The Week

Leading article

The folly of Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal

It would be natural to assume that sinking bond markets would be the government’s priority this week, as low UK growth and high borrowing rattles investors. Yet remarkably the Prime Minister’s attentions seem to be focused elsewhere: on advancing a deal to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in the days before Donald

Portrait of the week

Diary

Am I a MAGA icon?

‘Traitor!’ the woman yelled at me the instant I entered the beautifully decorated living room of a famous actress. It was a Twelfth Night celebration, and the room was full of glamorous friends and acquaintances. ‘What?’ I replied, bemused. ‘That photo!’ she screamed, ‘How could you take that picture with all those Republicans?’ Over Christmas

Ancient and modern

What Bridget Phillipson has in common with Plato

One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story

Barometer

Which were the most destructive fires in history?

Swing states Where would Canada and Greenland rank if they became US states? – Canada would be, by far, the largest state. In fact, at 3,855,100 square miles it is marginally larger than the current US (3,796,742 square miles). – It would also be the largest state by population, with 41.5m inhabitants, putting it ahead

Letters

Letters: The dangers of the ADHD ‘industry’

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the