We are living in a world of profound confusion. Despite many of our best wishes, Donald Trump’s promise of a trade war was no April Fools’ Day prank. The follies were merely postponed. ‘History repeats itself,’ wrote Marx: ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Tariffs may prove him right, though the […]
I am subject to a chronic embarrassment. It is assumed that because I write about politics, I must be able to forecast the future. But I always decline. If people insist, I will have a crack at predicting the recent past, but that is difficult enough. Consider the position last December. The Labour Government had […]
So, what happens now? There is general agreement that last Friday’s White House meeting was a disaster. Nothing like that has ever occurred in the Oval Office. It was the sort of way in which Stalin might have treated one of his colleagues, before ordering him to be taken off and shot. The Western Alliance: […]
Are we witnessing a transient storm, after which the climate will return to normal, or is it an earthquake, leading to a fundamentally changed political landscape? To judge by Kemi Badenoch’s latest speech – delivered at the ARC Conference – she believes that Britain specifically, and the West in general, are both facing a crisis […]
Donald Trump might take this as a compliment, but he resembles two very different pursuits: Wagner and red-deer stalking in the Scottish highlands. In both cases, nobody is indifferent. Some find themselves addicted: others repelled. The same is true of Trump. His supporters revel in MAGA. His opponents believe that the Oval Office has been […]
The unthinkable has come to pass. The new President has burst through the frontiers of credulity. Donald Trump says that he wants a revolution based on common sense. That has always been a much more elusive quality than its advocates may realise, and no one ever had the Donald down as one of its exemplars. […]
The decorations are down. The last strains of ‘Tidings of comfort and joy’ are no longer audible. Instead, it is the season for the Massacre of the Innocents and the Flight into Egypt. There is a good old Scottish phrase to mark the end of a festival and the return to normal life: ‘back to […]
Confusion is worse confounded. As far as I can tell, no one foresaw the fall of Bashar al-Assad. So it is hardly surprising that no one has any clear idea what will happen next. Some 20 years ago, I spent a bit of time in Syria in the days of Hafeez al-Assad. The country seemed […]
We are not supposed to call Keir Starmer’s re-launch a re-launch and one can understand why. ‘Re-launch’ would imply some novelty. There was none. The Prime Minister delivered a tired combination: an old message, and a persistence in failure. The ‘old’ part almost entitles him to sympathy. Like most of his recent predecessors, he is […]
Imagine. It is twenty years ago, and you are an aspirant political novelist. So you do some drafting and take your efforts to a publisher. Your two principal characters are a prime minister resembling Boris Johnson and a US president: a dead ringer for Donald Trump. Arriving full of optimism, your meeting is brief, and […]
British politics has now entered a new and unpredictable phase. After their party’s smashing defeat at the latest election, most Tories assumed that Labour would be in power for at least a decade. In many cases, the stress was on the ‘at least’. Tory morale was rare as bananas at the end of the Second […]
An important event is approaching. A few months ago, hardly anyone seemed interested in the Tory leadership contest. Complacent Lefties, buoyed up by victory, were reviving the old cliches about deckchairs on the Titanic. Who would be the next William Hague, sacrificing youthful promise to lead his demoralised followers towards a distant vista of interminable […]
Tragedy in Israel/Palestine: by contrast, banality in the UK. As for British politics, who would have thought it? No government, let alone one with such a large majority, has ever dissipated such an advantage so rapidly. As for Sue Gray, I have never met her, but some of those who do know her are bewildered. […]
The fate of Lebanon is heart-rending. It should be one of the glories of the Levant and of Mediterranean civilisation. At ground level, the Lebanese have always had an appetite for a good time: every vice imaginable can be found in Beirut. But there’s one problem. The pleasures of dolce far niente are likely to […]
My dear late friend Peregrine Worsthorne had a delightful Franco-Belgian wife, Claudie, whose English was fine, except for a tendency to mangle metaphors and catchphrases. Once, her husband was upset by something or other. Claudie’s comment: ‘My poor Perry: he spent the whole night crying cats and dogs’. Perhaps that is what they are now […]
I do not believe that any incoming Government has ever stumbled into a slough of despond quite so quickly. Keir Starmer won a huge majority because of the vagaries of the electoral system and the unpopularity of the Tories. Those remain his sole assets. Indeed, a large number of people who used to say ‘he […]
We have been here before, when matters seemed, if anything, even worse. I was reminded of this by a work of light fiction, perfect for holiday reading, by Jim Naughtie, called ‘Paris Spring’, set in the spring of 1968. Back then, it was some time since there had been a French revolution, so it might […]
Rarely has bad news been broadcast so enthusiastically. Keir Starmer has told us that the country is in a mess, both economically and socially. The difficulties will get worse before they get better and there is little hint of sunlit uplands: not that Starmer is a sunlit character. Moreover, switching to the gloom which comes […]
Autumn approaches, but not much in the way of mellow fruitfulness. In the UK, the public mood has not seemed gloomier since the late 1970s. In much of the US, for gloom, read anger. On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a withdrawal of faith in institutions and in democracy itself. This is alarming. […]
Health. Although we need not echo the Psalmist’s scepticism about the value of living beyond three score and ten, there are factors. As I move steadily into my eighth decade (can I really be that old?) there is a recurrent topic in most conversations. ‘You’ve heard that Meg’s having chemo?’ or ‘You know that Fred’s […]
