America

Thursday

Ian Williams

China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm. Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisers reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to

Toby Young Toby Young

Lord Young goes to Washington

I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and thinktankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist,

Tim Shipman

Gilded age: the lessons from Trump’s second term

Washington, D.C. When John Swinney, the SNP leader, and Peter Mandelson visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office a few months ago, the President showed them three different models for his planned renovation of the East Wing of the White House, which he has demolished to build a new ballroom. ‘If you’re going to do it,’ Scotland’s First Minister suggested, ‘you might as well go big.’ This Wednesday marked one year since Trump’s election victory, and going big captures the essence of his second term – bold and controversial moves, which have impressed even British politicians who thought him reckless in his first term. When Trump visited Chequers on his

Monday

Jonathan Ray

Give Baltimore a chance

You saw Homicide: Life on the Street, right? You know, that gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore. What? Ah, no, you’re thinking of The Wire, that other gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore, the one with Idris Elba and Dominic West. Homicide predates The Wire and was filmed largely around Fells Point and along Baltimore’s historic waterfront. The former City Recreation Pier, which stood in for the police department, is now a swanky hotel, the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, in whose comfortable embrace I have just wallowed. Baltimore doesn’t have a great reputation. Whenever I tell American friends I’ve been there they affect horror and ask what on earth I was thinking. Couldn’t I have gone to Boston, New

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hurricane hits Jamaica, Plaid reigns in Caerphilly and sex offender gets £500 to leave Britain

Home An Iranian man who arrived on a small boat and was deported to France on 19 September under the one in, one out scheme returned to England on another small boat. Hadush Kebatu, the migrant whose arrest for sexual assault sparked weeks of protests outside the Bell hotel in Epping where he was living, was freed by mistake from Chelmsford prison; he was arrested two days later and given £500 to be deported to Ethiopia. The Home Office ‘squandered’ billions on a ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system of asylum accommodation, a Commons home affairs committee report found. Some 900 of the 32,000 asylum-seekers in hotels might be rehoused in

James Heale James Heale

Which party has the crypto factor?

He helped ‘break’ the Bank of England – but now Scott Bessent is helping to shape its future. As a young hedge-fund manager, he served in George Soros’s firm when it made $1 billion on Black Wednesday. But as Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, he has overseen an explosion in cryptocurrencies this year which has left many in London looking on enviously. While the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin has trebled in Britain since 2021, this country’s governing framework has struggled to keep up. A shortage of political bandwidth has meant the UK lacks a national equivalent to Europe’s MiCA rules or America’s Genius Act, passed in July. Our policy

Thursday

Madeline Grant

How America’s Wasps lost their sting

They moved, with a sort of nonchalant intent, up the aisle to make communion with their God; the men in bow ties and immaculate blazers, the women in pearls. They spent the service making small bows, singing (but not too loudly) and wearing looks of pacific – or rather, north Atlantic – calm. These were the Wasps and this was St Thomas Fifth Avenue, one of their high temples in New York, where they come for their moments of triumph and where the world often bids them adieu. It was hard to tell from those gathered on a recent Sunday morning if the stiffness of their physical motions was the

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Can anyone stop J.D. Vance becoming president?

As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on Sunday to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves to address the rumbling civil conflict on the home front. J.D. Vance did not rule out invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act in order to quell the violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in several American cities. ‘The problem is the fact that the entire media in this country, cheered on by a few far-left lunatics, have made it OK to tee off on American law enforcement,’ he told NBC News. ‘We cannot accept that in the United States of America.’ This is now Vance’s familiar role. He’s not

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The Spectator state of mind

It is party time in New York as we toast the launch of The Spectator’s swish new office on Fifth Avenue. The building, an art deco number originally designed by George F. Pelham, thrusts skywards, just a few blocks from the Empire State Building – and we’re right at the top. The Spectator State of Mind. The office is a work in progress: walls half-demolished, wires hanging out, plaster on show. Yet even in its unfinished state, it looks beautiful. We spend the day getting the place in shape for our ‘hard hat party’, improvising with gaffer tape and a few well-placed lamps to conjure up a vibe. I lay

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The vanished glamour of New York nightlife

Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly surpasses the Oscar he won for the songs in that Lady Gaga remake of A Star is Born; it probably equals his Barbie soundtrack; and maybe even approaches the hits he made with and for Amy Winehouse. But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1990s, Ronson’s hair was a standard-issue crop, while he

Bernard Cornwell

My plot to take on the peach-tree thief

Summer is icumen to its end, but my peach tree yielded a fine crop this year, though most of it was stolen. My mistake was planting the tree close to the road in my front garden, which made it easy for the thief to see and approach. I doubt that the thief reads The Spectator, so it’s safe to reveal my wife’s plan to inject next year’s crop with a powerful laxative. But the few peaches we managed to pick ourselves proved delicious. I was surprised that a peach tree would survive in Cape Cod, let alone thrive, but I constantly forget that we are on the same latitude as

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

A new era of nuclear weapons is here

The world is moving into a more dangerous age. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, last year set a grim record, namely the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in more than seven decades. At the same time, we are seeing a fundamental realignment of global geopolitics – made clear from the recent meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation in Tianjin and the ‘Victory Day’ parade held in Beijing shortly afterwards. There, the leaders of what many in the West see as an emerging new world order stood shoulder to shoulder as Chinese military hardware was put on display to mark 80 years since the end of the second

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Is Charlie Kirk’s murder really a ‘watershed’?

The Charlie Kirk assassination has triggered a spate of duelling death counts. The usual media suspects on both sides of America’s epic left-right divide have trotted out set lists of the past decade’s politically motivated violence. For once, the faction that chocks up the most fatalities in this warped real-life video game loses – for the competition is over which end of the political spectrum can blame the other end for the frenzied ideological bloodlust we’ve been told for days now characterises the contemporary United States. For the left, the starring evidence that the right’s crazies pose the greater threat to the orderly conduct of civic life is January 6th.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

A portrait of alienation: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai, reviewed

Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize. Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia is in Vermont, working for the college library while finishing her studies, and Sunny is in New York, as a reporter for the Associated Press. When Sonia flees a coercive relationship after suffering depression and Sunny agrees to help a childhood friend choose a bride, they both return to India, where they encounter one another

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The Pret plunge isn’t quite what it seems

Gold goes on up: having risen by an unprecedented 40 per cent in a year to pass $3,600 (or £2,675) per ounce by the beginning of this week, even its most ardent devotees are wondering how long the surge can last. Much of the rise clearly represents a stampede towards the most traditional of safe havens, in anticipation of market storms ahead as well as fears over inflation and Donald Trump’s threat to the independence of the US Federal Reserve. But it also has to do with a secular shift in the economic world: de-dollarisation, as favoured by the busload of US-hating heads of states who partied with Xi Jinping

Toby Young Toby Young

How America could save free speech in Britain

The only holiday the Youngs had this summer was a week in Norfolk for the Hunstanton tennis tournament. I’m too hopeless to enter myself, but my friend Nell, who has a house nearby, organised a different competition that I was more suited to. It involved making an ‘elevator pitch’ for a policy that would fix broken Britain. What made it challenging was the panel of judges was chaired by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary who is also Nell’s dad. The problem I focused on, needless to say, was the free speech crisis. My proposal was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act and

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The truth about the trans school shooter

True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Keir Starmer’s reshuffle, Graham Linehan’s arrest and get ready for Storm Wubbo

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told the Commons that new applications for refugee family reunion visas would be suspended. She later said in a radio interview: ‘I have St George’s bunting. I also have Union Jack bunting.’ An injunction stopping the Bell Hotel, Epping, from housing asylum seekers was overturned by the Court of Appeal. Ahmad Mulakhil, 23, and Mohammad Kabir, 23, reported to be Afghan asylum seekers, pleaded not guilty to charges in connection with the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton on 22 July. Only 56 migrants arrived in England in small boats in the seven days to 1 September. Tommy Robinson, the right-wing agitator, faced

Friday

Luke Lyman

Taylor Swift is saving America

Elon Musk and Taylor Swift fans rejoice! America’s birthrate is saved! News of the engagement between America’s reigning sweetheart, Taylor Swift, and jock, Travis Kelce, can mean only one thing: a millennial marriage boom is upon us. And with it, natalists will hope, an impending baby boom. I’m no Swiftie. Nor am I one of those men who’s organised his entire political identity around hating the singer. Still, I can’t deny that I feel uplifted by the jubilation erupting across the US and beyond this week. Why? Because Taylor and Travis are taking a stand against pessimism. America’s permanently heartbroken oldest daughter has escaped her fate (for now). These are

Thursday

Sean Thomas

America’s obsession with British decline

As Sigmund Freud pointed out way back in 1905, everyone feels a bit schizo about Mum. On the one hand, she carried you in the womb, she probably nursed you at the nipple. She made the greatest of sacrifices so that you exist. Heck, maybe you really love her cooking. On the other hand, you have to escape her. The Italians have a brilliantly pejorative word for the man-child who stays in the maternal home far too late in life: mammone. No one wants to be that guy. And to avoid it, sometimes you have to scorn your mother, to break the psychological apron strings. So it is with American