Politics

Remember Rishi-mania? It came around the time of the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme, which was designed to help the restaurant trade recover from the Covid lockdowns. As chancellor, Sunak won over stomachs –­­ and hearts – with his generous financial scheme to help everybody through the crisis. Cometh the hour, cometh the Treasury.  But it is now quite clear that hundreds of millions, even billions, of pounds were stolen from the taxpayer through these schemes. And for all his supposed competence as a technocratic administrator, in reality, Sunak presided over fraud on an unprecedented scale. It may be just a matter of time before this massive scandal catches

Vladimir Putin turned seventy on October 7, but Garry Kasparov was not in the mood for a celebration. The Russian dissident, author and chess grandmaster had been invited to address the community of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where, seventy-six years ago, Winston Churchill famously announced the descent of an ‘iron curtain’ across the European continent. Seldom has a phrase so vividly captured a geopolitical phenomenon as Churchill’s clarion call about the looming threat posed by the Soviet Union. As Russia once again threatens European peace, it fell upon the shoulders of an exiled Russian democrat to issue a dire warning about the fate of what used to be called

It is a measure of the dark places Xi Jinping is taking China politically and economically that the rule of Jiang Zemin, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is being looked back upon with some nostalgia. During Jiang’s later years, ‘toad worship culture’ (a play on his supposed amphibious features) became popular on social media as an oblique way of criticising Xi’s rule and praising China’s relative openness under Jiang.  Stability was always Jiang’s top priority. He didn’t hesitate to crack down against any perceived threat to the CCP Jiang was plucked from relative obscurity to head the Chinese communist party in 1989, soon after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and

Things are currently so bad in the western democracies that we tend to ignore how much worse they are in what one could politely call ‘non-democracies’. China’s policy of developing Covid in a lab, and then covering up its leak, seemed to work at the time. Western scientists, some corrupted by their links with China, helped persuade many that Beijing had the best policy for infection control. But it is increasingly clear that Chinese people themselves do not believe this and are rebelling. In Russia, Putin’s policy of war has isolated his country, humiliated his armed forces and bound his democratic enemies more closely even than did anti-Soviet feeling in

A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get? It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In