In 2010, Nick Clegg made a fateful intervention against nuclear power. On the eve of becoming deputy prime minister, the then-Lib Dem claimed that building new reactors would take too long: they wouldn’t “come on stream” until about 2021 or …
Annexation has always haunted Canada
“It is her own soul that Canada risks today.” Rudyard Kipling’s cable to a Montreal newspaper was an explosive intervention in the country’s 1911 election, which turned on a familiar question: should Canadians submit to the “economic force” of the …
Why Iran needs foreign journalists
It doesn’t make much difference if it was hostage diplomacy or old-school press trampling — or, as now seems clear, the tit-for-tat response to the detention of an Iranian in Italy. He, it turns out, was accused of supplying drone …
Is Trump the most libertarian president ever?
It’s unusual to have a single figure, Donald Trump, dominate the political life of a country for a decade — and for nobody, really, to have any clear definition of his core political philosophy. For much of that decade, Democrats …
Trump’s return to the Monroe Doctrine
With just over a week to go to his inauguration, Donald Trump is already sabre-rattling. It is, he said, an “absolute necessity” that America annexes Greenland. “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but …
China’s stooges: the real Covid conspiracy
The World Health Organisation ended 2024 by reminding us that it is five years since it discovered a virus was sweeping through the Chinese city of Wuhan. These were the first signs of the pandemic that went on to destroy …
Lessons in antisemitism from the NEU
Perhaps the clues were always there. When the “national education union” was formed in 2017, it dispensed with the rules of grammar for its new image. Capital letters, typically used for proper nouns, were dispensed with in its logo. This …
How Justin Welby hollowed out the Church
Most media comment about Justin Welby has naturally focused on the safeguarding lapses that triggered his downfall. What of the wider landscape? In big-picture terms, his 12 years as Archbishop of Canterbury involved a reprise of George Carey’s Evangelical vision …
Elon Musk: neo-feudal prince
In a surreal cascade of events, the internet personality Andrew Tate has launched a political party. He has done this seemingly in response to a resurgence of interest in the scandal of Britain’s predominantly Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs”, as these …
Who’s funding DC’s pro-war think tanks?
Last year, the US Commission on National Defense Strategy published its final report, creating intense buzz in Washington. “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945,” the report warned. …
Trump is starting an oil war
Has Donald Trump been reading Don Quixote? Last week, the incoming President warned the UK that it was making “a very big mistake” by raising tax on North Sea oil. His solution? “Get rid of windmills.”
It was classic Trump, …
Why we can’t escape the Victorians
Charles Dickens never used profanity, despite publishing several million words of prose. It’s exactly the sort of titbit that makes us imagine history was much the same: that before the 20th century, there was never any swearing, nor much sexiness, …
The vapid world of America’s top book influencer
“Hi, I’m Zibby Owens, host of Totally Booked With Zibby, formerly Moms Don’t Have Time to Read. I interview today’s latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As …
Jean-Marie Le Pen poisoned French politics
21 April 2002 was a watershed date in post-war French politics. Turning on their televisions that evening, the French public heard the startling news that Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National — a party boasting a former member …
Why the police ignored the rape gangs
The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. …