What Europe gets wrong about the far right

The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect them to perform such a task? How can one explain the intricacies of supporting transgender opera among the Inuit in such short order?

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Happily, the new editor is not putting those of us on The Spectator’s payroll through any similar exercise. Nevertheless, something in the global vibe-shift perhaps impels me to mention a little of what I have been doing with my time. And the first thing that comes to mind is that while everyone else is swimming in a sea of acronyms, I might have something useful to say about the recent elections in Germany.

It has been my view for a very long time that most mainstream press coverage of politics on the European continent is pretty much bunk. I arrived at that realisation after a period of some years when I was in a different European country most weeks, meeting with politicians and trying to work out who was who. There was a time when a lot of the media did that: within living memory British tabloids had correspondents in all the major European capitals. But today even the broadsheets have gone over to impossibly wide-ranging roles like ‘Europe correspondent’, which is only marginally more useful than the BBC’s ‘Africa correspondent’.

Another problem is that the few outlets that aspire to actually cover politics in Europe are prone to a law of British journalism which must someday be analysed.