Nigel Jones

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor will no doubt be feeling sorry for himself this morning. Stripped of his royal title and booted out of his Windsor mansion, Andrew probably feels that he has paid an unjust price following the Virginia Giuffre scandal. Indeed, King Charles’ defenestration of his disgraced brother is being described across the world as ‘unprecedented’. The truth is that Andrew should count himself very lucky indeed. Had he been born in a different era, his downfall might have been far more complete.

That strange sound coming from their primeval swamp is the noise of two Tory dinosaurs trumpeting their disdain and disapproval of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. As if in coordinated stereo, former prime minister John Major, 82, and his erstwhile rival for the party leadership, Michael Heseltine, 92, have both sounded off with dire warnings to their old party against any idea forming a pact with Reform. 'I want to expose Reform for what they are,' Michael Heseltine said Major, whose lacklustre premiership ended in 1997 with his landslide defeat by Tony Blair’s New Labour, said that a pact with the rising populist party which is leading both Labour and the Tories in the polls, would be 'beyond stupid' and forever destroy the Conservatives.

President Trump’s undeclared war on Latin America’s drug smugglers escalated dramatically on Tuesday when US air strikes destroyed four more boats allegedly carrying narcotics – this time in the eastern Pacific Ocean 400 miles south of the Mexican coastal city of Acapulco.At least fourteen crew members died in the attacks, and one was rescued alive by the Mexican navy, bringing the total number killed by the US campaign in the last two months to 57.Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the attacks as a violation of international law, and said Mexico’s ambassador in Washington would lodge a protest and demand an explanation from US officials.The latest strikes were personally authorized by Trump and announced by War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Javier Milei, Argentina’s self styled “anarcho-capitalist” President, defied pessimistic poll predictions on Sunday to win in the midterm elections and save his radical economic reforms. With almost all the votes counted, Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party had won nearly 41 percent of the national vote, while the main left-wing Peronist opposition Fuerza Patria party netted just over 31 percent.  Up for grabs in the election were 127 of the 257 seats in the lower house of Congress, and 24 out of 72 seats in the upper house Senate. The LLA won 64 lower house seats and 12 in the Senate, enough for Milei to overcome an opposition veto against his most radical measures.

Lord Dick Taverne, a one-time Labour Minister turned Lib Dem peer, has died at the great age of 97 – and with him has passed the once leading force of social democracy in British politics. A Charterhouse and Balliol College Oxford educated intellectua, Taverne was a barrister who entered Parliament as Labour MP for Lincoln at a by-election in 1962, and quickly rose to be a minister in Harold Wilson’s government of the late 1960s, serving as a Home Office minister and chief secretary to the Treasury. Taverne had the distinction of being both the first social democrat to leave Labour because of its swing to the left, and (apart from David Owen), the last survivor of those rebels who broke with the party to create the SDP.

The message could not be clearer: Israeli football fans are not welcome in Birmingham. I am no lover of football, but that doesn’t stop me feeling outraged and sickened by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being told not to attend their Europa League game against Aston Villa next month. The seats at Villa Park that had been allocated to the Israeli visitors for the fixture will now remain empty. In Amsterdam, Maccabi supporters were attacked by anti-Semitic mobs The appalling decision to tell fans of the Israeli club that they are not permitted to attend the 6 November game – meekly accepted, of course, by West Midlands Police and Villa – comes from Birmingham City Council's Safety Advisory Group. What an appropriately saggy acronym the letters SAG make.

Japan is still in many ways a traditionalist – not to say a sexist – society. But the times they are a changing, and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have just chosen Sanae Takaichi as its leader, which means that she will become the country’s first ever female Prime Minister, and it’s most stridently right-wing one. Takaichi, 64, revels in the nickname the "Iron Lady" and is a hardline patriotic right-winger who is an avowed admirer of the original Iron Lady - Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who Takaichi has cited as her role model.

Brazil’s former right-wing president Jair Bolsanaro has been sentenced to 27 years in jail after being found guilty by the Supreme Court in Brasilia of plotting a coup and attempting the assassination of his leftist successor, the current President Luiz "Lula" da Silva. The five-person court panel trying the case delivered a verdict, with four judges voting guilty and one voting to acquit. The casting guilty vote was returned by a female judge, Carmen Lucia. Donald Trump, who regards Bolsanaro as a personal friend as well as an ideological ally, has described the trial as a "witch hunt" and a "political assassination." He has imposed 50 percent tariff charges on Brazil in response, and has threatened to increase the sanctions if Bolsanaro goes to jail.

A landslide election defeat for Argentine President Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party has made money markets doubt whether he will be able to push through his radical economic reforms.The Argentine peso lost 5.6 percent to the dollar and the Merval stock index plunged by 13 points on Monday after the flamboyant President’s party trailed the leftist opposition Peronist party of former President Cristina Kirchner by 13 points (47 percent to 34 percent) in local elections in Buenos Aires province – which, with 40 percent of the country’s voters, is the country’s biggest and most populous area.Bond markets also reacted negatively to the shock result, posting their biggest daily falls since they recommenced trading in 2021 after a debt reconstruction deal.

Back in July I wrote in these pages that if too many Tories joined Reform, Nigel Farage’s party would risk looking like a rescue raft for rats leaving the sinking Conservative ship. Since then, the trend for repentant or redundant Tories to desert their old party – so comprehensively rejected by the voters – and flee to the rising Reform rebels has only accelerated. Recent Reform recruits include the former Conservative party chairman Jake Berry, former Tory Welsh secretary David Jones, and senior former Tory MP Adam Holloway. Ex-Tory minister Dame Andrea Jenkyns is now Reform’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, and Reform’s latest MP, Sarah Pochin, who won the Runcorn by-election in May, is also a former Conservative councillor.

The trial of Brazil’s former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of plotting a coup to topple the current President Lula da Silva is entering its final stages.Bolsonaro, 70, and seven co- defendants are accused of conspiring to oust Lula, the veteran left-winger who narrowly beat him in the 2022 Presidential election. The Supreme Court in Brasilia will consider its verdict this week. If – as expected – the court convicts Bolsonaro, the ailing ex-President is looking at a lengthy jail sentence, and may die in prison as a result. Bolsonaro has been in poor health since he was stabbed in the abdomen in an assassination attempt while campaigning during his successful bid for the presidency in 2018.

President Trump has authorized what he called a "kinetic strike" from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called "narco terrorists" aboard. The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime. The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro "the world’s No.