World

Alexander Larman

King Charles offers his support to Zelensky

This weekend marks perhaps the most turbulent 48 hours that Ukraine’s President Zelensky has ever experienced – and, given the events of the past three years, that is saying an awful lot. After his already notorious reception in Washington at the White House in Friday, and rather more emollient greeting by Keir Starmer in Britain yesterday, he has now visited Sandringham to see King Charles after attending a summit of European leaders at Lancaster House. Doubtless he is running on a mixture of adrenaline and righteous anger at his enemies – whether those of long standing or more recently acquired – but he is almost certainly in need of reassurance

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starmer has his work cut out bringing peace to Ukraine

Keir Starmer today attempted to make the debate about Ukraine’s future one primarily held by Ukraine and European countries. This came after Donald Trump had suggested at the end of last week that it was for the US and Russia to decide. In his press conference after the summit of European leaders in London, the Prime Minister said work was now beginning on a deal to end the war with Russia, led by European countries to then be discussed with the US to ‘take it forward together’.  He also dismissed suggestions that the US was an ‘unreliable ally’, and suggested that America was at least not opposed outright to the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Starmer’s summit is high stakes for Zelensky

There is only one story dominating the news this weekend following Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting on Friday with the US President in the Oval office. After the Ukrainian president’s conversation with Donald Trump and JD Vance descended into a war of words, Zelensky’s trip to the White House was cut short and a planned minerals deal between the two countries went unsigned. Now the future of the Ukraine war has been thrown into doubt as talk grows that the US could halt all military help and a deal could be off the cards. The hope will be that European leaders can come up with a united response Since then, there

Edward Howell

Can South Korea fix its birth rate woes?

Month after month, it just kept plummeting. The South Korean birth rate last year earned the not-so-holy prize for being the lowest in the world. The demographic crisis faced by South Korea seems hardly the hallmark of the country’s self-proclaimed status as a ‘global pivotal state’. That said, the country’s fertility rate rose incrementally to a high of 0.75 births per woman in 2024, marking the first time in nine years that any such uptick has been seen. It is too early to say whether the tide is turning. Nevertheless, South Korea faces an unholy combination of an ageing population (with the over 65 year-olds accounting for 20 per cent

Ukraine

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Trump: To help Ukraine, Europe must help itself first

Fresh off the back of a summit with Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington, the President of the United States granted The Spectator’s US Editor-at-Large Ben Domenech an exclusive interview in the White House. One of the most pressing topics discussed by Starmer and Trump was support for Ukraine in its efforts to resist Russia’s invasion – and America’s threat to throw in the towel as Europe’s peacekeeper. It was time for Europe, Trump told The Spectator, to step into the breach. Trump’s inability to resist promoting the superiority of American support for Kyiv aside, he is correct ‘They have to step up, but they also have to get equipment,’ the President said. ‘They

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What will Zelensky’s fate be?

Kyiv We resemble pilgrims. Because of the war, no one can fly to Ukraine, and so we travel, romantically, by night train. ‘We’ means assorted European dignitaries, a thin sprinkling of Americans, and the media. I find myself sharing a cabin with a former president of the European parliament. The holy day is Monday, the third anniversary of the Russian invasion. We emerge, yawning and crumpled, into the sub-zero dawn. The collective object is to show our devotion to Ukraine’s struggle. This year, our numbers are swollen because of Donald Trump. (In a Polish service station near the border I noticed a magazine cover in which his face is superimposed

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

What does Trump’s minerals deal mean for Ukraine?

Has Donald Trump’s heavy-handed negotiation style scored a win, or have the Ukrainians managed to wrench a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat? Although the details are still unclear, Kyiv and Washington are confirming that a deal on mineral rights has been agreed, and that Volodymyr Zelensky will be on his way to the White House on Friday to sign on the dotted line. Trump has abandoned his ludicrously overblown demand for a $500 billion (£400 billion) return on what has actually been no more than $120 billion (£95 billion) given in total aid, through revenue from Ukrainian oil, gas and rare earth metals. Zelensky had understandably rejected

China

America

Europe

Daniel Thorpe

Is the Kurdish PKK about to lay down its arms?

On Thursday, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) called on his organisation to lay down their arms and dissolve themselves. If they comply, this would put an end to a decades-long conflict with the Turkish state that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 people. The statement was delivered in a crowded press conference in Istanbul by members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy party (DEM). The call appeared to be more or less unconditional. One of the speakers at the end of the conference added that ‘in practice, of course, the laying down of arms and the PKK’s self-dissolution require the recognition of democratic politics

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Merz is caught in a defence spending trap of his own making

It’s not just in Britain that defence spending is top of the agenda. In Germany, too, the debate has turned to how the government can resurrect the country’s hollowed-out armed forces. Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU and the man pipped to become the next chancellor, is driving the discussion. But unlike the grudgingly positive response Prime Minister Keir Starmer has received for pledging to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP over the next two years, Merz is blundering his way into an almighty row – and possibly a constitutional crisis.  The final vote in Sunday’s federal election had not been fully counted before Merz, whose

Henry Donovan

Russia is the big winner in Germany’s election

The real winners of Germany’s election are sitting in Moscow. Despite Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) technically claiming victory with a meagre 28 per cent showing, the truly remarkable surge belongs to the openly pro-Russian forces that now dominate the political landscape. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the far-left party Die Linke (successor to East Germany’s communist SED) have emerged from this record 85 per cent turnout election with unprecedented strength: both unapologetically aligned with Vladimir Putin’s interests and fundamentally opposed to Germany’s Western orientation. That this Russification of German politics coincides with the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels less like coincidence and more like

Yesterday

Nicholas Hopton

Will the Gaza ceasefire collapse?

The end of February, which coincides with the start of Ramadan, was meant to mark the conclusion of the initial exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, rather than engaging as planned on what should happen, how, and when in the second phase, the ceasefire appears to be stalling and the parties sliding inexorably towards stalemate or renewed conflict. So far, the ceasefire that started on 19 January, the day before President Trump’s inauguration, has defied the expectations of many. The conflict in Gaza stopped and more deliveries of humanitarian aid were allowed to reach displaced and desperate Palestinian refugees. Twenty-five Israeli hostages

James Snell

The troubling truth about ‘witchcraft’ in modern Britain

Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, are returning to Britain. We might think of witchcraft as a thing of the past; sadly, this isn’t the case. In multicultural Britain, folk practices like witchcraft and sorcery are more common than you might expect. Alongside the practice of witchcraft, there is also its opposite: accusations that others, particularly children, are witches, or demons, or possessed by spirits. In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments have been linked to false accusations of witchcraft. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments connected to witchcraft, according to research carried out by the National FGM Centre. An accusation of witchcraft

Elisabeth Dampier

Why even parts of Berlin are moving right

‘Berlin is more East than West’, said Thilo Sarrazin. A member of the centre-left SPD, in 2010 he published Germany Abolishes Itself, a book which warned about the impact of mass immigration. It sold over one million copies in a year but it went down less well with his own party, which tried to kick him out for writing the book. In 2020, after three attempts, the party finally succeeded, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Over the course of those ten years, the SPD’s grasp on Berlin, which they had ruled since reunification, slipped away from them, as mass immigration not only changed the country but also its politics.

Friday

Jawad Iqbal

Zelensky made a fatal mistake in going toe-to-toe with Trump

What possessed the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump in a verbal wresting match in the White House? It makes almost no sense as a diplomatic strategy. It is well documented that the US president, notoriously thin-skinned and egotistical, likes to be showered with compliments and treated as an all-knowing, all-seeing master of the political universe. All that Zelensky was required to do was behave in a simpering manner while the cameras were rolling, before moving on to the substantive negotiations behind the scenes. Indeed, only 24 hours earlier, Sir Keir Starmer provided a useful primer on how to go about pandering to Trump in order

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump: Joe or Hunter Biden left cocaine in the White House

Back in 2023, when Joe Biden was President of the United States, there was something of a drugs scandal in the White House, when the Secret Service found a gram of cocaine in the West Wing. An investigation was launched, but while Secret Service officials trawled through their security systems and indexed ‘several hundred’ people who entered the White House, they were unable to identify a suspect. There was ‘insufficient DNA’ on the bag in question and an FBI lab was unable to retrieve any fingerprints. A mystery indeed. Who could have left the cocaine there? It’s clearly something that has been on Donald Trump’s mind since he’s returned to

Robin Ashenden

Is Trump Putin’s useful idiot?

Those whose mouths have been left hanging open by Donald Trump’s pivot towards Russia in the past fortnight, and the ruthlessness with which the Ukrainians (and Europe) have been thrust off the stage, haven’t been paying attention. The love-in between the two leaders has been going on now for a decade. It started properly in 2015, when the foreplay between the two ‘strongmen’ was conducted, like so many great flirtations, at a coy distance. Trump told CBS network he and Putin would ‘probably get along… very well,’ while Putin, to show willing, responded that Trump was ‘a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt.’ Trump, eyelids-a- flutter, schmoozed back that

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The BBC’s reputation is in tatters after its Gaza debacle

The BBC’s admission of serious editorial failures in its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is not just a scandal – it is a moment of reckoning. This is, without doubt, one of the most humiliating debacles in the corporation’s modern history, and it vindicates those who have long highlighted the BBC’s institutional biases when reporting on Israel. The implications of this controversy go far beyond journalistic failure; they touch on issues of public trust, financial accountability, and even national security. At the heart of this disgrace is the BBC’s failure to conduct even the most basic due diligence. That the narrator of the film – a child carefully chosen to evoke

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Matthew Parris, Ian Buruma, Hermione Eyre and Francis Young

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood reads his letter from the Vatican (1:17); Matthew Parris warns Conservatives from embracing causes that could lose them as much support as they would gain (7:31); reviewing Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Ian Buruma argues that the atomic bombs were not only immoral, but ineffective (15:35); Hermione Eyre examines the life and work of the surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun (23:03); and, Francis Young provides his notes on Shrove Tuesday (29:12).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starmer’s press conference with Trump was a triumph

Keir Starmer could not have dreamed of a better press conference with Donald Trump. Much of its success was not down to luck, either: the Prime Minister has meticulously prepared for these talks both in terms of substance and (very important) superficialities such as flattering the President. But instead of appearing to be a sycophant who just says whatever Trump wants to hear, Starmer ended up looking as though he was the one in control of the relationship. The President came into the press conference telling journalists that Starmer is a ‘very tough negotiator, however I’m not sure I like that, but that’s OK’. It was exactly the kind of

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

The case for climate humanism

28 min listen

Robert Bryce, an energy expert and author of The Question of Power, discusses the state of global energy, electric vehicles, and government policies both in the UK and America. Freddy and Robert look at how government subsidies and mandates have driven automakers toward unprofitable EV production, what is energy humanism, and how foreign interference has shaped climate policies over the past decade. 

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The true meaning of Trump’s AI Gaza video

Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of Gaza – complete with golden statues of himself, bearded belly dancers, and a triumphant song declaring, ‘Trump Gaza, number one!’ – landed like a slap across the face of polite Western discourse. The reactions were swift and predictable. Outraged commentators called it tasteless, delusional, the fever dream of a man obsessed with his own mythology. Newspapers mocked its crudeness, its cartoonish spectacle, its lack of realism. Yet, in all the ridicule, something crucial was missed. This wasn’t just Trump being Trump. This was Trump speaking Arabic again – not linguistically, but in the deeply symbolic, visually driven language of Middle Eastern power. The video was not a policy

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Chagos – the riviera of the Indian Ocean?

Keir Starmer seemed on unusually good form as he arrived in Washington last night. He cracked quite a good joke about the United Kingdom’s new ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a charismatic statesman lurking behind the Prime Minister’s dreary exterior. We shall see. At any rate, assuming no bizarre media blow ups in the coming hours, the odds are that the Trump-Starmer meeting today will prove to be a success. Despite his reputation, Trump tends to like people, especially British PMs (he tried and failed with Theresa May) and reports are that he responded well to his long first telephone call with Sir Keir last month.

Georg Löfflmann

How to fix Germany’s broken army

On 27 February 2022, three days after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was a historic turning point, or Zeitenwende, for European security. Scholz promised to transform German foreign and defence policy, and substantially modernise and rearm Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr. A key element of the Zeitenwende was the creation of a €100 billion special fund for an immediate increase in defence spending, as well as the promise to meet Nato’s target of spending 2 per cent target of GDP on defence by 2024. Two years on, with the dawn of the second Trump administration, it seems that Zeitenwende was only the

Colin Freeman

Ukraine wants its nuclear weapons back

Kyiv Had America and the Soviet Union ever fought the battle of Armageddon, it would have started from beneath a patch of muddy fields a few hours’ drive south of Kyiv. It’s here, in an underground base near the once-closed town of Pervomaisk, that Moscow housed 80 strategic nuclear missiles, all pointed at the US. Today it’s a museum, a dark tourism excursion, with a 120-foot long ‘Satan’ missile on display. Satan carried 10 warheads plus 40 decoys, and could have single-handedly flattened Britain. The only disappointment, for the Dr Strangeloves among us, is the base’s ‘nuclear button’ – not a red switch with a skull-and-crossbones, but a dull grey

Paul Wood

The strange beauty of the vigil for the Pope

Steady rain during the day stopped just before Monday’s evening prayers for Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square. A line of cardinals sat on a platform, an ageing politburo in black and scarlet. A couple of thousand of the faithful and the curious stood below. Vatican gendarmes, wearing kepis and carrying sidearms, directed people to their places. The Swiss Guard were not on duty. Their gaudy, striped uniforms would anyway have been too exuberant for the occasion, a tenth night in hospital for the Pope, dangerously ill with double pneumonia at the age of 88. Floodlights illuminated the great baroque façade of the most famous building in Christendom. Cobblestones glistened;

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Foreign aid cut, Pope in hospital and King pulls a pint

Home Before flying to Washington, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We have to be ready to play our role if a force is required in Ukraine once a peace agreement is reached.’ He told the Commons that Britain would raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of national income by 2027, funded by cutting development aid from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of GDP. The government surplus for January, when much tax comes in, was £15.4 billion, the highest ever, but far below the £20.5 billion predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Average household energy bills will rise from April by £111 to £1,849 a

The Spectator

Keir Starmer’s welcome embrace of realism

Sixty-five years ago, a British Prime Minister acknowledged that a new world order was coming to pass and that it was time to lay down a burden the country could, and should, no longer shoulder. Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town signalled the eclipse of empire, the retreat of Britain from imperial pretensions and a new age of nationalism in Africa. Today, our own Prime Minister has trimmed his sails to catch a very different wind of change. He is navigating a new path – necessitated by the impact of Storm Donald from across the Atlantic. Sir Keir Starmer has indicated that Britain is willing to bear

Douglas Murray

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? 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

Wednesday

Michael Evans

Why Macron is offering France’s nukes to Europe

President Emmanuel Macron has raised the nuclear card. He has offered to provide nuclear cover for Europe as fears intensify that President Trump is moving further away from Nato and from America’s historic obligations towards European allies. The idea of France, the fourth largest nuclear weapons power in the world, extending its nuclear deterrence is not new. Macron is just one of many French presidents who have contemplated providing a European dimension to France’s force de frappe. However, today the context is dramatically different. For the first time in Nato’s history, the US sided with Russia and not its European allies when the Trump administration refused to condemn Moscow for the