Politics

It’s Budget week in Westminster. Over three months after Keir Starmer triumphed in the general election, his Chancellor Rachel Reeves will this week set out the direction of the Labour government for the coming years in her first ever Budget. It’s fair to say that expectations are relatively low – with the Prime Minister himself warning of painful decisions ahead. Meanwhile, Treasury sources are keen to play down talk of any Budget rabbits, suggesting a mix of the measures currently being discussed in the media. Starmer will be trying to offer a narrative as to why tough decisions need to be taken The one confirmed Budget measure is a change

Following this weekend’s fraughtly awaited election ‘results’ in Georgia – as important for the country’s direction as any since the end of the Cold War – a potentially explosive situation is developing. While exit polls suggested the Georgian Dream (the incumbent, pro-Kremlin party) would gain no more than 42 per cent to the collective opposition’s 58 per cent, Sunday morning saw GD leader Bidzina Ivanishvili declaring victory and claiming 54 per cent of the vote. ‘It is rare for any party anywhere in the world to achieve such success in such a difficult situation,’ Ivanishvili crowed.   Yet amidst widespread allegations of rigged ballots, intimidation and voter fraud, opposition parties are refusing to accept

In 2012, as the Islamic Republic showed signs of buckling under the weight of US and EU sanctions, Senator John Kerry spearheaded a series of backchannel meetings with his Iranian counterparts to begin exploring the deal that became the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an arms reduction agreement between Iran and western nations in which Iran would receive sanctions relief in exchange for caps on uranium enrichment. The US and its allies sought to strike a bargain with an Islamic Republic desperate for foreign investment, eager to accept terms. Yet in the years leading up to the JCPOA’s signing in 2014, another strand of thought emerged from within US

‘He wasn’t my first billionaire, so I kind of knew my way around him’, a senior US diplomat who plied his trade in Georgia told me at the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. ‘And the weirdest thing? He was starry-eyed about Nato and the West in the beginning. I remember at one meeting with a US delegation, he outright asked, “So what I” – notice the I, not we – “what I gotta do to get into Nato by 2016?” We all looked at each other, then gave him the usual line about democratic reforms and so on. He listened for a while, then interrupted, “But what do I really

There are three great makers of popular man-art working in Hollywood today – Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher – and all three work with broadly the same materials: male identity, its associated violence, and post-industrial societies with no place for either. Mann’s neon-noir aesthetic focuses on status, whether James Caan’s safecracker in Thief, with his $150 slacks, silk shirts, and $800 suits, or Jamie Foxx in Collateral, who dreams of running his own limo firm, but only idly, having long since sunk into his reassuring routine as night-time cab driver.  Nolan’s theme is personal darkness, whether Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in the Dark Knight trilogy, or Al Pacino’s