Donald trump

Thursday

Simon Kuper

Always the Superbrat

John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to the great man himself. John Sr, who is tennis-mad, has a request: can he come with his son to a veterans’ tournament in Belgium? McEnroe is horrified. Having dad around is a major drag. ‘I was about to say absolutely not,’ he writes — when his old rival Björn Borg, who happens to be dining with him, interjects: ‘Let me speak to him.’ Borg, who had lost his own father three years earlier, tells McEnroe Sr: ‘Don’t worry, JP, if John doesn’t bring you to Knokke-Heist, I will.’ The story

Thursday

Taki

High life | 29 June 2017

A major Greek ship owner, whose political knowledge matches his wealth and business acumen, explained to me what the Qatar brouhaha is all about. My friend Peter had the foresight to invest in liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, among the most expensive of ships to build but big-time money-makers. Why is it that it takes a major ship owner to tell us what’s really going on? Forget the bull put out by American hacks, whose minds no longer seem to function — at least since Trump’s triumph last November. Here goes: we sat on my terrace in Gstaad under the stars, watched the mountains turn from grey to dark blue,

Thursday

John R. Bradley

An unholy alliance

Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk named Abed al-Hamid Hakim. The subject was the blockade of Qatar imposed by the Saudis and a couple of other despotic Sunni Arab rulers to punish the country for its ties to Iran, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. It obviously wasn’t what Hakim had to say — religion should not be used to justify violence and extremism; we should all try to live in peace and harmony — that aroused interest. Rather, it was where he was sitting when he said it: Jeddah, the commercial capital of Saudi Arabia. For

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Harry Potter and the millennial mind

Which Hogwarts house would you be in? There are four options, and everybody fits into one. The brave and chivalrous are put in Gryffindor. Patient and loyal types head to Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw is for the witty and intelligent. The cunning and ambitious — and potentially evil — are destined for Slytherin. In the Harry Potter books, a pugnacious talking hat, known as the ‘Sorting Hat’, carries out the selection. If you are like me and under 35, you probably didn’t need that explaining. Almost every young person who can read has read Harry Potter — 450 million copies have been sold worldwide. Not to do so was an act of

Anthony Cummins

The evil that men do

Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as he arrived for work at an abortion clinic in Florida. Unrepentant by the time of his execution nine years later, Hill (who I really don’t recommend Googling) was associated with the Army of God (ditto), which urges the murder — or ‘justifiable homicide’ — of abortion providers in the United States. Given how often Joyce Carol Oates’s awesomely prolific output concerns male violence and women’s bodies, it’s no surprise to find her using this as material; with Trump vowing to undo Roe vs Wade, it’s timely. By turns icily subtle

Thursday

Taki

High life | 15 June 2017

I was busy explaining to a 23-year-old American girl by the name of Jennifer why the election result was not a disaster. She is a Spectator reader and wants to work in England, preferably in politics. She called the result the worst news since her father had abandoned her mother. I begged to differ. Actually, it was a far better result than it would have been had the Conservatives won a majority of 100, I told her. She gasped in disbelief, but soon enough she was hooked. Do not be alarmed, dear readers. I have not taken LSD. Nor am I suffering from populist-nationalist rage at global elites and starting

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 June 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, spent the week confronting the consequences of the general election that she had called to bring ‘stability and certainty for the future’. It had instead surprisingly left the Conservatives with no overall majority. They won 318 seats (a loss of 13) and Labour 262 (a gain of 30). The Scottish National Party won 35 (a loss of 21), with the Conservatives gaining 12 extra seats in Scotland, even capturing Stirling. Labour won an extra five seats in Scotland. Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, lost his seat, as did Alex Salmond. Nick Clegg, the former Lib-Dem leader, lost his seat, but Sir Vince Cable won

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Corbyn copy

Since the election, Jeremy Corbyn has been parading himself as prime-minister-in-waiting. ‘Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome,’ he tweeted this week, ‘especially after his attack on London’s Mayor and withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal.’ The message was clear: unlike ‘Theresa the appeaser’, Jeremy is willing and able to tell that climate change-denying Islamophobe across the water to get stuffed. Jez we can, Jez we can. There may be another reason why Corbyn is glad to think that Trump might not come to these shores, and that’s because the more the British see of the dreaded Donald, the more they might recognise how much he and the Labour leader have in

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

It won’t be long before Republicans finally turn on Trump

Forget Russia. Georgia, as the song has it, should be on Donald Trump’s mind. A special election for the House of Representatives takes place there on June 20. The state’s 6th district congressional seat has been comfortably in Republican hands for decades. A hitherto obscure Democrat by the name of Jon Ossoff is leading by seven points in the polls and has raised a record 24 million dollars. He is thirty-years old and has never held office before. In 2013 he earned a Master of Science degree from the London School of Economics. If he wins, Republicans across the nation will be profusely mopping their brows in anxiety. An Ossoff triumph would

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 8 June 2017

By the time you read this, the campaign will have drawn fractiously to its close, so here is a strong overall impression drawn from it, which stands whatever the result. Watching a large number of debates and question and answer sessions with party leaders and the public, I noticed, even more insistent than in the past, the righteous tone of the recipient (or would-be recipient) of state money. Whether it was a teacher or health worker, a person on benefits, a young woman wanting her tuition fees paid, or an old man sitting on a house worth (say) £750,000 and demanding that the state bear his putative long-term care needs

Paul Wood

Big trouble in little Qatar

 Washington DC At 8:06 on Tuesday morning the Tweeter-in-Chief reached for his Android phone and told the world: ‘During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!’ At 9:36 a.m. we heard from @realDonaldTrump again. ‘So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding… extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!’ The US President was showing his support for an

Friday

Rupert Darwall

Donald Trump is right to ditch the Paris Agreement

Yesterday’s announcement by Donald Trump that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is truly historic. The Paris accord was the closest the Europeans had come to getting the US to accepting timetabled emissions cuts in the now quarter century saga of UN climate change talks. The first was in the 1992 UN climate change convention itself, rebuffed by George H.W. Bush; the second was in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by the Clinton Administration, effectively vetoed by the Senate and repudiated by George W. Bush. Now, Donald Trump has dashed their hopes for a third and possibly final time. It’s understandable that the European reaction is one of fury

Thursday

Taki

High life | 1 June 2017

I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne — all great buddies — and now my oldest and closest friend, Aleko Goulandris, dead at 90. Mind you, they all had very good lives: plenty of women, lots of fun, accomplishments galore, and many children and grandchildren. And they all reached a certain age — what else can you ask of this ludicrous life of ours? Well, I won’t be writing about the high life this week, but scum life instead. And I’ll tell you why: those innocent young children slaughtered by that Islamist scumbag in Manchester, that’s why. Those sweet young lives deserved better,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 1 June 2017

Home The Conservatives grew restive when polls, for what they were worth, indicated a closing gap between their support and Labour’s. In a generally uneventful 90 minutes of television, in which Theresa May, the leader of the Conservative party, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, were questioned, Jeremy Paxman said to Mrs May: ‘If I was sitting in Brussels and I was looking at you as the person I had to negotiate with, I’d think, she’s a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.’ Mr Corbyn said in an earlier interview with Andrew Neil: ‘I never met the IRA,’ leaving viewers wondering in what sense this

James Walton

Heaven knows they’re miserable now | 1 June 2017

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in common, with one set in a determinedly present-day Britain, the other in a dystopian American future. What they do share, though, is a general air of classiness, some impressively understated central performances and, above all, an almost heroic commitment to unrelenting misery. In the first episode of Broken (BBC1, Tuesday), a typical scene consisted of single mother Christina — who’d just been sacked from her badly paid job and told she was ineligible for benefits — reluctantly selling off her wedding and engagement rings, before returning home to find her

Paul Wood

The madness of King Donald

 Washington DC Trump is a fighter – he seems to thrive on pressure – and he is lawyering up The panhandlers outside the White House hold signs saying: ‘Trump is President — saving to leave the country.’ Those signs will have to be updated if Trump’s enemies are right and the 45th President is driven from office by a scandal called ‘Putingate’. Inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump is said to be in a fury about the allegations that he is Russia’s pawn. Washington is gripped by rumours of a president sitting up in bed at night, a cheeseburger balanced on his stomach, raging at the television news. He does not,

Saturday

Philip Mansel

The kings are holding court again

A hundred years after the Russian revolution, Russia has a tsar and a court. Proximity to Putin is the key to wealth, office and survival. The outward signs of a court society have returned: double-headed eagles, the imperial coat of arms, the cult of Nicholas II (one of whose recently erected statues has ‘wept tears’), an increasingly wealthy and subservient Orthodox Church. In 2013, ‘to strengthen the historical continuity of the Russian armed forces’, the main honour guard regiment in Moscow was renamed Preobrazhensky, after the oldest regiment of the Imperial Guard, founded by Peter the Great in 1683. A statue of St Vladimir, founder and Christianiser of the Russian

Thursday

Peter Jones

The Nero in Trump

Donald Trump, whose word no one can believe and actions no one can anticipate, looks to blame anyone but himself for the chaos of his administration. The result is an inability to attract staff and a deep paranoia among those already in White House trying to work under him. But how to withdraw from serving such a man without recriminations? Seneca, the philosopher and adviser to Nero, took the view that entering politics was honourable as long as there was no good reason not to, and suggested that no state could be so bad that a man could not serve it at some level or other. But when the Trump in

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 May 2017

Home  Twenty-two people were killed and 59 wounded by a man who blew himself up, with a bomb containing metal fragments, in the foyer of Manchester Arena as crowds were leaving a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande, aged 23, who has a strong following among young girls. Of the wounded, 12 were children. Police named the suspected murderer as Salman Ramadan Abedi, aged 22, a Mancunian whose family come from Libya, which he had recently visited. Isis said it was behind the attack. A 23-year-old man was arrested the next day. The official threat level was raised to ‘critical’, meaning that an attack was expected imminently. Soldiers were

Taki

High Life | 25 May 2017

New York Although both guilt and innocence fascinate me, I’m not so sure that there is such a thing as redemption. I know, it sounds very unchristian, but there you have it. For me bad guys remain bad, and good guys ditto. I didn’t make it to the memorial service for either Rupert Deen or Alexander Chancellor, my first editor — two friends not known for feeling too guilty, nor for their innocence, come to think of it. I’m still in the Bagel and need to stay here because at my advanced age I’m finishing the last part of a TV show, or perhaps film, as yet untitled about two