Every war has a photograph that captures its horrors. Vietnam had Napalm Girl; Spain had The Falling Soldier. How will the war in Ukraine be remembered? Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s ruthlessness, an image of a heavily pregnant woman being stretchered …
How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees
For the last three decades, Europe’s leaders have pursued a noble strategy to prevent conflict using trade, aid and diplomacy. But their reliance on soft power has had an unintended consequence: it has left them divorced from reality.
Soft-power tools …
What Boris Johnson must do next
In the bowels of Westminster, if reports are to be believed, you can hear the constant rumbling of letters of no confidence being submitted to Graham Brady. At least a dozen Tory MPs have gone public with their desire to …
What Can We Learn from Southend West?
Daddy Dragon’s Rally is in Warrior Square, Southend, opposite a blank-eyed Travelodge. It is a gathering of the English Constitution Party, which seeks secession from Britain, its oppressor, in support of its leader Daddy Dragon (or Graham Moore) in the …
Why Canada’s truckers will lose
The world does not usually pay much attention to Ottawa, Canada’s sleepy capital city. But over the weekend it generated international headlines. A “Freedom Convoy” consisting of anti-vaccine mandate truckers descended on the Canadian parliament to protest cross-border vaccine mandates …
Why the experts are losing
We tend to characterise totalitarianism as a top-down affair, where the state controls the thoughts and actions of its citizenry according to the whims of some politburo. But in the West today, the project of information control and narrative management …
Putin’s next move
A couple of weeks ago, in a biting sleet wind, I visited the graveyard of the tiny village of Bohoniki in Poland’s far north east, home to Poland’s minuscule Tatar Muslim minority, descendents of the Mongol Golden Horde. On the …