Australia
Three’s a crowd
Calling themselves the Bee Gees spelt trouble from the start for the very disparate Gibb brothers, says Craig Brown
Death on the Nile
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Who killed Australia Day?
Australia Day was once a big deal Down Under, but in recent years the annual celebration has been somewhat muted.…
Removing PMs hardly ever ends well
As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would…
How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?
We are, of course, in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction’ of life on Earth.…
Foreign corners that are forever England
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
Are the Australian election results a bad sign for the Tories?
Scott Morrison’s Liberals were absolutely thrashed in the Australian elections this weekend. The party’s vote collapsed, and there were big-name…
How Scott Morrison was defeated in Australia
‘Scott Morrison is empathetic – without the “em”.’ Those words, spoken on Friday by the Labor party frontbencher Jason Clare,…
New Aussie rules
Conservative values have fallen out of fashion
Could Australia’s answer to Corbyn become PM?
While the main electoral attraction of the moment is the French presidential showdown between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen,…
Rest in peace, Shane Warne
Headingly, July 22nd 1993 and the opening day of the fourth test that summer between England and Australia. This, as…
Novak Djokovic is treating Australians like mugs
Just minutes from the heart of Victoria’s capital, Melbourne Park is one of the great tennis complexes. For a fortnight…
Why England lost the Ashes
England’s wretched performance in the Ashes – which saw the side lose three tests and so the series to Australia…
Letter from Taiwan
Normally, if the response to a speech of mine was that it had been a ‘despicable and insane performance’ from…
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
The EU should keep out of France’s spat with Australia
Ursula von der Leyen has demanded a full investigation. EU officials are considering pulling out of technology talks with 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 —…
Australia and the new special relationship
The awkwardly-named AUKUS agreement reflects Washington’s escalating concern about China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific. It signals London’s determination to be…
What the Aukus pact says about Britain’s foreign policy
While the foreign secretary changed in the last 24 hours, the most important announcement regarding the direction of UK foreign…
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…
Letters
A glimmer of hope Sir: After the debacle of the West’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was comforting to read…
Zero-Covid is wishful thinking if Australia wants to rejoin the world
As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all…
Can Australia escape its Covid lockdown cycle?
In the early days of the pandemic, Australia was the envy of the world. The country was lauded as a…
How Australia was caught in lockdown limbo
Sajid Javid’s deleted weekend tweet about Britain ‘learning to live with, rather than cower from Covid’ upset just about everyone…
