Max Jeffery is The Spectator’s online commissioning editor. He tweets at @MaxJeffery_.
Is that Monty Panesar? The old England spin bowler is stood in a crowd in Parliament Square, with a vacant, million-mile smile. George Galloway is standing in front, talking to the press. Galloway is meant to be revealing the 200 candidates that his new ‘Workers Party’ is putting up at the next election (Panesar is one of
‘Won’t you take me to… Funkytown!’ At around 10 p.m., in a bar under a railway arch in south London, members of a group called Youth Demand are doing the conga to 1970s disco music. They are celebrating a week of good protesting. ‘I’m sooo ketty!’ shouts a girl on the dance floor. (‘I’ve taken
Rob Stephenson is trying to produce a sonic representation of joy. He’s DJing on stage at the World Happiness Summit in London, pumping out a kick drum at 124bpm. The sound represents the subliminal satisfaction you get from a walk round the park, Rob says. He adds bongos and the dinging noise of a triangle
Greed is good again. It’s early Saturday morning in a glum and airless back room of a Holiday Inn in London. ‘Raise your hand if you’d like to make some money this morning!’ says Chloë Bisson, ‘#1 Bestselling Author, Multi-Award Winning Entrepreneur, International Speaker’. People go ‘yep’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘too right’ and put their
It’s mid-afternoon in the Royal Oak pub in Blackpool and Liv has arrived to sell a bag full of stuff she’s stolen from the supermarket. She’s got fabric conditioner, soap, Creme Eggs and a large bar of Dairy Milk. She pulls in a few pounds and then leaves to score some crack. ‘Everyone struggles,’ says
Tapa, Estonia In a pine forest two hours from Estonia’s border with Russia, preparation for war is under way. British, French, American and Estonian soldiers are rehearsing what Nato would do if Vladimir Putin invaded. They’ve brought Challenger II tanks, an F-16 fighter jet and Himars artillery systems – some of the best equipment the
The circus of American and European diplomats in Moscow loved Dmitri Trenin while he was on their side. Trenin was a former colonel in a Soviet intelligence agency. He became known in the early 2000s for writing books that argued Russia, diminished after the Cold War, should get friendly with the West by joining Nato and
There’s a new mantra in championship boxing. Try speaking to anyone from that world – a big-time promoter, trainer or fighter – and before you can get a word in, they’ll say something like: ‘I’d like to thank His Royal Highness King Salman Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and, of course, the chairman of
Walid Sharks is taking a nasty beating at the AO Arena in Manchester. It’s the second round of his fight against ‘Deen the Great’, and he has just been knocked down by a punch to the face. ‘His eyes are rolling right now,’ says a commentator. ‘He doesn’t know where he is!’ But Sharks doesn’t mind:
Hair combed and slicked, Mike Graham sits at his big shiny desk and waits on his cue. When his guest goes rogue backstage and starts swearing at a minion, it barely registers. He remains placid. Unruffled. It’s only his second week doing TV but Mike is in the zone. Three, two, one, zero. ‘Welcome to
Micah Goodman is done being nice and even-handed. He became a best-selling philosopher by telling Israelis that the Palestinians needed more freedom. He said if the West Bank had better roads and an airport and more land and fewer checkpoints, relations between Israelis and Palestinians would improve. There was a way through the stalemate, if
Gitanas Nauseda stood outside his palace and checked his watch. The Lithuanian President’s guests – the leaders of the other 30 Nato countries, VIPs from Europe and Asia, Volodymyr Zelensky – were an hour late for dinner. Nauseda idled on the red carpet with his wife, and the couple stared at the setting sky. An
Ben Wallace thinks Ukraine needs to be careful. The West has used a whole load of political energy this week to try and bring Ukraine closer to Nato, and its government’s response has been a bit unthankful. ‘There is a slight word of caution here,’ Wallace told a gaggle of reporters this morning, on the
Afternoon is boom time in Quang Tri, Vietnam. Fifty years since the war here ended, and they’re still getting rid of America’s mess. Frags, flechettes, Bouncing Bettys and cluster bombs are scattered unexploded across the country, ready for a farmer to run them over or a child to pick them up. ‘Deminers’ work with metal
US diplomat Brett McGurk is being teased again. In 2008, he was in Iraq, negotiating with Nouri al-Maliki’s government the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ that determined the withdrawal of American soldiers. At the same time, he was having an affair with a Wall Street Journal reporter. Emails between the pair were leaked a few years later when
‘Yalla! Yalla! Yalla!’ shouts a Saudi man. There are arms dealers, fixers, military men and gun geeks; tanks, assault rifles, mortars and drones. Jets do aerobatics overhead and a band plays Maroon 5. A Chinese robot dog bangs into delegates. Welcome to the International Defence Exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Business is booming. On
Saudi Arabia is a bit like us. It’s decent at football. It holds conferences to talk about things like ‘investing in humanity’. Bruno Mars is doing a concert there next week. But then again, 17 criminals have been executed in Saudi Arabia in the past two weeks. Many had their heads chopped off. Drains in the kingdom’s
Hadar Muchtar is angry because Benjamin Netanyahu has won a sixth term as prime minister of Israel and she hasn’t won anything. Her party didn’t get a seat in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and it’s the fault of brainless old people. ‘I think that the citizens are stupid and we’re going to pay for that’,
In the most violent region in the world, the West is realising that it messed up. Protestors in Burkina Faso throw Molotovs at the French, American-trained soldiers overthrow their governments, and Malians wave Russian flags. After a two-decade American deployment in the Sahel in Africa, the Pentagon has finally admitted that the area is getting worse. A paper
Is Britain ready to fight tomorrow’s wars? ‘Ish,’ answers James Heappey, the armed forces minister. Britain’s military is in an okay state, he says. But we need to spend more money on ammunition, medics and logistics systems. Our high-tech kit, the kind that helps us wage electronic warfare and collect data on our enemy’s positions, needs to be
