Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator

Ron DeSantis just isn’t presidential material

Sans Trump, the Republican presidential debates of 2023 have mostly been piddling contests in a shallow pool. We’ve seen nasty insults — most aimed at or directed by Vivek Ramaswamy — and that’s fun to watch. But you can catch those bits on social media and the rest hasn’t been worth tuning in for. Maybe

The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in

‘The party of abortion’ is winning

Not so long ago, Republicans called Democrats the ‘party of abortion’ as an insult, or a pre-election attack line. Now, it is the Republicans, as the party against abortion, who are losing. This is a grim reality for Americans who believe that the unborn deserve protection.    Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the

Not even America’s legal system can stop Trump

‘I beseech you to control him if you can,’ Justice Arthur Engoron told Donald Trump’s lawyer in court yesterday. To which the only sensible reply is: ‘Good luck with that.’  Nobody can control, or stop, the 45th President – least of all, it seems, the legal system. The trials of Trump will drag on and on in

The banality of Elon’s chat with Rishi

It was hard to enjoy Rishi Sunak’s sit down with Elon Musk on stage at Lancaster House last night. It was hard to hate it, too. We saw two men, two different types of nerd, talking about how artificial intelligence can be good or bad, and how science fiction is a useful guide to this coming

Kamala Harris’s brain-dead AI plan

Try to think of leading names in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Kamala Harris is probably not the first that springs to mind. The woman can barely talk. But she is Vice President of the United States of America and as such she’s in London, about to give a speech ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big

Joe Biden’s Middle East diplomacy is a wreck

Joe Biden prides himself on his decades of foreign-policy experience, his ability to talk tough yet be kind, and his talent for bringing opposing sides together. Touching down in Israel today, he gave Bibi Netanyahu a big hug – quite the gesture – and promptly told him he believed that ‘the other team’ – i.e.

The Republican party is a mess

In comparison to the Republicans in the United States, the British Conservative party is a model of unity and discipline. In Manchester this week, for all the blather about Nigel Farage and ‘pandering’ to the far right, the grumbling about nanny-statism and HS2ing-to-nowhere, the Tories held themselves together.  Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, a small group

Emergency on Planet Biden

‘If aliens attacked Earth, do you think we would be safer under Joe Biden or Donald Trump?’ That’s a question in a new poll of American voters, and 43 per cent of respondents opted for Trump, 32 per cent for Biden, while 25 per cent sagaciously picked ‘Don’t know’. It’s fun to imagine President Donald

Freddy Gray

Americans care less and less about Trump’s legal troubles

Another day in America, another judgment against the Trump family. In the latest, New York state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron has ruled that the Trump Organisation is liable for ‘persistent and repeated fraud’ and stripped the 45th president’s family business of its operating licenses in the Empire State.  At first glance, it appears to be a devastating piece of news

It won’t be long before Russell Brand releases his first show on X

It’s only a matter of time before Russell Brand, backed as he is by Elon Musk, releases his first show on X. I say that because YouTube has just announced that it has ‘suspended monetisation’ on Brand’s channel for ‘violating’ something it calls its ‘creator responsibility policy’. Brand has 6.6 million followers on YouTube, which makes

Does Joe Biden need a conservatorship?

America’s wacky Libertarian party, which sadly never gets anywhere in presidential elections, has just filed a petition to put Democratic President Joe Biden, 80, and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, under ‘conservatorship’. The Libertarians claim that America’s ‘geriatric elites’ are evidently unfit for public office and need, for everyone’s sake, to have all decision-making

Is Joe Biden really running again? 

Will President Joe Biden be on the ballot in the presidential election of 2024? It’s a question that Biden seemed to answer four months ago when he announced, in an online video, that he would be running for re-election next year. ‘Let’s finish this job,’ he said. ‘Because I know we can.’  Three-quarters of Americans

Trumpvision: He’s making America watch again

It was hardly a surprise when Donald Trump said last weekend that he would not be participating in the televised Republican candidate debates. ‘New CBS POLL, just out, has me leading the field by “legendary” numbers,’ he declared on his very own Truth Social platform. ‘The public knows who I am & what a successful

Will America eventually tire of Trump’s legal troubles?

In our age of mass attention deficit, the manifold legals trials against Donald Trump represent a big challenge. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to care when you can’t keep count. The whole objective of ‘lawfare’, as it is called, is to bully your enemy into submission through overwhelming paperwork. It might work. That doesn’t

What’s gone wrong for Ron DeSantis?

It’s widely acknowledged that, as governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis has been a success. As a presidential candidate, however, he has been a disaster – at least, so far. Last weekend, amid reports that his bid for the White House was floundering, DeSantis sacked a dozen of his staff and scaled back his travel plans.

Joe Biden’s Hunter problem will not go away

Shall we play a game of pick the real criminal? Come on, it will be fun. On the one hand, we have a 77-year-old man, a former president and a billionaire, whose Gollum-like greed caused him to hoard various boxes of classified documents which he should have returned to the proper authorities. He, or his

America is trapped in Trump legal groundhog day

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that’s true, then what the American justice system is doing to Donald Trump is barking mad.  Yes, he’s been indicted, again – on seven federal criminal charges. It’s all unprecedented, again – he’s the first president ever to face,

Harry’s crusade: the Prince vs the press

Self-pity is one hell of a drug. On Tuesday, a day late, Prince Harry appeared in the High Court to ‘give evidence’ against the Mirror. The only testimony he was willing to provide, however, was his familiar gloop about the pain he suffered growing up rich, famous and royal. He can’t help himself, poor boy,