Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
When the Intelligence and Security Committee’s (ISC) Russia Report was finally published last week, the name of one person who gave evidence will have leapt out for many people. Among the ‘external expert witnesses’ listed was none other than a certain ‘Mr Christopher Steele, Director of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd’. Steele, you may remember, was
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As the long-awaited Russia report is released this week, we discuss Russia’s plan to unleash chaos (00:45). Plus, does Boris Johnson have a management problem with his new MPs? (14:30) And last, the pains of dating during lockdown (28:30). With Russia journalists Owen Matthews and Mary Dejevsky; the Spectator’s deputy political editor Katy Balls; Conservative
‘The expected recession will hit young adults hardest,’ BBC presenter, Jonny Dymond, said on ‘The World This Weekend’. Almost half the programme was then given over to the dire future that awaits the UK’s 18-24 year olds, with the prospect that a million of them could become unemployed. The latest ‘Weekend Woman’s Hour’ offered a
It had to be. We were barely into the first week of the coronavirus emergency than the Prime Minister and others started invoking the ‘Blitz spirit’. You know, that incomparable time soon after the start of world war two when Brits stood firm and united against the worst that Nazi Germany could hurl at our
Whatever your feelings about Brexit, this day, 31 January, 2020, will be seen as a point in history. It is the day that the UK left the European Union after nearly half a century and set out, once again, on its own. While we may have been through more than three years of parliamentary wrangling,
Every November the London based foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House, awards a prize for ‘the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year’. This year, the joint laureates were Sir David Attenborough and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit for the television series Blue Planet II. It is a
Last week, Boris Johnson made a last-minute change to his itinerary in the West Country after protesters from Extinction Rebellion and others had gathered outside a bakery he had planned to visit near Glastonbury. The visit, it was reported, had not been publicised, but word had nevertheless got out. The Prime Minister swerved off to
The central proposal in Damian Green’s recent paper on social care is that care provision should be treated like pensions. In ‘Fixing the care crisis’, he argues that everyone should be entitled to ‘a decent standard of care’ funded by the state – in the same way as they are entitled to a state pension
If, as looks likely, Petro Poroshenko loses his bid for re-election as President of Ukraine, he will have gone out in style. On Saturday night, the eve of the vote, his home town staged a huge public concert at the venue he created and sponsored: a state-of-the-art sound-and-light fountain complex just a short walk along
It is cold, dank and muddy and I’m contemplating a barely defined path from the paved road into an ever-darkening wood. I should have brought a torch, but I didn’t, and before the light fades completely I need to find the ‘idyllic’ woodland burial ground I have shortlisted as a possible resting place for my
It is just a week since Theresa May used her Mansion House speech to launch a broadside on Russia. During a wide-ranging survey of the international horizon, it was Russia she singled out for special criticism and it was her Russia attack that attracted (and was surely intended to attract) the headlines. Just a reminder
The plane landed a fraction early, at just after 9 p.m. Hope flickered that passport control would be as deserted as the echoing arrivals terminal. But no. By the time we reached sight of what is now labelled in enormous letters the ‘UK Border’, we had joined a mass of humanity in a single corridor to
There is much to be faulted in Uber, which has branched out from delivering people into delivering meals, under the unappetising name UberEats. But even I, someone who can rarely bring herself to write the word ‘sharing’, as in economy, without inverted commas, am prepared to give credit where credit is due. Uber has made
Town halls and unringfenced government departments are feeling the pinch, but one corner of British public life is conspicuously flush. Visit almost any university in the land and you will find a small city bursting with Portakabins, scaffolding and cranes. If you dare to raise your eyes from the mud puddles, you will see vast
Who controls the media in Britain? Depending on your political outlook, you might answer: the Conservatives, the liberal-left chattering classes, Rupert Murdoch or the BBC. But if the coverage of the elderly is anything to go by, then we can perhaps agree on one thing: the headlines are decided by a cohort of 25- to 45-year-olds
What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of
In the few days since Conservative defector Douglas Carswell gave Ukip its first Westminster MP and John Bickley scared the pants off Ed Miliband by almost snatching Heywood and Middleton from Labour, there has been much talk of a broken mould and a new age in British politics. listen to ‘John Bickley: ‘If there was
To judge by much of the western media coverage in recent days, you would have thought that Vladimir Putin had spent last Thursday sitting in the Kremlin, plotting how to blacken his image in the West even further, before settling on the brilliant idea of getting some clueless proxies to blow an international airliner out
Regret suffuses the post mortem on many a conflict, with hindsight recommending alternatives that were far less obvious at the time. Crimea is different. Rarely can the fateful choices — those critical forks in the road — have been so evident as those that have led Russia, Ukraine and the West into this conflict. A
Yad Vashem, Israel’s vast Holocaust memorial complex, dominates a hillside above Jerusalem, surrounded by bare rock and pines. Vast though it is, it manages to be both harrowing and restrained; both rooted in the times it commemorates and thoroughly modern — not just in style, but in the way it harnesses the most advanced technology
