Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40
On the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, Pope Francis was driven through St. Peter’s Square in an open-topped Popemobile. A few weeks earlier he had nearly died from pneumonia, so pilgrims were thrilled to watch him blessing babies. They told journalists that it was a miracle to see the 88-year-old Argentinian in such good
“I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left,” Steve Hilton tells the lunch meeting of Southern California Republican Women. Knives and forks rattle on porcelain as the perfectly coiffured ladies down cutlery to clap. Remarkably, Hilton, director of strategy under former British prime minister David Cameron, has topped virtually
A Labour MP, reflecting on the problems UK Prime Minister faces over the war in Iran, observed: “Keir got it right, but things keep going wrong.” His point was that Starmer kept Britain out of the Israeli-American air strikes, a position popular both with the parliamentary Labour party and the electorate, yet the impact of
No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status.
From time to time, I’ve given some famous pianists a bit of a kicking in the arts pages of this magazine. You may be a Bach specialist, but that’s no excuse for sleepwalking through all six keyboard partitas in a marathon recital. Your -Beethoven Diabelli Variations may be renowned, but don’t expect a rave review
As a birthday treat, a good father might take his ten-year-old daughter to the ballet or a Disney movie. Three years ago, North Korea’s ruling dictator Kim Jong-un (“Brilliant Comrade”) took his ten-year-old daughter Kim Ju-ae to the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was her first public outing. Subsequent kiddie treats have included
I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen,
“Donald Trump is a complicated person with simple ideas,” said Kellyanne Conway, the former White House senior counselor. “Way too many politicians are the exact opposite.” It’s a good way of understanding the 45th and 47th President and his extraordinary success. His turbulent personality causes mayhem, yet his political aims have remained constant, straightforward and
I am in Dubai where we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on. Granted, the sudden instruction to “seek immediate shelter’ in the early hours of Sunday morning was unnerving, but with the exception of excitable “influencers,” few people are cowering in their basements. On Saturday evening, I’d hotfooted it to the
The American-Israeli attacks on Iran were publicly called Epic Fury, but behind the scenes it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction – not just from Donald Trump but from the UK’s allies in the Gulf. A Labour peer was in Washington when the first missiles slammed into Tehran on Friday evening
When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American “rats” were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle
The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference in February. Britons “must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life,” Starmer warned. Britain
Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle.
No TV show better encapsulates the nexus between money and power than Industry. The HBO drama sees investment bankers screwing, snorting and slogging their way to the top of English society. Now, in its fourth season, political intrigue is taking center stage. Think House of Cards – but with more sex and better-remunerated hotties. Mickey
My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father, Robert, went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offenses linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimized villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest
On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by
Years ago, Peter Mandelson, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney – until last week the prime minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Reminiscing about his involvement in the Labour party’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the “spray-paint election.” The manifesto was a “beautiful technicolor” document
The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to