All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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
It hasn’t taken 20 years to work out that Christopher Hitchens was a dud, but this week’s collapse of Kabul obliges us to reexamine the Hitchens back catalog — because Hitchens had an outsized influence on debates about the supersised errors of post-9/11 foreign policy. The briefest of looks exposes the deficits of the neoconservative mind. An
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With Parliament being called back from recess tomorrow, including the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab who maybe stayed on the beach a touch too long given the worsening circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan. Isabel Hardman talks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls about just what we may hear tomorrow.
For a government to break a manifesto commitment is a serious matter which, quite rightly, is sure to rebound at the ballot box. But there is one commitment in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto which has simply got to go: the promise to maintain the ‘triple lock’ on pensions which sees the basic state pension increased
Matt Hancock’s hot girl summer continues unabated. The West Suffolk MP was last week snapped frolicking on the beaches of Cornwall, surfboard in hand, a month after being forced to resign for breaking Covid rules with advisor Gina Coladangelo. Now Steerpike can report that the 42-year-old has become an unlikely star on TikTok after recently
When Eton master Will Knowland was sacked last year over anti-feminist views contained in a YouTube video which he refused to take down, alumni and others rightly called out Eton’s small-mindedness and intellectual conformism. If the best-endowed schools in the land can’t stomach unorthodox opinion, what hope for UK education generally? They were, of course,
The Taliban retaking Kabul has been inevitable for almost the entirety of the 20 year war, and certainly since Barack Obama announced the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011. And yet the manner in which Kabul has fallen, with images of despair and the Taliban’s unopposed march to the presidential palace, heralds a global
‘Everyone is getting out – and fast’, the man tells me over a crackling line. He is tired, clearly subdued. A UN staff member, he was in Afghanistan until very recently and is still trying to process what happened. ‘We knew this was going to happen,’ he continues, ‘but everyone was caught by surprise at
Last week’s arrest of a security guard employed at the British embassy in Berlin, on suspicion of spying for Russia, serves as a stark reminder that the UK and its allies are in the thick of a new Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of communist
Once the British left fought for civil rights, social justice and the brotherhood of man. But now such high principles have been discarded in favour of less grandiose battles, judging by the shenanigans of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs. The group, established by Tony Benn’s supporters in 1982, boasts the backing of 33
The efforts of a 20 year war took only a few weeks to overturn: the Taliban has completed its takeover of Afghanistan. As parliamentarians return to Westminster on Wednesday to discuss the situation, the focal point of the debate should be damage control. One of the major challenges will be restoring deterrence. The withdrawal of
Cabinet office minister Michael Gove has put his £2.25 million west London home on the market. The house, which has a black painted door just like the real No. 10 in Downing Street, is described by estate agents as a ‘big boned period house’ that ‘oozes style’. While Gove may not longer be part of the Notting
Among America’s self-described foreign policy ‘realists,’ there is a common trope according to which the best way for the United States to get its allies to do more is to show them some tough love – particularly by doing less. That theory has just been put to a test in Afghanistan. It has failed spectacularly.
When America decided to save Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban, it acted on two major beliefs. The first was that the US had the might, the tech and the ability to reshape Afghanistan — what could a superpower have to fear from a ragtag bunch of insurgents? — the second was a belief
The papers have been full of speculation this month about rumours of a rift between Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson. The pair are reported to have clashed over travel quarantine rules amid speculation about Sunak’s designs on the top job. Such tensions are nothing new in Westminster politics of course – not for nothing has
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With Kabul now taken back by the Taliban and the Americans in full retreat after two decades of war, what will the USA learn from this catastrophe, if anything? Freddy Gray talks to author of After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, Andrew Bacevich about the goals not met, allies abandoned and lives