America
Reality bites
No wonder the President would rather be asleep
How Glenn Youngkin beat the Democrats in Virginia
When a Republican wins in a reliably Democratic state, it’s big news. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia, where newcomer…
Joe Biden is making the world a more dangerous place
Less than a year into the Biden presidency the world suddenly is a very chaotic place. The hasty and botched…
Diary
Rishi Sunak had a pre-game Twix and a Sprite to prepare for this week’s impressive Budget. I used to have…
Could a truthful Clinton have saved the US?
What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because…
Diary
The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core…
Colin Powell: A great man – and a failure
My memory of Colin Powell feels personal, even though we were 6000 miles apart at the time. I was in…
The rise and rise of hate hoaxing
Last week, some racist graffiti was found at Parkway North and Parkway Central schools in the Midwest American state of…
A script to raise whirlwinds
Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant. Then the entire world collapses. That’s the story of Camp Siegfried, which is set…
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
No, America couldn’t have been Canada
What if William Howe, the dithering British commander, hadn’t let the American army escape in the Battle of Long Island…
The Covid pantomime at my father’s memorial
This last weekend I attended the memorial service for my father, who died in July. This isn’t a bid for…
Joe Biden is everything Trump wanted to be
Do you remember the president who gave Vladimir Putin everything he wanted in Europe? The president who consistently ignored the…
Biden is losing Nato
The forming of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) military alliance in the Pacific shows how everything Trump can say, Biden can do.…
Aukus is a disaster for the EU
It is hard to overstate the importance of the so-called Aukus alliance between the US, the UK and Australia —…
Crime and punishment
How do we have difficult conversations? Especially in an age of polarisation, where everything is immediately politicised? But also where…
Macron’s ambitions have been torpedoed by Aukus
Today France is outraged. First, explicitly because Australia has broken a large contract to have a French company design their…
America’s Covid rules are for serfs, not celebrities
Amid the ridiculous outfits at the Met Gala last night, between the faux-socialist in her absurd ‘Tax the Rich’ dress…
Full circle
How the left thought they were right to fight the war on terror
Defund the world’s policeman?
It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary…
The West’s Islamist capitulation
On Monday, Tony Blair addressed a military think tank in London and stated that the West should continue to intervene…
Portrait of the week
Home Britain brought its last troops home from Afghanistan, having flown out more than 15,000 people since 14 August; but…
‘Britain is not a superpower’
The Defence Secretary on Afghanistan and the questions facing the West
The Spectator’s Notes
From time to time, people get worried and ask one another: ‘Is the world falling apart?’ I imagine this is…
A farewell to arms
It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing…
