World

Thursday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Why Jeremy Corbyn is being feted by the French left

Into the three-ring circus of the French legislative election campaign has stepped Jeremy Corbyn. The papi magique arrived on the Eurostar last weekend to campaign for candidates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose insurrectionary ultra-left campaign is threatening to deny the recently re-elected Emmanuel Macron a presidential majority in the parliament. First round voting is on Sunday. A runoff will be a week later. Those tempted to overlook the continuing appeal of Mr Corbyn and dismiss him as a political has-been or even an unreconstructed Marxist clown, would perhaps have been startled to see him mobbed by adoring fans in Paris. Corbyn was feted as a red prince from over the water.

Aidan Hartley

The real reason Africa can’t feed itself

Northern Kenya Claims that Vladimir Putin is stoking famine in Africa is a compelling red herring, which also exposes inconvenient truths about why people are going hungry in the world’s poorest continent yet again. For sure, the Russians are holding up 22 million tons of Ukrainian wheat, have bombarded grain terminals, blockaded shipping and disrupted farming. But that’s still a tiny percentage of global harvests and, though the challenges are great, crops like winter wheat are growing and there are other routes to export via Ukraine’s neighbours. When the African Union’s chairman Macky Sall met Putin in Sochi last week, he urged the lifting of western sanctions on Russia’s own

Owen Matthews

How Russia is holding Ukraine’s wheat exports to ransom

Starvation is a weapon as old as war itself. But Vladimir Putin has put a perversely postmodern twist on the ancient stratagem. Instead of menacing his Ukrainian enemy with hunger and poverty, he is threatening the whole world. Putin has long used oil and gas as a political instrument, most recently cutting off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria in retaliation for their refusal to pay their bills in roubles. But it is Putin’s blockade of the export of Ukrainian wheat that could prove just as effective in Russia’s war of weaponised commodities. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce 30 per cent of the global wheat exports. Ukraine is the world’s sixth

Anshel Pfeffer

Is a return to power in Netanyahu’s grasp?

Jerusalem ‘Netanyahu’s coming back soon, and he’ll be back with a vengeance!’ Simcha Rothman’s eyes flashed as he made his bold prediction. The normally mild-mannered lawyer, an ultra-nationalist Knesset member, was convinced. ‘He’s coming back and it’s all the left-wing’s fault for demonising him. If it wasn’t for them, the right-wing would have found a different leader by now. But the left made him into an icon and much more dangerous.’ Will Rothman be vindicated soon? It’s been a year since Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, was forced into opposition by an eclectic coalition of parties united only by their determination to keep him out office. At 72,

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Welcome to the age of post-Covid nihilism

Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist made national news after he shot two boys at a gas station who were trying to lift his car. In Chicago, 1,900 vehicles were jacked just last year, which is eye-wateringly high even by that city’s grim standards. There is an inhumanity at work in this country that’s as stark as anything I’ve seen in

Oleksiy Pluzhnyk

Why Ukrainians like me still love Boris Johnson

When Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s president Zelensky walked through the streets of our capital in April, they came across a man. Astonished and emotional, he begged Zelensky:  ‘Please tell Boris that we will be grateful for the rest of our lives. Britain saved us. God, I’m so happy…My children and grandchildren will remember this forever. This memory will live through the centuries.’ These words sum up how many Ukrainians feel. For all his troubles at home, Boris Johnson remains more popular in Ukraine than many of our own politicians, with the possible exception of Zelensky himself. During the first day of the war, shocked and bound by fear in the face of

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Nigeria’s Christians are relentlessly under attack

Dozens of Christian worshippers, including several children, were killed in a gun raid on a church in Nigeria’s Owo town on Sunday. Initial estimates place the death toll at around least 70 parishioners but that number is set to rise, given that the church in question, St Francis Catholic Church, has one of the largest parishes in the southwestern state of Ondo. Nigeria is experiencing an epidemic of terror attacks. Over the last six months, gunmen have killed 48 in the northwestern Zamfara state, massacred over 100 villagers in Plateau state, and raided trains and buses leaving dozens dead and hundreds missing. At least 3,000 Nigerians were killed and 1,500

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The EU’s phone charger rule will stifle innovation

Who could argue with the words of the EU’s internal market commissioner Thierry Breton when he says: ‘a common charger is common sense for the many electronic devices in our daily lives’? No longer, it seems, will we have to fiddle around with several different cables, and curse when we have brought the along the wrong one on holiday. M. Breton has just succeeded in introducing a directive which, from 2024, will oblige the manufacturers of all electronic devices on sale in the EU to use the same model of charger. The directive – yet to be rubber-stamped by the European parliament – will ‘increase convenience and cut waste’, as well

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

Estonian PM: When will Macron stop talking to genocidal Putin?

Alongside Britain, Estonia has been among Kyiv’s staunchest allies in its efforts to repulse Putin’s forces, delivering more military equipment to Ukraine since February as a portion of GDP per capita than any other country in the world. Kaja Kallas, its prime minister, is in London today and spoke at her country’s embassy. She took questions on a range of topics and didn’t hold back – especially when it came to Emmanuel Macron. Kallas was very much singing from the same song-sheet as Kuleba when she effectively accused Macron of appeasing genocide He has tried to position himself as a mediator between Putin and the west throughout this conflict, only

Sunday

Steerpike Steerpike

Does Macron have a police problem?

Things are spicing up over in France. Not content with tear-gassing British children, the Parisian gendarmerie seem to be turning on their own disgruntled citizens.  Last night passengers at Paris’s Gare de L’Est scrambled to get aboard a replacement bus after a train broke down at the station. Instead of trying to shepherd irritated travellers into orderly queues, the French police instead decided to fire off pepper spray into the crowd. People can be seen reeling after having been sprayed with the chemical agent, usually reserved for out-of-control rioters rather than frustrated commuters.  This is starting to look like a real problem for President Emmanuel Macron. Last week’s authoritarian policing at

James Snell

Germany’s stinginess is betraying Ukraine

Bafflement is not quite the right word. Instead, Ukrainian officials and their allies now see Germany through a confused form of anger. Things started out well. Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, and in response to international condemnation, Germany did the following, against type: It halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, placing it more thoroughly in the palm of Russian fossil fuel suppliers; it committed — for the first time since reunification — to spend more than 2 per cent of its giant GDP on self-defence, per year, in perpetuity; and it announced a €100 billion investment to rearm, beginning that instant. The most moving speech

William Cook

The timeless mystery of Charlie Chaplin

Eleven years ago, I was summoned to the Manoir de Ban, a huge white house overlooking Lake Geneva, to meet Michael Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s oldest surviving son. Charlie Chaplin had lived here for the last 24 years of his life. Now the house was empty, and the family wanted to turn it into a museum. I doubted it would ever happen, but I was keen to look around the house and I was eager to meet Michael. Chaplin’s biographer, Simon Louvish, had called him ‘the family rebel’. Michael had written a frank teenage memoir called I Couldn’t Smoke the Grass on My Father’s Lawn. The house was all shut up,

Terry Barnes

Why did the new Australian PM insult the Queen?

Timing is everything in politics. This week in Canberra a new junior minister, an obscure Australian Labor Party MP named Matt Thistlethwaite, was sworn in by the Queen’s representative, Governor-General David Hurley. His portfolio: Assistant Minister for the Republic. A minister of the Crown sworn to bring about the demise of the Crown in Australia. When Australia’s new strongly left-wing prime minister and admiring friend of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Anthony Albanese, announced his government would include a minister dedicated to making Australia a republic, his timing was calculated and deliberate. Albanese’s appointment is disrespectful, distasteful and poorly judged The Labor party which has been fervently republican ever since a

Saturday

Helen Rappaport

Russia, Ukraine and the forgotten exiles of the 1920s

At the end of 1920, a mass exodus of Russians from their homeland after the Russian civil war created a humanitarian catastrophe. ‘Never in the history of Europe has a political cataclysm torn such huge numbers of people from their mother country and their homes’ remarked émigré journalist Ariadna Tyrkova Willams. In the West there were widespread concerns about how European nations would cope with the massive new influx of refugees. Today, a century later, the war in Ukraine has prompted an equivalent number of politically disaffected Russians to leave their country – in barely half that time. History seems to be repeating itself. And the great exodus of Russians

Daniel DePetris

What if the Ukraine war is never won?

In late March, roughly a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unnamed Nato official told NBC News that the conflict was turning into a meat grinder for both sides. ‘If we’re not in a stalemate, we are rapidly approaching one,’ the Nato official said at the time. ‘The reality is that neither side has a superiority over the other.’ Sure enough, a month and a half later, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘stalemate’ is exactly what is occurring. ‘The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning, and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,’ Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director

Benedict Rogers

What the Tiananmen Square massacre teaches us about Xi’s China

As millions of Brits celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, others will be gathering outside the Chinese Embassy in London to mark a different event: the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Beijing has done its best to wipe this day from the history books, but it’s vital we don’t forget an event that has foreshadowed the direction the Chinese Communist Party has taken in the years since. 33 years ago on the streets of China’s capital, we saw the true nature of the Chinese regime as it turned its guns and tanks on thousands of peaceful protesters. ‘They were shooting, people were running, and people tried to rescue others,’ said Jan Wong,

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The Queen is one Brit Macron can warm to

He may not have much respect for the ‘Clown’, but when it comes to the Queen Emmanuel Macron is as smitten as his compatriots. With political relations between France and Britain at their coldest for decades, and Macron reportedly regarding Prime Minister Boris Johnson as more suitable for the circus, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has provided the French president with an opportunity to warm up his rhetoric. In a video address to Her Majesty published on Thursday, Macron praised the constancy of the Queen’s Francophilia throughout her 70 years on the throne. ‘Times have changed, Europe has evolved, our continent is again experiencing war,’ said Macron. ‘Through these transformations, your

Thursday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Macron vs the deep state

French diplomats are on strike today. But will anyone notice? Not to be immodest, I am especially well qualified to comment on French diplomacy. Some time ago, between gigs in Washington DC, I was employed as a consultant by the French embassy there. The embassy is a modern building in Georgetown, conveniently near all the best restaurants, although the food at the embassy itself was both fabulous and cheaper than McDonalds. The wine list was, obviously, exceptional. I was not allowed to see deeply into the embassy’s most sensitive operations (there was a mysterious wing that seemed to be entirely occupied by spooks) but must admit that in the scientific

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What’s going on with the Russian economy?

The Russian economy is headed for its deepest recession since 1991. That’s the British government’s latest assessment of whether sanctions are successfully, in the words of Liz Truss, ‘choking Putin’s war machine’. As the West’s most effective non-military tool for putting pressure on the Kremlin, sanctions have been under the microscope from the beginning: are they working? Are they targeting the right people? Could they actually benefit Putin’s regime? Indeed, just last month it was reported that Russia had doubled its fossil fuel revenues since February, by some accounts raking in as much as €62 billion (approximately £53 billion), benefiting from global prices driven skywards by the sanction-induced shortages. By

Robin Ashenden

Why Georgia is going mad for Ukraine

Georgia seems to have gone Ukraine crazy since the outbreak of war in February. Taxi drivers have the Ukrainian flag on their dashboards. Takeaway coffees come in blue and yellow paper cups with ‘Glory to Ukraine’ written on them. Medicines come in blue and yellow bags. There are Ukrainian-coloured scooters for hire in Tbilisi and written on the huge city metro telescreens are the words ‘Be Brave like Ukraine’. There is so much glory for Ukraine in Georgia you wonder whether the Georgians have any left for themselves. They might well argue, however, that the two things are inseparable. In a recent interview, the Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili described Ukraine