Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
The Government in the person of Rishi Sunak won a surprisingly positive public response to what was essentially a tax-raising Budget this week. Within 24 hours though, the same government had spectacularly lost the PR contest by recommending a 1 per cent pay rise for NHS staff across the board. The outcry was universal: mean,
Much ridicule has been directed at reports that Boris Johnson is eyeing not just one tunnel to link Scotland and Northern Ireland, but another three, which would converge in a giant roundabout under the Isle of Man. Comparisons have been made to Hitler moving around imaginary armies in the last days of the Third Reich.
If I could wave a wand and reverse just one government policy it would be the expansion of so-called ‘smart motorways’ in the face of what seems the iron determination of the Department for Transport to press ahead with them. These are motorways where the hard shoulder is incorporated into the motorway to create an
Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees have been warmly received by the massed ranks of anti-Trumpists in Washington. But the warmth stateside is nothing compared with the rave notices the incoming administration is receiving in much of Europe. There is particular delight in the UK, where the special Boris-Donald relationship evaporated within seconds of Biden’s election victory.
It was Nervtag that did it for me. The New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) was responsible for reviewing, and then delivering, the bad tidings to the government about a new variant of the Covid-19 in the UK. So much more easily transmitted did the group judge it to be that, within
In the last days of November, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released from Tehran’s Evin prison and flown back to a welcome in Australia. A dual Australian-UK national, she had served two years of a ten-year sentence for espionage — pronounced after a secret trial. She had been in Iran for a conference and was detained
Maybe it had to come: a note on my local (London) message-board said that the two Marks & Spencer food halls where I have taken to shopping since the first pandemic lockdown are now offering – toot the bugle, as the Prime Minister might say – a booking system. Of course, this is presented as
You don’t need to know any more about Stephen Colbert than that he is an American political broadcaster and satirist who hosts ‘The Late Show’ on the CBS television channel, which makes him something of a US household name. Last week, after Donald Trump had given his embarrassingly rambling non-concession speech in the White House
As the US enters the final straight of what has been — to put it mildly — a highly unusual election campaign, something akin to panic is taking hold among observers on both sides of the Atlantic. The premise is that the United States is in a highly fragile state, that the election could easily
When the Intelligence and Security Committee’s (ISC) Russia Report was finally published last week, the name of one person who gave evidence will have leapt out for many people. Among the ‘external expert witnesses’ listed was none other than a certain ‘Mr Christopher Steele, Director of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd’. Steele, you may remember, was
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As the long-awaited Russia report is released this week, we discuss Russia’s plan to unleash chaos (00:45). Plus, does Boris Johnson have a management problem with his new MPs? (14:30) And last, the pains of dating during lockdown (28:30). With Russia journalists Owen Matthews and Mary Dejevsky; the Spectator’s deputy political editor Katy Balls; Conservative
‘The expected recession will hit young adults hardest,’ BBC presenter, Jonny Dymond, said on ‘The World This Weekend’. Almost half the programme was then given over to the dire future that awaits the UK’s 18-24 year olds, with the prospect that a million of them could become unemployed. The latest ‘Weekend Woman’s Hour’ offered a
It had to be. We were barely into the first week of the coronavirus emergency than the Prime Minister and others started invoking the ‘Blitz spirit’. You know, that incomparable time soon after the start of world war two when Brits stood firm and united against the worst that Nazi Germany could hurl at our
Whatever your feelings about Brexit, this day, 31 January, 2020, will be seen as a point in history. It is the day that the UK left the European Union after nearly half a century and set out, once again, on its own. While we may have been through more than three years of parliamentary wrangling,
Every November the London based foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House, awards a prize for ‘the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year’. This year, the joint laureates were Sir David Attenborough and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit for the television series Blue Planet II. It is a
Last week, Boris Johnson made a last-minute change to his itinerary in the West Country after protesters from Extinction Rebellion and others had gathered outside a bakery he had planned to visit near Glastonbury. The visit, it was reported, had not been publicised, but word had nevertheless got out. The Prime Minister swerved off to
The central proposal in Damian Green’s recent paper on social care is that care provision should be treated like pensions. In ‘Fixing the care crisis’, he argues that everyone should be entitled to ‘a decent standard of care’ funded by the state – in the same way as they are entitled to a state pension
If, as looks likely, Petro Poroshenko loses his bid for re-election as President of Ukraine, he will have gone out in style. On Saturday night, the eve of the vote, his home town staged a huge public concert at the venue he created and sponsored: a state-of-the-art sound-and-light fountain complex just a short walk along
It is cold, dank and muddy and I’m contemplating a barely defined path from the paved road into an ever-darkening wood. I should have brought a torch, but I didn’t, and before the light fades completely I need to find the ‘idyllic’ woodland burial ground I have shortlisted as a possible resting place for my
It is just a week since Theresa May used her Mansion House speech to launch a broadside on Russia. During a wide-ranging survey of the international horizon, it was Russia she singled out for special criticism and it was her Russia attack that attracted (and was surely intended to attract) the headlines. Just a reminder
