World

Friday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Meloni’s mission to ‘make the West great again’ will infuriate Macron

Giorgia Meloni met Donald Trump in the White House on Thursday and stated her ambition to ‘make the West great again’. The Italian prime minister is closer to the Trump administration than any other Western European leader, and later today in Rome she will host J.D. Vance. The American vice-president could be described as Meloni’s ideological soulmate, and it was noteworthy that when Meloni spoke of her ambition to reinvigorate the West she added: “When I speak about (the) West mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilisation, and I want to make that civilisation stronger.” This will be music to the ears of Vance This

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Katy Balls, Olivia Potts, Benedict Allen, Cosmo Landesman and Aidan Hartley

40 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Would Trump really bomb Iran, asks Paul Wood (1:38); Katy Balls interviews Health Secretary Wes Streeting on NHS reform, Blairism and Game of Thrones (8:38); Olivia Potts examines the history – and decline – of the Easter staple, roast lamb (18:25); the explorer Benedict Allen says Erling Kagge and Neil Shubin were both dicing with death, as he reviews both their books on exploration to earth’s poles (22:13); Cosmo Landesman reflects on what turning 70 has meant for his sex life (28:46); and, Aidan Hartley takes us on an anthropomorphic journey across Africa (33:55).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The plight of Nigeria’s Christians

The persecution of Nigeria’s Christians is medieval in its horror. Villages are surrounded in the dead of night by bandits who rape and kill the inhabitants. No one is spared: women and children are among those butchered. The Makurdi Diocese, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt Benue state, has been hit badly by this savage violence. In 2024, 549 locals in this diocese alone were murdered and dozens more kidnapped. Over 3,700 people in Makurdi have been killed since 2015. Villages have been effectively wiped off the map. Over a million Nigerians, terrified of what might await them, have chosen instead to live in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. Wilfred Anagbe, the

Zoe Strimpel

The trouble with Harvard

Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at Harvard became a blueprint for campus protests throughout the US, especially at Columbia, UCLA and the University of Michigan. These all-campus jamborees of Israel-loathing were looked on benignly, and sometimes even joined, by faculty that are otherwise easily angered by crimes such as using the wrong gender pronoun. Now, as threatened, Donald Trump is taking

Daniel DePetris

What will Trump do if the Ukraine peace talks fail?

With the war in Ukraine now in its fourth year, Trump administration officials, including Donald Trump himself, have spent the last month dialling their Ukrainian colleagues, jetting to foreign capitals to meet with Ukrainian and Russian officials and huddling with European ministers in an attempt to bring the conflict to a conclusion. The latest meeting happened this week, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, traveled to Paris for an all-hands session. Trump, however, doesn’t have much to show for his efforts. U.S. officials continue to put on a brave face and insist that Trump, and only Trump, has the knowledge, skill-set and experience to negotiate

Thursday

The Spectator

Watch: Douglas Murray on Israel’s plight and the plague of western guilt

On Monday evening, The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove and Spectator columnist and associate editor Douglas Murray sat down for a live event at the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster.  In front of a packed auditorium with 1,500 guests, they discussed the October 7th massacre; Douglas’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West; and the best and the worst aspects of the MAGA movement. This is a video exclusively for Spectator subscribers.

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Britain and France are too scared to tackle the migrant crisis

France has overtaken Germany as Europe’s top destination for asylum seekers. During the first quarter of 2025, France registered more than 40,000 applications, just above Spain (39,318) and Germany (37,387). This is a 41 per cent drop in German applications for the same period in 2024; Interior Minister Nancy Faeser attributed the fall to a ‘strong package of measures, Germany’s own actions and close European cooperation’. Germany has been Europe’s destination of choice for asylum seekers since 2011. The country was considered the most welcoming, in part because of the impression cultivated by the former chancellor Angela Merkel, who issued an open invitation to migrants and refugees in 2015. Successive

Nicholas Farrell

Can Giorgia Meloni sweet-talk Trump on EU tariffs?

We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D. Vance – a Catholic – on Friday, who is in Rome for Easter hoping to meet the Pope as well. Certainly, Meloni is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing Italy’s first female prime minister travels to Washington bearing the cross of the EU on her small but sturdy shoulders. For

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Putin’s cronies are enjoying needling the West

Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is in many ways an uncomfortable and ephemeral spy chief, but an enthusiastic information warrior. In recent talks with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, he accused Nato of threatening Moscow and Minsk by increasing the size and activity of its forces on the border – or rather, certain nations within the alliance: We feel and see that European countries, especially France, Britain and Germany, are increasing the level of escalation around the Ukrainian conflict, so we need to act pre-emptively. We are ready for this. Playing up a supposed ‘threat’ to Belarus is a way of threatening Poland and the Baltic

James Hanson

The case for chlorinated chicken

As a UK-US trade deal moves closer, an age-old fear is rearing its head once more: that Britain will be forced to accept imports of American chlorinated chicken. Ever since Brexit, politicians of all parties have decried the prospect. The Labour manifesto ruled it out and even Rishi Sunak promised farmers in 2023 that there would ‘be no chlorine-washed chicken… on the UK market. Not now, not ever.’ But here’s the thing: isn’t chlorinated chicken a small price to pay for a deal with our biggest trading partner? I have never understood the scaremongering that surrounds chlorinated chicken. First of all, washing poultry in chlorine-based solutions poses no harm to

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The biggest threat to Trump is Trump

Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per cent of Americans own stock; unsurprisingly, I do, too. A believer in the joys of denial, I’ve refused to even peek at my portfolio since the President’s ‘Liberation Day’. I guess not worrying my pretty head about my finances constitutes liberation of a kind. While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the

Toby Young Toby Young

Can Trump keep me on side?

I’m in danger of falling out of love with Donald Trump. I was ecstatic when he beat Kamala Harris, delighted with his flurry of executive orders, particularly the one entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’, and thrilled by his appointment of Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But his flip-flopping over tariffs and the resulting market turmoil has led to a smidgen of buyer’s remorse. At the end of last week, my pension pot was worth 10 per cent less than it had been a couple of weeks earlier. But then he does something that reminds me of what it is that I like about

Paul Wood

Would Trump really bomb Iran?

A satellite picture shows six American B-2 Stealth bombers parked on the runway at Diego Garcia. The planes – each with a distinctive flying-wing shape, like a bat – are sinister, otherworldly, and seem like a portent. Surely that’s the idea. Donald Trump has warned the Iranian leadership there ‘will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before’ if they don’t agree to limit their nuclear programme. The US is also sending a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East and anti-ballistic missile batteries to Israel. This is Trump’s ‘coercive diplomacy’, and so far, it’s working. In his first presidency, Trump resisted the war hawks, such as

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Only a US trade deal can save UK pharma from Trump’s tariffs

Forget whisky, cars or chemicals. The real blow to the British economy from President Trump’s determination to impose steep tariffs on everything the United States imports from the rest of the world is still to come. Over the next few days, Trump plans to unveil levies on pharmaceuticals. And if the UK can’t find a way of carving out an exemption from that, it will do huge damage to us at the worst possible moment.  For the moment, drugs are exempt from the 10 per cent blanket tariff on US imports, and the higher country-specific levies. That will change in the next few days, with President Trump promising to add

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is France too weak to stop the violent attacks on its prisons?

A wave of violence is sweeping France as gunmen attack the country’s prisons. In some cases, vehicles belonging to prison staff have been set alight and in other incidents bullets from AK47s were sprayed at the gates. In the eastern city of Nancy, a prison officer was threatened at his home. The violence began on Sunday evening and is ongoing: overnight three vehicles were set ablaze outside Tarascon prison in the Côte d’Azur region, and a fire was started in an apartment where a prison guard lives close to Paris. Graffiti was also sprayed on the wall. No one has been hurt but the coordinated attacks, carried out the length

Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands: 38 Londres Street – On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia

58 min listen

Sam Leith’s guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, whose new book 38 Londres Street describes the legal and diplomatic tussle over the potential extradition of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet. Philippe tells Sam why the case was such an important one in legal history, and presents new evidence suggesting that the General’s release to Chile on health grounds may have been part of a behind-the-scenes stitch-up between the UK and Chilean governments. He sets out some of that evidence and pushes back on our reviewer Jonathan Sumption’s scepticism about the case. Here’s an old case, but not yet a cold case. Produced by Oscar Edmondson

Pieter Cleppe

Is Brussels finally cracking down on NGOs?

Over in Brussels, a scandal has erupted over the role of ‘non-governmental organisations’, or NGOs, in European Union decision making. In a new report, the European Court of Auditors, the EU’s in-house financial watchdog, has criticised the European Commission’s ‘opaque’ monitoring of how EU funds are distributed to these organisations. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU dished out €7 billion to 90 NGOs through various funds, focused on environmental policy, migration or science. According to the Court of Auditors,  30 of these NGOs received more than 40 per cent of EU funds between 2014 and 2023 – some €3.3 billion. That may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to NGO funding. The auditors warned

Tuesday

John Foreman

Of course Britain’s military chiefs should be meeting with China

It’s quite something when the Chinese Ministry of Defence is more transparent than its British equivalent. Despite the Prime Minister on assuming office promising ‘transparency in everything we do’, a flying visit to Beijing last Wednesday by the UK chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, only emerged via a Times scoop a day later. Official silence from an habitually opaque UK MoD about the first such visit for 10 years ceded the information advantage to China, allowing it to paint a rosy, false picture that Radakin had discussed deepening engagement and cooperation with his Chinese equivalent, General Liu Zhenli. This in turn prompted outrage from UK China hawks who accused Radakin of engaging in ‘a

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Has a US-UK trade deal inched closer?

13 min listen

As Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs keep shifting, leaving countries scrambling to react, there has been some good news for Keir Starmer and the Labour government. Speaking to UnHerd, the US vice-president J.D. Vance spoke up the UK’s chances of securing a trade deal. While this would be a win for Starmer, questions remain over the substance – from agriculture to food, what would be included? And can we really believe it will happen? The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls and deputy US editor Kate Andrews join Patrick Gibbons to discuss.  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Eliot Wilson

J.D. Vance’s disdain for Europe has never been clearer

Being vice president of the United States is a strange role. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s understudy for his first two terms, dismissed the office as ‘not worth a bucket of warm piss’, but it was the first incumbent, John Adams, who put his finger on its one transcendent quality. ‘I am vice president. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.’ That nod to ‘everything’ makes Vice President J.D. Vance important. By the next presidential election in November 2028, Donald Trump will be 82, and unless he defies any rational reading of the 22nd amendment, he cannot continue as president. That places Vance in the pound seats