World

Thursday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Biden is as big a narcissist as Trump

The dullest assertion you can make about Donald Trump is that he’s a narcissist who has no interest in the American people and only cares about himself. Competent pundits don’t waste wordage on such an over-obvious observation. Less obvious, though more so since last week’s dog’s dinner presidential debate – in the aftermath of which dubbing the encounter ‘elder abuse’ went from droll witticism to exhausted cliché in a few hours – is that Joe Biden’s narcissism rivals Trump’s and may even exceed it. The Bidens’ decision to contest this race was arrogant and criminally oblivious to the country’s future Early in his 2020 run, Biden indicated to apparatchiks in

Angus Colwell

Israel says it’s ready for another war

According to my phone, I’m in Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Except I’m not. The Israel Defence Forces have scrambled the GPS of everyone within about an hour’s drive of the Israel-Lebanon border. The same navigation system that tells my iPhone its location is the same navigation system that Hezbollah could use to identify targets in northern Israel. They’ve been firing across the border since 7 October, and the Israelis are fed up. They’ve evacuated 80 kibbutzim, nine villages, three community centres and two Arab villages. The phrase that ministers use to describe the displaced is ‘refugees in their own country’. The offensive in Gaza is winding down, and after that

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: an election looms, Joe Biden crashes and England wins

Home A general election shook the nation’s political snowglobe. Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was able to stop stunts for the camera after making a bungee jump at Eastbourne. Before the election, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister for the time being, commented on Channel 4 footage of a Reform UK supporter talking of him in racially abusive language: ‘My two daughters have to see and hear Reform people who campaign for Nigel Farage calling me an effing Paki. It hurts and it makes me angry.’ Reform UK made an official complaint against Channel 4 to the Electoral Commission, claiming that the supporter filmed was an actor. England beat

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

It’s payback time for voters

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral sword. Joe Biden will be lucky to survive the summer as the Democrats’ presidential nominee after his disastrous debate performance. Almost every opinion poll says he’s losing to Donald Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron bet on a snap election, daring his country to vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Voters accepted that bet and are making the French President pay. This weekend we could see Jordan Bardella, 28, asked to become the next prime minister. Justin Trudeau looks doomed as Prime Minister of Canada. Around the world, leaders are

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Jill Biden’s relentless pursuit of power

At rallies, Joe Biden often speaks after his wife. ‘My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,’ he begins. It’s a line he has used for years – a faux humble joke about how much more impressive she is. These days, however, it sounds more like an admission of the real pecking order. In the past week, we’ve seen the extent to which Dr Jill Biden (as she insists on being called) has taken charge of her ailing spouse’s collapsing campaign. This week, she appeared on the cover of American Vogue, looking imperious in a white tuxedo dress. ‘We will decide our future!’ shouts the quote headline. That’s a

John Keiger John Keiger

What the National Rally means for France’s foreign policy

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even circling. France is the world’s seventh-largest economic power, a prominent Nato member, a member of the UN Security Council and the EU’s leader on foreign and defence issues. It has the fifth largest strategic nuclear force and the fifth largest navy, a ‘tier one’ military and one of the highly effective ‘Nine Eyes’ intelligence services. Last year France was the world’s second largest arms exporter. It controls the third largest global undersea cables network and has the second largest coastal economic area, whose confetti territories give it a

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

A tribute to Ismail Kadare, a writer who really deserved a Nobel Prize

Apart from Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s a fair bet that most people’s reaction to the Nobel prizewinners for literature this century is, who? Arguably the most recent, Jon Fosse, is an exception but the majority of winners don’t really stand up to the weight of the award. Annie Emaux? Abdulrazak Gurnah? Louise Gluck? It’s hard to avoid the impression that the judges were swayed by ethno-gender considerations rather than outright lifetime literary merit. I asked him about Albania obtaining European Union membership and he got tetchy This week there died, and today was buried, one man who really did merit the award for which he was nominated 15 times,

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

Israel can no longer avoid a clash with its ultra-Orthodox citizens

In the imagination of the world, there could be nobody more Jewish than the ultra-Orthodox. With their black hats, sidecurls and frock coats, they are taken as the very epitome of the culture. That is why their radical fringes are appropriated by Israelophobes seeking a cover for their bigotry, as if suffering a cartoonish Jewish ally is a price worth paying to evade charges of antisemitism. Tens of thousands of young men devote their lives to taxpayer-funded study while their secular compatriots place their lives on the line This week, pictures of such apparently devout Jews clashing with Israeli police were seized upon as another opportunity to delegitimise the state

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has himself to thank for the rise of Jordan Bardella

The mood has taken a dark and intolerant turn in France since the National Rally’s (NR) victory in the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The left and Macron’s centrists have not accepted their reverse with good grace. On Sunday evening there were spontaneous protests in several cities, including Bordeaux, where police had to use tear gas to disperse an angry crowd of 200. In Cherbourg on Monday, a gang of Antifa assaulted Nicolas Conquer, a candidate for the wing of the centre-right Republicans that has allied with NR. He said later that it was another sign of the ‘normalisation of political violence by the extreme left’.

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump campaign lead blasts Labour meetings as ‘fake news’

Oh dear. As election campaigns draw to a close, Sir Keir Starmer has found himself under scrutiny at the eleventh hour. A Telegraph article about his ‘pragmatic’ approach to US relations that states Labour has been talking to Donald Trump’s team on a ‘daily basis’ has been slammed as ‘fake news’ – by none other than top GOP strategist and Trump’s own campaign manager himself. Oo er. The Telegraph piece states that ‘staff working for David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, have been in near-constant talks with Trump’s team for weeks, since he met the former president’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita in Washington in May’.  But Chris LaCivita took to

Jay Mens

How Trump and Starmer could form an unlikely alliance against Iran

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated. Tehran may never have a better window for building a bomb Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer’s party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

How Hungary’s presidency could shake up the EU

Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its rotating presidency, under which the 27 member states take it in turns to do a six-month stint running its technically supreme political body, the European Council. This week, Hungary, the bad boy of Europe, took over the hot seat. It keeps it until the end of this year. The difficulty is that the government of Viktor Orbán in Budapest, albeit still popular at home, is at loggerheads with the EU. Politically, its scepticism over Ukraine’s war effort and its open dislike for liberal social

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Giorgia Meloni will enjoy taking revenge on Macron

The German government has expressed its ‘concern’ at the prospect of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally forming the next government of France. Poland’s PM Donald Tusk – the man who said Brexiteers deserved ‘a special place in hell’ – responded to the result by saying ‘this is all really starting to smell very dangerous’. Not in Italy, where the odour wafting down from France after the first round of the parliamentary election was rather to the liking of Giorgia Meloni. ‘I congratulate the Rassemblement National and its allies for the clear success,’  she said. No EU leader will have enjoyed Macron’s humiliation at the hands of Le Pen more than Meloni As in

Roger Kimball

What the Supreme Court immunity ruling means for Donald Trump

Yesterday, reviewing last week’s Supreme Court decisions, I noted that the court would probably issue its final opinion of the season, on the question of presidential immunity. So it turned out to be. Yesterday, ‘Trump v. United States’ dropped. For the first time, the Court pondered the question, ‘Does a president have immunity from prosecution?’ or, to use the language of the opinion, ‘Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.’ The answer was more or less what I predicted. I wrote that, while no one outside the hallowed halls of the Court really knew how the

Edward Howell

Will North Korea send troops to Ukraine?

When dealing with North Korea, it’s important not just to look at what the regime says about its present and future policies. Arguably more important is what the regime doesn’t say. Sometimes we might need to read between the lines.  The two meetings between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin within the space of a year indicate that the pair’s bromance is more than just for show. Russia’s relations with North Korea look to be on an upward trajectory after the signing of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ between Kim and Putin. The mutual defence pact, where each side agreed to assist the other in the event of any external aggression,

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Joe Biden go on?

20 min listen

The dust has settled from the TV debate that was catastrophic for Joe Biden. What are the possible options going forward? Are things changing behind the scenes? Freddy Gray assesses the situation with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest. 

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Starmer’s Europe dilemma

13 min listen

As Europe comes to terms with the fallout from Marine Le Pen’s victory in the first round of their parliamentary elections, Cindy Yu talks to Freddy Gray and Katy Balls about what it all means for Keir Starmer. If he does win the UK’s own election on Thursday, he faces a European landscape that could be harder to navigate. What do the results mean for the UK and what reaction has there been? Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike Steerpike

Jill Biden revealed as Vogue magazine cover star

Oh dear. Vogue magazine’s August cover dropped this morning and it transpires that its editorial team has decided on a rather curious cover star in the form of, er, Jill Biden. The First Lady has been revealed as the central focus of the summer cover a mere four days after her husband gave a pitiful performance at the presidential candidate debate on Thursday. Talk about bad timing… President Biden stumbled and mumbled his way through his disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week – so much so that media outlets across the world questioned just how the President could remain the Democratic party’s choice for the 2024 US election. Yet

Matthew Lynn

What the markets have wrong about the French election results 

The Paris stock market is soaring. French bonds are rising once again, and the banks are suddenly looking a lot healthier. As the results of the French elections came through overnight, and it looked less likely that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally would have enough votes to form a government by itself, investors started to buy into France. Sure, the result might be messy, but chaos is a lot better than the shambolic mix of protectionism and welfare spending that passes for an economic plan for the NR. But hold on. In reality, the crisis has just been postponed – and the crash when it comes will be far worse.

Monica Porter

How Viktor Orbán plans to ‘Make Europe Great Again’

Hungary has just begun its presidency of the Council of the EU, as part of the member states’ six-monthly rotation process. Unsurprisingly, prime minister Viktor Orbán is all keyed up for the challenge. For years the bureaucrats of Brussels have tried to force the stubbornly contrary PM to change his ways, withholding billions of euros as punishment for his administration’s ‘democratic backsliding’. But sticking to his guns, Orbán has declared that, on the contrary, it is he who will ‘take over Brussels’ and change the EU. Hubris indeed. After all, David Cameron with his emollient charms was unable to get the EU to alter its entrenched culture, which ultimately led to