistan, about what he saw as the failure of world leaders, particularly President Biden, and about what must
Finally, some news to cheer us all up on this grim, relentless August. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been rendered ‘speechless’ by the news from Afghanistan and Haiti. No doubt, there’ll be no more Oprah interviews or birthday messages. And there’ll be no more lectures from Harry on the importance of imagining how
Boris Johnson has had a very uncomfortable start to today’s Commons debate on Afghanistan. Not only did he have a series of critical interventions from his own backbenchers when he was speaking, he then had to sit through an unusually powerful speech from Sir Keir Starmer. The Leader of the Opposition criticised the PM’s ‘careless
Boris Johnson opened the debate on the situation in Afghanistan to a packed house. With virtual parliament rules now gone, MPs on both sides crammed into the Commons Chamber to take part in the debate. But the large audience didn’t actually help the Prime Minister. In fact, it served to highlight the criticism the government
The chamber is packed in the Commons today for the first time in more than a year as MPs flock in to debate the collapse of Afghanistan. While many hold doubts about the impact such a debate will have – with one backbencher confiding to Steerpike that it was nothing more than a chance for
Screams for help are coming from Afghanistan, and echoing around the world. Mine comes from British consultancies and charities the UK government funded to run state-building projects in Afghanistan. As a fair number of Conservative politicians and activists read The Spectator, I am publishing them here in the hope that you will alert your leaders
We lost. Whatever hope we had that we could help Afghanistan crawl out of its misery has been shattered. The dreams of the 14 million women in Afghanistan or the tens of thousands of Kabul university graduates, who had grown-up after the expulsion of the Taliban, are now in ruins. Afghanistan has been broken again,
There are few fixtures in British politics these days but Larry the cat is one of them. The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office has become something of an ornament of the constitution, serving for a decade with distinction under three Prime Ministers and three Cabinet Secretaries. Residing in No. 10 Downing Street, the feline phenomenon is tasked
Over the last 15 years Germany has come to be seen by many in Europe as a paragon of political stability. Whereas other countries have suffered rising unemployment, unmanageable levels of public debt or a rising wave of far-right support, Germany’s perennial chancellor Merkel demonstrated that her talents as a political fixer were superior to
Christians in Afghanistan have been paralyzed with fear at the news that the Taliban has taken control of the country. Nadine Maenza, chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said the Taliban takeover ‘is the worst possible development for religious minorities. While most from these communities left Afghanistan in recent years, those that remain,
It may well go down as the understatement of the year. In a quite extraordinary address to the nation after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the US President made this admission: ‘The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled