Latest from Coffee House

Wednesday

27 May 2026

Cockburn

Trump or Hochul: who knows ball?

The New York Knicks clinched an NBA championship spot Monday – and President Trump shared his excitement over his home team’s progress and his hopes to attend an NBA Finals game during today's cabinet meeting “Boy, what a team. They win all their games," Trump said. "They really, they have some great players. I think I will be going to one of their games.” He also congratulated Knicks owner Jim Dolan, who he counts as a longtime friend. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/2059684404973236616 Trump has been a Knicks fan for years, with recently surfaced photos showing him sitting courtside back in 1991. If his plans work out, he will be the first sitting US president to attend an NBA Finals game.

Theo Zenou

Meet the anti-Gretas: the women celebrating nuclear energy

Over the course of their lives, Americans have an average carbon footprint of 1,300 tons of CO2. Paris Ortiz-Wines, a young woman from San Francisco, has already canceled hers out. She could hop on a flight every week for the rest of her life, eat ribeyes at every meal and sip almond milk all day long, and still be in the clear. Back in 2021, Ortiz-Wines played a key role in the campaign that stopped the closure of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. This has already saved more than 30 million tons of CO2 emissions. Ortiz-Wines is part of a new generation of women advocating for nuclear energy, even though surveys show most women are skeptics. Call them the Nuclear Power Rangers.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s migration crisis will outlast Emmanuel Macron

France has maxed out on migrants. It’s a message that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has been pushing for years, but it’s one now endorsed by the government’s Justice Minister. In an interview with a newspaper at the weekend, Gérald Darmanin declared that the Republic has "reached the limits of our capacities for integration and assimilation." Darmanin believes that a three-year suspension of legal immigration is the answer, and in particular he wants a crackdown on the policy of family reunification. Introduced in 1976, the policy allowed migrants – mainly from North Africa – who came to France to work to also bring their family. "We must put an end to immigration as it exists today," said Darmanin.

Margaret Mitchell

The rise of the Orienfluencers

The term “Orientalism” has always implied some kind of caricature of the eastern world. It was originally coined as a way of describing how the West imagines the East as its negative to shore up self-confidence and justify conquest: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal,’” Edward Said wrote in Orientalism. Now, reverse “the Oriental” and “the European” and you have an idea of the new Orientalism, where the enlightened East becomes the foil to a decadent, violent, barbaric West. The new Orientalists aren’t academics, policymakers or Wall Street Journal opinion columnists.

ARLINGTON, VA - JUNE 14: A soldier prepares to catch a drone in the Pentagon parking lot on June 14, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. The U.S. Army is marking its 250th anniversary with a military parade along Constitution Avenue that includes roughly 6,600 troops, 150 vehicles, and over 50 aircraft. The parade, which coincides with President Donald Trump's 79th birthday, is designed to tell the history of the Army. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Sean Rayment

The drone delusion

In March, Russia suffered 35,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine. It’s estimated 33,600 of those, an extraordinary 96 percent, were caused by drones. Attacks by drones equipped with bombs, machine guns and even flamethrowers are now responsible for most of the casualties on both sides of the conflict. Therein lies a potential trap for militaries across the globe. It would be a catastrophic mistake to believe that victory can be bought cheaply and quickly with a single technology. The great lesson of Ukraine is that armies are punished for relying too heavily on one strategy. President Putin made precisely that mistake. He believed Russian vast tank regiments and precision artillery would bring Ukraine to its knees.

Travis Aaroe

The future belongs to Hunter Biden

As a human type Hunter Biden is familiar enough. Like George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, he is a wayward member of a political dynasty with a strange knack for slaloming his way out of trouble. Before the internet it was much easier for such figures to go about their business. It is hard to see how the goings-on at Chappaquiddick could be covered up now, in the age of X and camera phones. It was Hunter’s misfortune to be born too late. Dynasties are self-interested and adopt ideas based on the needs of the moment. The Habsburgs placed themselves at the head of the Counter-Reformation, and the Bushes, who were once liberal Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller mold, later became the spokesmen of the evangelical revival. Hunter Biden is now going along in a similar vein.

Tuesday

26 May 2026

Damian Thompson

What Pope Leo fears about AI

Pope Leo XIV has just passed the first great test of his pontificate. He has published a thoughtful encyclical on a controversial topic that (a) does not contain whole sections obviously farmed out to progressive lobbyists; (b) is not stuffed with semi-literate jargon; (c) does not display myopic hostility to capitalism; and (d) has been broadly welcomed by conservative Catholic commentators. Or, to put it more simply, it could not have been published in the name of Pope Francis. (I’m wording that carefully: popes rarely write their own encyclicals, and cynics suggested that the Argentinian pontiff did not even bother to read his.

Fredrik Karrholm

Why Greta is so angry about Swedish immigration

Greta Thunberg is 23 years old. Six years have passed since her emotional address to the UN Climate Action Summit about the end of the world. She has since shifted her attention from climate activism to one fashionable left-wing cause after another, but her tone is as shrill as ever. The other day, she denounced Sweden’s migration policy as inhumane. Her conclusions, as usual, wrong. But she is at least right about one thing: Sweden has adopted an entirely new migration policy. In Sweden, the system has until now often penalized the honest and rewarded the dishonest For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe. Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985, even as pressure across the rest of the continent remains immense.

Philip Patrick

Japan isn’t as safe as you think

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world. What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone.

Monday

25 May 2026

Sam Leith

The Andrew investigation is looking increasingly desperate

"Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime" is the can-do attitude attributed to Stalin’s chief of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. There’s more than a flavor of that attitude, I think, in Thames Valley Police’s investigation into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Two days ago, the news was led by a story, briefed by the police, that the scope of the investigation into the former Duke of York for possible Misconduct in Public Office was being widened to include questions of sexual misbehavior.

Sunday

24 May 2026

Freddy Gray

Why are Trump’s would-be assassins so forgettable?

Another weekend, another failed and frankly pathetic attempt to kill the President of the United States. On February 22, a Sunday, Secret Service shot dead an armed 21-year-old male called Austin Tucker Martin, who had entered the Mar-a-Lago complex, although Donald Trump wasn’t there at the time. America is in a strange condition when a shoot-out at the White House will be soon forgotten On the Saturday night of April 25, the 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen tried and failed to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington DC. And we all saw what happened there. Earlier this month, in an incident the news cycle quickly moved past, Secret Service shot an armed individual at the National Mall.

Christopher Sandford

A progressive mayor puts Seattle to sleep

Back in April 1971, a large billboard appeared by a freeway near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. “Will The Last Person Leaving Seattle Turn Out The Lights?” A reference to the Boeing company’s decision to lay off 40,000 local employees, and the ensuing rapid downturn in the area’s economy. Among other problems, the aircraft manufacturer had suffered a crippling blow when the US Senate rejected further funding for its proposed SST supersonic jet, Boeing’s would-be competitor to Concorde. I was reminded of the 1971 slogan just last month, when Seattle’s newly-elected mayor Katie Wilson told a university audience that she was “really, really excited” about the recent passage of a 9.

Saturday

23 May 2026

Ian Evans

Welcome to Transnistria: the country that’s not a country

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognizes it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier. In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway "country" (via a peace accord) policed by Russian "peacekeepers.

Matthew Palmer

Inside the Ukrainian army’s art division

The Ukrainian Cultural Forces’ headquarters is situated above a non-descript shopping center not far outside downtown Kyiv. The walls are covered in artwork and photographs, sculptures are dotted about; the initial impression is of a university arts department, though with more security and military figures. Officially part of the Ukrainian Army, though independently set up and run, the Cultural Forces employs artists, musicians, publishers and data analysts. They are something between an artistic collective, an information operations unit and a wartime parallel to the UK’s British Council. Their remit is broad and continually expanding.

Friday

22 May 2026

Andrew Tettenborn

Why did police handcuff Henry Nowak?

Britain's police are meant to police without fear or favor, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that they don’t – think of how they hold, or too often do not hold, the ring impartially between supporters of Israel and Palestine, Muslim and Christian preachers, supporters and opponents of trans rights, or whatever. Does all this matter? The Nowak case, with an obvious victim, shows clearly that it does There is a tendency for the great and the good to say this is no very big deal; the police are doing their best in difficult situations, complainants are normally tiresome culture warriors or enablers of hate speech. Events in Southampton Crown Court over the last two weeks show how wrong they are. Partial policing can potentially be deadly.

Svitlana Morenets

Putin’s nuclear escalation is a sign of desperation

As Vladimir Putin senses the momentum of the war shifting in Ukraine’s favor, he has redoubled his attempts to coerce Kyiv and its European partners. Russian troops are in retreat, losing territory overall for the first time since Ukraine launched its Kursk offensive in August 2024. Drone strikes have forced all of central Russia’s major oil refineries – accounting for a quarter of the country’s refining capacity – to halt or reduce output. Meanwhile, the cracks are beginning to show as Russians cease believing in their President, with some openly calling for an end to Putin’s so-called special military operation. His only available response, it seems, has been to resort to nuclear intimidation and threats of military confrontation with the Baltic states.

Thursday

21 May 2026

Geoff Hill

Why the Pentagon has Nigeria in its sights

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

Alexander Larman

Why did the Queen push for Andrew to become a trade envoy?

The Andrew formerly known as "Prince" was always supposedly his mother’s favorite child. He had a degree of indulgence paid to him that his (far more deserving) siblings never received. Newly released files suggest that this indulgence went far beyond any kind of explicable or appropriate fashion. Correspondence between Sir David Wright, chief executive of British Trade International, and then-foreign secretary Robin Cook from 2000 suggests that the late Queen was "very keen" for the former Duke of York to take on a "prominent role in the promotion of national interests." This, in turn, led to the creation of "Air Miles Andy," with Mountbatten-Windsor acting as a roving trade envoy.

John Fund

The ‘Trump sleaze factor’ grows and grows

Earlier this month, I wrote a cover story for The Spectator warning that Donald Trump’s increasingly brazen flouting of ethical standards portended a political disaster for Republicans in the midterms. Since then, the corruption news has only gotten worse. Just this week, the financial disclosure form Trump quietly filed for the first quarter of 2026 revealed his personal account had made an eye popping 3,600 stock trades valued at between $220 million and $750 million (his corporate holdings aren’t subject to disclosure).

Owen Matthews

Russia is becoming embarrassingly dependent on Beijing

A week after Donald Trump was greeted in Beijing by well-orchestrated crowds of flag-waving schoolchildren, it was Vladimir Putin’s turn to pay a visit to China’s Red Emperor. Protocol-watchers spotted a distinctly lower level of pomp and circumstance afforded to Putin than to Trump – though Kremlin media were quick to emphasize that this was a working meeting, the latest of over 40 Putin-Xi summits over the last two decades. Both sides paid formal homage to the ongoing strength of the Dragon-Bear alliance. Xi observed that relations between Beijing and Moscow were at "the highest level of comprehensive strategic partnership," as he called on both countries to oppose "all unilateral bullying" in the international arena.

Wednesday

20 May 2026

Freddy Gray

What does Massie’s loss say about the future of the right?

Congressman Thomas Massie, one of the most vocal Republican critics of Donald Trump lost his fight for re-election in Kentucky to a Trump-backed challenger. Freddy is joined by Spectator contributors Daniel McCarthy and Christopher Caldwell to discuss where Thomas Massie went wrong, how corruption centered around the campaign, whether or not Trump's success is a reflection of the upcoming midterms and the way Europe reacts to Trump more broadly.

Freddy Gray

Are the haters wrong about Trump’s foreign policy?

35 min listen

After Trump visited Xi Jinping last week, Putin is now expected to meet the Chinese leader in Beijing. Freddy speaks to Francis Pike about these meetings, and Francis makes the case that despite the Iran war, America – thanks to Trump – remains the global superpower. Also on the podcast, they discuss Modi's attempts to curb collateral from the oil shortages and why he's a leader like no other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Are the haters wrong about Trump's foreign policy?

Jawad Iqbal

The unbearable smugness of Arsenal fans

Arsenal are Premier League champions after a 22-year wait: their first title since the famous Invincibles season under Arsène Wenger in 2004. The title was sealed after Manchester City (serial champions, let’s not forget) failed to beat Bournemouth last night, handing Arsenal an unassailable lead at the top of the table with one game remaining. The team deserves all the plaudits for winning the Premier League, but what is it with Arsenal and their fans when it comes to celebrations? Why do they always go so over the top? It is cringeworthy stuff, reeking of a certain smug sense of undeserved entitlement, and enough to bring out the “celebration police” mentality in every other fan across the land.

Eliot Wilson

Trump’s NATO troop reduction isn’t Europe’s biggest problem

Before Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, there were many commentators who sought to sanitize the President. Take him seriously but not literally, they said. Some hinted that his cruder and wilder hyperbole was not the ignorant, boorish reflex it seemed but a shrewd and daring negotiating tactic in Trump’s beloved "art of the deal." It has been reported that the United States is planning to announce a reduction in the number of troops it will make available to NATO in Europe. America is planning to shrink its commitment to the NATO Force model, under which troops "carry out the alliance’s operations, missions and other activities during peacetime.

Ben Clerkin

Why drones will carry out the next 9/11

Few know more about drone warfare than Brett Velicovich. During the Iraq war, the former Delta Force intelligence analyst lived in a “black box” in the Iraqi desert using Reaper and Predator drones to pinpoint and track high-value terrorists – before sending in Tier 1 special forces teams, or a Hellfire missile, to end their lives. Most notable among the scalps he claimed were ISIS founder Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Ayyub al-Masri. “I feel like there's going to be another 9/11, but this time without the martyrs because you don't need humans anymore to cause sensational damage” Velicovich’s days in the "black box” were some of the last that America could control the skies with drones.

Daniel McCarthy

Where Thomas Massie went wrong

What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel? The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.

Tuesday

19 May 2026

Charles Lipson

The tide has turned in Ukraine

The long war in Ukraine has morphed into a new and decisive phase, one that could lead to Ukraine’s upset victory over its much larger, more aggressive neighbor. The global consequences of Russia’s loss – and Vladimir Putin’s humiliation – would be enormous. What is this new phase? Is there really evidence the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor? To sort out the answers and understand what’s new about the war’s current phase, we need to do a brief tour of the three phases that preceded it. The first phase began well over a decade ago, in February 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Ukraine fatefully signaled it wanted much stronger ties with Europe and the United States, not Russia, at the very moment US deterrence was weak.

Gareth Roberts

My strange beef with Azealia Banks

It’s always fun when worlds collide – when two people whose paths should rightfully never intersect smash into one another like a car and train at a level crossing. I’ve enjoyed many such occurrences on the political scene over the years – like Mrs. Thatcher doing the video vote on Saturday Superstore with René from ’Allo ’Allo. But I never expected to find myself involved in one. I have to admit I never expected to get into the middle of a rap beef, let alone one connected to the Daily Telegraph That all changed on Saturday evening. There I was happily rolling pastry in the kitchen when suddenly my phone and other connected smart devices started flashing and pinging like a Chernobyl control panel.

Theo Hobson

Middlemarch is overrated

Middlemarch, which a Guardian poll of "experts" has named as the best novel ever, is overrated. I enjoyed reading it when I was seventeen. I probably re-read it in my twenties. Then I grew up. I became a bit more skeptical of the para-religious sentimentalism-on-stilts that defines George Eliot’s oeuvre, and this novel in particular. This is a pile of nonsense with a grain of truth in it Of course I was in love with Dorothea Brooke as a teenager. So high-minded, and considerate and so wisely accepting of her misfortunes, and rather pretty too. But nowadays she strikes me as a blue-stocking bore (I far prefer the feisty Gwendolyn from Daniel Deronda (partly thanks to Romola Garai’s portrayal of her). Let’s put it simply.

Freddy Gray

Was Trump’s trip a win for China?

Freddy speaks to Jacob Heilbrunn about China, Trump and America's foreign policy.

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 12: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press as he departs the White House on May 12, 2026 in Washington, DC. Trump is traveling to China where he is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for expected talks on the Iran conflict, trade imbalances, regional security, and economic cooperation between the two countries. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump needs peace in Iran

Donald Trump was for the Iran war before he was against it. His latest post on social media about the conflict indicated that he is once more calling off a sweeping military action, this time at the behest of his Gulf allies who are apparently quaking at the thought of a renewed conflict.

Monday

18 May 2026

John O’Neill

Did ‘millions’ attend Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally?

The Metropolitan Police were braced for one of the "busiest days for policing in London in recent years" on Saturday, with both a Unite the Kingdom rally organized by Tommy Robinson and a pro-Palestinian Nakba day rally taking place. Some 4,000 officers were deployed, along with helicopters, drones, Sandcat armored vehicles, dogs, horses and live facial recognition systems. The last Unite the Kingdom rally, in September, drew a crowd of 150,000 according to the police, three times what the Met expected – and organizers said this one would be "the biggest patriotic rally to grace this planet." Addressing the crowd at the event, Robinson said "we are here in our millions" and that attendees were at the "biggest event in British history.

Edward Howell

The Moscow-Beijing-Pyongyang axis is here to stay

On Donald Trump's sojourn to China – the first visit by a US President in almost a decade – North Korea was hardly at the top of the agenda. Trump and Xi Jinping had bigger fish to fry, be that China’s desire to secure rhetorical US concessions on Taiwan, Trump’s wishes for greater Chinese investment in US manufacturing or whether Beijing can compel Iran to ease the effects of the Iran War. But US-China relations are not just a two-player game. Only last weekend, history was made as North Korean soldiers participated in Moscow’s Victory Day parade for the first time. A day beforehand, Kim Jong-un had pledged to Vladimir Putin that North Korea would "give top priority" to its relations with Russia.

Saturday

16 May 2026

Ian Williams

America has a serious Chinese spying problem

President Donald Trump struck a conciliatory tone during his trip to China. He returned from his Beijing summit with Xi Jinping yesterday full of praise for the “great leader,” who is, in Trump’s estimations, “an incredible guy.” The summit was “very successful, world-renowned, and unforgettable,” according to the President, who insisted that “a lot of different problems were settled.” But there’s one problem that hasn’t been addressed: the growing number of Chinese operations on US soil. China’s espionage and influence operations are extensive Last week Eileen Wang, the mayor of the southern Californian city of Arcadia agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of China.

BEIJING, CHINA - MAY 13: Chinese youth hold American and Chinese flags as they join officials to welcome U.S. President Donald Trump at Beijing Capital International Airport on May 13, 2026 in Beijing, China. President Trump is meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing to address the Iran conflict, trade imbalances, and the Taiwan situation while establishing new bilateral boards for economic and AI oversight. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)