Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Yuan Yi Zhu

The Chagos deal could spell environmental catastrophe

This week, the government will try to push its draft deal to surrender the Chagos Islands through Parliament. There are many, many reasons why the deal is bad – from security, to the legitimate rights of the Chagossians, to the fact that the legal basis on which it is constructed is bunk. But there is another reason why the Chagos deal should be canned: it will be a catastrophe for the world’s environment. Currently, the Chagos are protected by one of the world’s largest and strictest marine protected areas, in which all fishing is forbidden. An initiative of the last Labour government, the Marine Protected Area (MPA) has safeguarded one of

Nigel Jones

What are Trump’s post-Maduro plans for Venezuela?

Donald Trump likes to keep both his friends and enemies guessing. It’s no surprise then that his plans for Venezuela’s future after his typically bold and reckless abduction of dictator Nicolas Maduro are a mystery. Trump has awarded the plum of power in Caracas not to Machado but to Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez In his Mar-a-Largo news conference after the bombing and special forces raid on Caracas that caught the mustachioed Marxist napping, and delivered him to US custody, the US president begged as many questions as he answered. Looking and sounding understandably exhausted after watching the nighttime Operation Absolute Resolve unfold on a live feed in real

Sam Leith

The outstanding beigeness of Keir Starmer

”I’ll be PM this time next year,’ Starmer tells BBC.’’ Such was the headline on the BBC’s website over the Prime Minister’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, in a place of some prominence. I feel like I’ve read this one before, don’t you? It is, hilariously yet also, oddly, boringly, the headline that now goes on every interview our useless PM gives. Out he sets, determined, as I expect he sees it, to draw a line under the speculation about his future and talk about the things that really matter to hardworking families, salt-of-the-earth toolmakers, and so on – and the most interesting thing he manages to say is that he’s

Doug Stokes

Maduro’s capture wasn't about oil

The image of Nicolás Maduro in US custody has inevitably resurrected the ghosts of foreign policy past. For the reflexively cynical observer, the narrative writes itself: a Republican White House, a Latin American strongman, and the world’s largest proven oil reserves. As with Iraq in 2003, the slogan of American imperialism and its ‘blood for oil’ foreign policy circulated on social media before the dust had even settled over Caracas. ‘The overnight strikes on Venezuela,’ declared the Guardian, and Trump’s neo-imperial ‘declaration that the US would run the country and sell its oil, have driven another truck through international law and global norms’. This is a comfortable, nostalgic critique, harking

Today

Oscar Edmondson

Regime change in Caracas … but not Westminster

20 min listen

It’s our first podcast back in the office of 2026 – and the year has started with a bang, of course, after the successful US operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. He will appear in a Manhattan court later today. This throws up all sorts of problems for Labour and the left more broadly – they seem to be hedging their bets on whether to condemn this as a breach of, if not international law, then certainly international norms, or to celebrate the removal of a corrupt regime. Could this be a dividing line for the Labour party? Elsewhere, the battle that Labour want to focus on is the

Gavin Mortimer

Was Maduro’s capture the greatest special forces raid in history?

On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The American president praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as ‘incredible’. The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed ‘Absolute Resolve’ – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. ‘They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro. They were assisted by stealth drones high in the sky overhead and

Jake Wallis Simons

How to stop Venezuela from becoming Iraq

Will the Venezuela adventure end up like Afghanistan, or will it be another Iraq? In the eyes of most commentators, those seem to be the only options, both of which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while achieving little, especially in the case of Afghanistan. It is clear that if Venezuela is to be the success story that the White House would like to see, there can be no alternative to the Panama model Some have also thrown in the example of the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, after which the rule of law collapsed, human trafficking thrived and instability spread across the region. One analyst

Stephen Daisley

Trump is winning the Maduro meme war

The Vietnam war was the first Americans watched on their nightly TV news, the Gulf War the first that could be followed live on CNN, and the Global War on Terror the first documented online through the work of bloggers, citizen journalists and video-sharing sites like LiveLeak. Meme warfare is being used not only to humiliate the Venezuela regime but also domestic critics of the president’s actions The US invasion of Venezuela, Operation Absolute Resolve, marks another innovation: it is the first armed conflict in which the victor has simultaneously won a conventional military victory and a meme war. Seeing as US forces managed to violate Venezuelan sovereignty, seize and

Stephen Pollard

Hugh Bonneville should pipe down about Israel

Hugh, meet Claire. Claire, meet Hugh. Claire has some guidance that might prove useful for you, Hugh. Should, that is, you not want to come across as any more of an ignorant buffoon than you do already. The problem for Bonneville is that details do matter. And there is a big issue with the detail of his rant To explain: over the weekend, Claire Foy – Queen Elizabeth in the first series of The Crown – had a message that some of her peers could do with taking note of: stick to reading scripts. The fact you might play the role of someone with insights worth listening to doesn’t mean

Daniel DePetris

Trump doesn’t care about democracy in Venezuela

The US military operation to track down, capture and fly Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro back to the United States for prosecution on drug trafficking charges went flawlessly. It was well-coordinated, meticulously planned and executed to a tee. Nearly two days after Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into US custody, details of the snatch-and-grab mission are beginning to percolate into the US media. It involved a cyberattack against Caracas’s electricity system, precision bombing against several Venezuelan airfields and ports, a low-flying helicopter assault on Maduro’s hideout and a CIA deployment that was operating in the country since August. By the time Americans woke up on Saturday morning, Maduro,

Yesterday

Max Horder

The long history of kidnapping Latin American Chieftains

One of the few benefits of being an anthropologist is the uncanny exhilaration one feels watching novel current events as re-runs from previous episodes in the history of mankind. Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela, is no exception. Kidnapping Latin American emperors is a continental tradition. It’s simply the most practical method for breaking the chain of command in the region. It triggers succession chaos, enables the extraction of resources, and keeps the rest of the hierarchy more or less intact. In earlier centuries, it was Spain and Portugal. Today, it’s the United States. In the colonial era, the objective was to secure enough gold to beat

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Keir Starmer hasn't 'got the full picture at the moment'

Keir Starmer: ‘We simply haven’t got the full picture at the moment’ The US has struck Venezuela’s capital Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Maduro is now in detention in New York. In a press conference after the military operation, President Trump said that the US will ‘run the country until such time as we can do a safe… transition’, and that America’s ‘greatest oil companies in the world’ will be ‘very much involved’. In a long interview with Prime Minister Keir Starmer this morning, Laura Kuenssberg asked if an American attack on a sovereign state was in breach of international law, and whether the

James Kirkup

AI could make degrees redundant

For decades, British politics has lived in the shadow of a major failure of social and economic policy: the imbalance between graduates and those who don’t go to university.  Many politicians have understood the need to do better for the ‘other 50%’ who don’t go to higher education. But few have delivered real change.  From Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ to Keir Starmer’s newfound focus on ‘higher-level skills,’ the goal has remained constant: to provide a better deal for those who don’t go to ‘uni’.  Yet despite the speeches and the promises, the divide remains a major fault line of our politics. It explains Brexit (grads were Remain, non-grads Leave) and

Daniel McCarthy

Maduro got off lightly

Nicolas Maduro is a very lucky man. The Venezuelan dictator – or ex-dictator now – might not feel that way as he enjoys the hospitality of the U.S. justice system after being snatched from the safety and comfort of his own capital on the orders of President Trump. But once he’s had a bit of time to relax, he should compare photos of his capture, Nike-clad and brandishing a water bottle, to the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was dragged out his “spider hole” in 2003 – or the way Muammar Gaddafi looked when a mob of his own people got done with him. Maduro didn’t lose a war

Steerpike

Labour MPs squabble over Venezuela

Oh dear. It seems that all is not well in the party of good comrades. The Americans’ stunning snatch-and-grab operation in Venezuela has divided opinion among Labour MPs. Jeremy Corbyn may no longer be running the show – but it seems some still mourn the ending of Maduro’s regime. Among them was Richard Burgon, Jezza’s onetime business spokesman. The hard-of-thinking socialist reacted with fury to Keir Starmer’s mealy-mouthed statement, tweeting that: The Prime Minister should respond to an illegal bombing and kidnapping by Trump in exactly the way he would if Putin had carried it out. Either Keir Starmer believes in international law – or he doesn’t. You can’t pick

Patrick West

Reform and the real populist threat

We’re scarcely into the new year and already luminaries on the liberal left have resumed one of their favourite pastimes: issuing alarmist forebodings about the threat posed by populism, and imploring everyone that Reform UK must be stopped. That is why Starmer and those on the left will always invoke the bogeyman of Reform and forever diabolise its brand of ‘populism’ Just as the final days of 2025 saw Gillian Tett of the Financial Times warn on Newsnight about ‘the rise of “The Three Ps”: populism, protectionism and extreme patriotism’, this year had barely got started before Sir Chris Powell, the New Labour former advertising strategist, chimed in to remind

Rory Hanrahan

Social media visa vetting would protect Britain's Jews

You don’t need to be a fervent admirer of Donald Trump to recognise that, on matters of national security and cultural cohesion, he hits the bullseye our establishment prefers to evade. His administration’s recent proposal – requiring travellers from visa-waiver countries, including Britain, to disclose five years of social media history as part of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) – has drawn the usual transatlantic sneers: an assault on privacy, a chilling of free expression, another Maga excess. Yet recent events show social media vetting can expose troubling views. If Britain wants to protect its Jewish citizens – especially young scholars besieged on university campuses – it should follow

Edward Howell

Kim and Putin's growing bromance should make us nervous

As Kim Jong-un himself announced at a New Year’s Eve event in Pyongyang, 2025 was an ‘unforgettable year’ for North Korea. During the final weekend of the year, the Supreme Leader supervised a ‘nuclear-capable’ long-range strategic cruise missile test, which he termed an ‘exercise of war deterrence’ against the ‘security threats’ facing Pyongyang. The test followed a week of oily letters between Kim and his new best friend, none other than Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader lauded the ‘heroic dispatch’ of North Korean troops to assist Russia’s war against Ukraine as an example of the ‘militant fraternity’ between Pyongyang and Moscow. Even if dynamics in the Ukraine war change this

Saturday

Charlie Gammell

Maduro's fall could galvanise Iran's opposition

On the afternoon of the 28 December in a Tehran electronics bazaar, shopkeepers (known as bazaaris) shuttered their shops and walked out, outraged at a planned gas price rise and crippled at the continuing slide in the value of the Iranian currency and the government’s powerlessness to shepherd Iran’s economy towards something better than corruption, unemployment and inflationary cycles. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar was quick to follow suit. A day or so later, several of Tehran’s most prestigious universities staged demonstrations. Smaller cities and towns have since taken up the baton of resistance, with government offices attacked and people openly calling for Khamenei’s death and the return of the Pahlavi dynasty,

Freddy Gray

Why Trump captured Maduro

Donald Trump likes to start the new year with a bang – or better yet a series of loud bangs. On January 3, 2020, his first administration ordered the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Exactly six years later, his second administration has carried out a large-scale regime-change operation in Venezuela, blowing several sites to smithereens and capturing the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and flying them out of the country. This after a series of military strikes against Venezuelan and cartel targets in recent weeks and months. There had been strong rumours in Washington that Trump would order

James Tidmarsh

The New Year's Eve fire shattered the myth of Swiss invulnerability

This was not supposed to happen in Switzerland. In a country where disasters are meant to be engineered out, risk neutralised and failure anticipated, the idea of a crowded bar turning into a death trap feels almost unthinkable. Around 40 people died inside the Constellation bar in Crans Montana on New Year’s Eve, and up to 119 were injured, many suffering serious burns. Switzerland has become more open and more exposed. It’s also become more complacent Witnesses describe flames racing across the ceiling within seconds. Systems that were assumed to hold clearly did not and panic set in. The inquiry will take time, but the outline is already visible. The

Joanna Marchong

Will 2026 be Rachel Reeves’s year?

Rachel Reeves enters 2026 more unpopular than she has ever been before. YouGov polling from December has 71 per cent of Britons saying they have an unfavourable opinion of Britain’s first female chancellor. Reeves was meant to be a competent economist who could restore credibility to the Treasury and, in her words, ‘revive economic growth’. How’s that going? Reeve’s tenure in No. 11 has so far been more slapstick than good governance. Her CV unravelled under scrutiny; she broke manifesto commitments; she unveiled an appalling Budget, vowed never to repeat it, and then promptly did. Am I judging her too harshly? Am I being a misogynist? Reeves would probably say

Nigel Jones

Trump says the US has 'captured' Venezuela’s Maduro

Donald Trump’s undeclared war in Venezuela against the Marxist regime of President Nicolas Maduro has erupted into the open. Trump says the US has captured Venezuela’s leader and his wife. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote: ‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.’ Trump’s statement

Brendan O’Neill

The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran

And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colours. They frothed day and night about a ‘murderous regime’ – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum. It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors What is it about revolts in Iran that rankle the activist class? These people love to yap about ‘resistance’ and ‘oppression’. Yet the minute