Politics Archives

Saturday

April 18, 2026

How Peter Mandelson became Britain’s ambassador to the US – despite failing vetting

I have just been contacted by a source who knows much more about what happened with Peter Mandelson’s vetting. It supports the case that I made in my summary of the case last night and Sam Coates made in his thread yesterday that the crucial decision was Keir Starmer’s political decision to appoint him. In essence, Oliver Robbins – the top civil servant who overruled Mandelson’s failed security vetting – was rubber-stamping a decision which had already been made. Things are much less clear cut than Downing Street has been claiming for the last three days I have heard too from an ally of Mandelson who believes Robbins’s dismissal was "egregious" for exactly the reasons which follow.

Mark Galeotti

Russia’s nationalists are falling out of love with Putin

Moscow's Manezh exhibition hall is playing host to a celebration of the life and politics of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the outspoken, unfiltered and unrepentantly toxic founder of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), who died in 2022. What is meant to memorialize Zhirinovsky's career, though, also highlights the degree to which the Kremlin is losing control of the nationalist right. The neatly-choreographed simulation of party politics that has worked for so long is getting harder to sustain The LDPR – which was neither liberal nor democratic – was established in 1992 and from the first was a populist force that was more a vehicle for the bombastic Zhirinovsky than the expression of a coherent ideology.

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Melania’s mysterious messaging

On April 9, Melania Trump held a lone press conference. She showed up in a charcoal suit, delivered a speech and turned to exit, runway style, without pausing. Melania doesn’t take questions from the press. The facts, according to Melania: Jeffrey Epstein had not introduced her to Donald Trump. She met her husband, “by chance, at a New York City party, in 1998.” She and her husband were acquainted with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein, but this was “common in New York City and Palm Beach.” She had engaged Maxwell in polite “casual correspondence” over email. That was the extent of the relationship. “I am not Epstein’s victim,” she said somberly. White House staff were perplexed. Why had the presser been called?

Friday

April 17, 2026

Tim Shipman

Britain’s ‘drone gap’ makes it vulnerable

When John Healey was asked, onstage at the London Defence Conference, whether the armed forces were “ready” for war, the Defence Secretary replied: “Yes.” One of those present says: “That was greeted with near incredulity in the room.” Another attendee compared Healey’s plight to someone “playing French cricket,” with critics from all sides hurling balls at his ankles while he tried to bat them away. “You can’t score any runs in French cricket.” George Robertson, Healey’s most respected Labour predecessor and a former secretary general of NATO, was not present; he was in Scotland celebrating his 80th birthday. But he returned to give a withering interview to the FT and a speech.

Freddy Gray

Will Keir Starmer be a casualty of the Epstein fallout?

In America, important men don’t seem to suffer too much over their links to the late Jeffrey Epstein.Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick and Paolo Zampolli, among others, might regret their past friendships with the world’s most famous sex criminal. Certainly, they resent having to face pesky questions about it.But the story just rumbles on, darkly, a source of endless intrigue and gossip and conspiracy theories – sustained as it is by the occasional publicity jolt, such as last week when First Lady Melania Trump, apparently without the knowledge of her husband, decided to give a big public statement denying that she, er, something something Jeffrey Epstein.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The politicization of everything

“A number of observers of the political, moral and spiritual life in recent years have taken up the famous theme of the decline of the West,” the French journalist Luc Ferry wrote in Le Figaro at the end of January. “They recall that civilizations are mortal, like human beings, and that our own, far gone in decadence, is dying. Nevertheless, I fail to see how one can include the United States in this pessimistic reading of history. Not only does it remain the most powerful economic and military power in the world… politically speaking, whatever one thinks of [Donald] Trump, of his antics and his perverse narcissism, it is difficult to deny that he has given new life to the idea that politics can change the world, that action taken by a leader can have an impact on the real world.

Roger Stone

The tragedy of Laura Loomer

I first met Laura Loomer in the New York office of Project Veritas. She was blonde then, feisty, smart and ambitious. She was also fearless. Because of her outspoken views regarding the dangers of radical Islam – views that I largely share – her career as an investigative journalist and advocate was severely hampered. She became possibly the most censored woman on the planet; forbidden from placing her warnings about Sharia law and radical Islam on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Even Uber banned her. In 2020, Loomer decided to make a valiant race for Congress against Democrat incumbent Lois Frankel in an overwhelmingly blue Florida district, which happened to include Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s club and winter residence.

Christopher Caldwell

A change has come over Trump

Geostrategists used to fret over the “Eastern Question” or the Maginot Line or the Missile Gap. Today there is no doubt that the overriding geostrategic question of our day is whether the President of the United States is playing with a full deck. With the US-Israeli war on Iran failing, and depleting much of both countries’ non-nuclear defenses, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and western economies spiraling toward depression, Donald Trump greeted the world on Easter morning with a message to Iran’s leaders to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” then threatened the next day to wipe out Iranian civilization. He then denounced the Pope for having imparted Catholic teachings on just and unjust war.

John Keiger

How France is bending the knee to Iran

What is Emmanuel Macron playing at? In the space of just a few days, three apparently unconnected incidents have the French president’s fingerprints all over them. They indicate that, while Macron is a spent force at home, he is willing to deploy his powers to help France navigate the Iran war crisis and try to salvage his reputation – even if it means making his allies, including the United States, look utterly foolish. While Macron is a spent force at home, he is willing to deploy his powers to help France navigate the Iran war crisis On April 2, a French container ship, the Kribi, became the first western vessel to cross the Strait of Hormuz and exit into the Gulf of Oman since the war against Iran began.

Spectator Editorial

How Trump loses friends and alienates people

It is a long haul until the midterm elections in November. Many threats and deadlines will have been issued to Iran in that time, many cycles of optimism and pessimism will have been completed. The war may be over, or Donald Trump may be bogged down in an intractable conflict which he privately wishes he had never started. Regardless, his administration must start preparing for what looks to be an increasing certainty: that the Republicans will suffer a heavy electoral reversal. That was looking likely even before Iran and its effect on oil prices. The President’s tariff wars have protected some, but the overall effect on blue- collar jobs has been negative. Moreover, at 3.3 percent, consumer inflation is back at the sort of levels which helped stop Kamala Harris from winning.

Rod Liddle

What we can learn from the Southport killer

It was a matter of some disappointment to me that Kanye West was barred entry to this country as a person not conducive to the public good. Millions of people have arrived here in the past 20 years and, unlike Kanye, have no intention of leaving. I am not sure what proportion of them are “conducive to the public good.” As a kind offascistic Little Englander, I would hazard a guess at about 8 percent, so quite why we singled out Kanye I am not sure. Of course, he courted a little controversy with his exciting song “Heil Hitler.” No truth, beauty or insight has ever been revealed in a rap song Kanye also divested himself of some anti-Semitic observations via technology’s equivalent of rap music, Twitter.

Matt McDonald

Can Liz Truss and CPAC Make England Great Again?

“We have an elite who have been in power for at least the last 40 years, who fundamentally don’t like western civilization and they wanna destroy it,” said Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022, as she spoke to a half-full room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. It was her third such speech. The Liz Truss who addresses American audiences bears little resemblance to the awkward, growth-obsessed economics nerd who somehow ascended the greasy pole of British politics, only to slide back down at staggering speed. She’s changed her vocabulary – and her talking points. The few attendees of her panel, snappily titled “Europestan: Can Europe Survive?” could hear Truss lambasting “grooming gangs” and “transgender ideology.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump badly needs a victory

Has the dustup between Washington and Tehran come to an end? "They’ve agreed to give us back the nuclear dust that’s way underground because of the attack we made with the B-2 bombers," Donald Trump proclaimed on Thursday evening. "So we have a lot of agreement with Iran, and I think something’s going to happen, very positive, very important." Trump indicated that he himself might fly to Pakistan this weekend to participate in negotiations with Iran. Trump’s response to the spate of bad news he’s encountered has consisted of a mixture of bravado and defiance If Iran were to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile, it would represent a startling development indeed. No previous American president, whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama, came close to accomplishing that goal.

Cockburn

Former British archbishop: ‘There’s something demonic in US political culture’

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has said "there is something demonic" in the "political culture" of the United States. He made the remark on The Spectator’s Edition podcast when discussing Donald Trump’s row with the Pope over the President's decision to go to war in Iran. Following J.D. Vance’s comments earlier this week that the Pope should "stick to morality," Williams said that he feels "slightly sorry" for the recent Catholic convert – "with just a hint of schadenfreude." The former archbishop observed that Vance appears to be "floundering" in his arguments. "People who look to the Catholic church for a strong lead on issues of morality tend to mean one kind of morality only," Williams said.

Thursday

April 16, 2026

James Heale

Trump is making life increasingly hard for his allies

Here is a fun one: what do Giorgia Meloni, Pope Leo XIV, Ed Miliband and the Cato Institute all have in common? The answer is that they have each been attacked in the past 24 hours on Donald Trump’s overactive Truth Social feed. The President’s erratic actions both online and off now seem to be exhausting the patience of even erstwhile allies. In the aftermath of the Iran crisis, Keir Starmer and his ministers appear to have had enough of pussyfooting and pandering to the whims of the Commander-In-Chief. Downing Street sees little benefit in indulging what one Labour MP calls ‘Trump’s imperial overreach’ This afternoon, Rachel Reeves publicly called the war a "mistake.

Damian Thompson

What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope?

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff.

Douglas Murray

Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear

The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war. In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: "We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?" Who indeed.

Wednesday

April 15, 2026

Jane Stannus

Does Mark Carney believe in democracy?

Mark Carney is swaggering about Canada with his new majority government, acting as if he’d just received a landslide mandate from the electorate. The truth is he acquired his precious majority not by climbing up on his soapbox and convincing voters, but by whispering sweet nothings to five MPs from other parties, upon which they mysteriously lost their political principles and crossed the floor. Does Carney believe in democracy? It’s hard to be sure. Yes, his party did just win three special elections. But only one of those counted (the other two were held by Liberals already and in safe Liberal ridings, so made no difference to the number of seats the party held). Without the floor-crossings, Carney would be stuck with the minority he won last April.

John Fund

The lesson of Orbán: Trump must tackle corruption

The landslide defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán carries lessons across the ocean for Donald Trump and both MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans. Trump pulled out all the stops for his ally, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to Hungary for a three-day endorsement tour and promising the day before the vote to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy” if Orbán won. Well, he didn’t, and the Democrats are in full gloat mode after Orbán’s Fidesz party fell from 135 seats in parliament down to just 55. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer quickly made a comparison to the US, writing on X: “Pay attention, Donald Trump. Wannabe dictators wear out their welcome. November 2026 can’t come soon enough.

Roger Kimball

Sorry, but America still holds all the cards

“Negotiations.” Are you heartened or dismayed by that word? Those who remember or who have read up on the seemingly interminable Paris Peace Talks designed to bring an end to the Vietnam War have reason to be dubious. A negotiation, if it is to be successful, requires that both sides be candid and in earnest. The Vietnamese were not candid participants. They stalled. They prevaricated. They acted out. It seems that the Iranians are hoping to reprise that melodrama. They will be profoundly disappointed. On the second weekend in April, Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met some 70 Iranian representatives in Islamabad to hammer out a peace deal.