World

Bruno Retailleau’s quiet revolution

Bruno Retailleau has done something nobody expected. He has made himself the most serious contender for the French presidency, not by campaigning, but by governing. In a government few thought would last, under a president widely seen as disengaged and more focused on foreign stages than domestic affairs, Retailleau has taken the hardest job in the country and quietly mastered it. This week he was elected leader of Les Républicains with 74 per cent of the vote – a crushing result that signalled just how completely he has taken control of the party. He is already Minister of the Interior. Now he is starting to look like the man most

Gavin Mortimer

The EU’s power is waning. If only Starmer could see it

Britain is back in the big time. Or at least it is according to Sir Keir Starmer, who was tickled pink with the ‘reset’ relationship agreed with the European Union on Monday. ‘It’s time to look forward,’ declared the Prime Minister, standing alongside the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. ‘We’re ready to work with partners if it means we can improve people’s lives here at home.’ The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, shared the PM’s delight at a reset she believes will be good for trade, defence and energy. Others weren’t so sure. Reform leader Nigel Farage – Mr Brexit – accused the government of selling out Britain to the

Freddy Gray

Was Zbigniew Brzezinski a Cold War prophet?

30 min listen

Polish émigré Zbigniew Brzezinski – known as ‘Zbig’ – rose to prominence in America during the Cold War as a key intellectual architect of US foreign policy. He was National Security Advisor to President Carter and was a trusted advisor to many US presidents from John F Kennedy onwards. Yet, despite helping to shape American foreign policy during critical moments, he is not as well-known or celebrated as his lifelong rival Henry Kissinger.   The Financial Times’ chief US columnist Edward Luce joins Freddy Gray on this episode of Americano to talk about his new book Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet. The book aims to bridge the

Romania’s Europhiles have bludgeoned the populists

Bucharest, Romania Moments before Romania’s exit poll was announced, George Simion, the nationalist firebrand and presidential hopeful, was tapping his feet to YMCA on the steps of parliament. The campy American anthem bounced off the marble facade of Nicolae Ceausescu’s vast neoclassical palace, an incongruous soundtrack for the night’s unfolding drama. Behind him, a phalanx of aides, friendly broadcasters and visiting politicians, some in MAGA hats, swayed to the beat. Then came the news: Simion was on track to lose. He didn’t miss a step. Taking the lectern, he thundered that he had, in fact, won by 400,000 votes. His supporters cheered. Cameras snapped. It wasn’t entirely clear whether he

Stephen Daisley

Why can’t Israel-haters accept that their Eurovision song was good?

Eurovision is an annual celebration of the gaudy and the garish – but I suppose someone should come to its defence amid the backlash. This year’s contest has provoked a fit of fury not about the naff music, simpering performers, or style choices that make Lady Gaga seem demure, but about the fact that Yuval Raphael came first in the popular vote. I probably don’t need to tell you which country she was representing. It was, inevitably, Israel, under whose flag she sang the pop number ‘New Day Will Rise’. Twenty-four-year-old Raphael is a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre on 7 October 2023. After Palestinian terrorists shot up the shelter

Who was the real winner of Poland’s presidential election?

The latest exit polls in Poland suggest that liberal Warsaw mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, has won the first round of the presidential elections, with 31 per cent of the vote. Trzaskowski is a career politician, the heart-throb son of a jazz musician. He ran on a pro-European platform and has pledged to defend the independence of the judiciary and rebuild Poland’s democratic institutions. He is the candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party, and is seen as a progressive and a ‘moderniser’ who represents a more cosmopolitan and outward-facing Poland. His rival, conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, came in second with 29 per cent of the vote. Nawrocki, a historian with very

Jonathan Miller

French Guiana is the perfect place for a supermax prison

So that you don’t have to, I’ve conducted a reconnaissance of French Guiana where the French justice minister is to build a strict regime, maximum-security prison to warehouse France’s most dangerous criminals. I’ve been there a couple of times as a guest of the French space agency, which occasionally conducts launches of the Ariane rocket from Kourou. You fly in from Paris over virgin rainforest and can see the enormous space base on the descent. It’s the hand of man on the face of God. In the jungle, the butterflies are poisonous, the snakes venomous and the Caiman crocodiles hungry French Guiana has a veneer of French civilisation. You can

Democracy dies in Romania

If the vote in the first round goes the wrong way, cancel the second round. If the ‘wrong’ candidate is still likely to win the rescheduled election, then detain him before he can register to stand and then ban him. Then hold the election again, this time with a stronger ‘independent’ candidate who with media support can defeat the ally of the ‘wrong’ but more popular candidate you have banned. This is exactly what has happened in Romania. If ‘democratic values’ trump democracy then you open the door to barring candidates who espouse the ‘wrong’ positions, according to the powers that be Democratic? Well, if it happened in an ‘official enemy’

Gavin Mortimer

Could Bruno Retailleau become France’s next president?

Emmanuel Macron appeared on French television last week and spoke for three hours without saying anything of interest. It was a damning indictment of his eight years in office. The country is up to its eyes in debt, ravaged by insecurity and overwhelmed by immigration, but Macron told the country that none of it is his fault. On the contrary, the President scolded the French for being ‘too pessimistic’. The disdain is mutual. A poll conducted in the wake of the President’s interminable television interview found that 71 per cent of the people consider him to be a ‘bad’ president. As to the idea that Macron might stand for re-election

The far right is gaining footholds across Europe

The relentless rise of the populist right in Europe has been confirmed by provisional first results of elections held yesterday in three different countries: Poland, Portugal and Romania. In Poland, there will be a run-off in the second round of the presidential election. This is after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centre-left candidate close to the Civic Coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was run to an unexpectedly close second place by the ultra-conservative candidate Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Ominously for the Left, the third and fourth places were also taken by ultra right-wing candidates, whose votes are now likely to go

The US and China are in more than a trade war

Headlines on the current discord between the United States and China speak only of ‘trade war’. Negotiations in Geneva have led to a 90 day ‘truce’. If only the war were that limited. If only agreement on solving trade hostilities would return things to normal. But what is normal? Sadly, trade is just one aspect of a much broader war, in which neither side is contemplating a truce. The head of China’s BGI group, a former high ranking official, understands the reality better: ‘Many people talk about financial and trade wars, but the deadliest battle is the technology war. The technology war will ultimately determine the fate of both sides.

Will Gibraltar get in the way of Starmer’s EU reset?

For years, the UK, Spain, Gibraltar and the European Union have been negotiating, on and off, to resolve the complex issue of Gibraltar’s post-Brexit land border with Spain. Now, ahead of next week’s meeting in London when Keir Starmer welcomes EU leaders to discuss a ‘reset’ in UK-EU relations, Spain’s Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has brought ‘the Gibraltar issue’ firmly back into the spotlight.  Referring to the planned reset, which covers a wide range of issues including defence and security, fishing and British exports, Albares told the BBC’s Newsnight programme, ‘There are many, many things we need to talk [about], Gibraltar included.’ Emphasising that the relationship between the UK and

Is Keir Starmer ‘far right’ now?

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new ‘far right’ mission to lock up asylum seekers in distant countries yesterday suffered an embarrassing setback on live television. The former human rights supremo – who cancelled the Tory Rwanda scheme on day one in office – was in Tirana, less than one year later, to discuss setting up a similar scheme in Albania. Or so the media were led to believe in press briefings beforehand: that it would be a main item on the agenda at his bilateral meeting with Albania’s socialist Prime Minister Edi Rami. Italy’s conservative Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has already launched such a scheme in Albania. She is still called

Brendan O’Neill

The anti-Israel Eurovision mob are Hamas’s little helpers

Imagine booing a survivor of a fascist attack. People actually did that this week. Pro-Palestine activists heckled and insulted a young woman who survived Hamas’s anti-Semitic butchery of 7 October 2023 by playing dead under a pile of bodies. Take a minute to consider the depravity of this, the sheer inhumanity of tormenting a woman who experienced such terror. It was a spectacle of cruelty masquerading as protest The woman is Yuval Raphael. She’s the 24-year-old singer who’s representing Israel at Eurovision. The last big music event she attended was the Nova festival in the desert of southern Israel on 7 October 2023. What she witnessed there almost defies belief.

The red lines delaying an American nuclear deal with Iran

Speaking to reporters on his Middle East diplomatic tour, Donald Trump hinted at what could be his biggest foreign policy achievement to date. A nuclear deal with Iran is ‘close’, he said. Tehran has ‘sort of’ agreed to curbing its suspected clandestine atomic weapons programme. The US and Iran have now had four rounds of indirect negotiations in Oman, and although the content has remained confidential, the atmosphere between the two sides has been candid but amicable, raising expectations that a deal to stop Tehran ‘breaking out’ and building a nuclear bomb could be brokered diplomatically without the need for Trump to resort to military force. When the first round

John Keiger

Britain could pay a big price for Starmer’s ‘EU Reset’

The great ‘EU Reset’ of 19 May – when the first formal UK-EU summit since Brexit will take place – is rapidly approaching. Yet even before Keir Starmer and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen meet in London to thrash out an agreement, advance attempts to sell the new relationship are growing. That so much surrounding Monday’s UK-EU summit in London is being kept secret on either side of the Channel is auspicious ‘UK wins £500m in science grants from EU Horizon scheme after Brexit lockout,’ the Guardian excitedly told its readers earlier this month. It claimed that British scientists were ‘over the moon’ with Britain’s return to the EU’s flagship

Mixed signals for Labour as GDP rises but the rich leave

13 min listen

The Prime Minister is in Albania today to focus on immigration: the government has announced that the UK is in talks to set up ‘return hubs’ with other countries to send failed asylum seekers abroad.  Unfortunately for the government though, also going abroad are Britain’s millionaires. In the cover article for this week’s Spectator, our economics editor Michael Simmons writes that London lost 11,300 dollar millionaires last year alone. These figures run in stark contrast to today’s news that GDP increased by 0.7% in the first quarter of 2025. This continues a trend of mixed signals for Britain’s economy.  Also on the podcast Spectator editor Michael Gove discusses his interview with justice secretary

Ian Williams

What the next phase of Trump’s trade war with China looks like

For clues as to where US policy towards Beijing goes next, look beyond Donald Trump’s chaotic and erratic tariffs and focus instead on the small print of the US-UK draft trade deal. It has a clear message: that if you want to do business with Washington, keep China at bay. The agreement itself doesn’t quite put it that way. It doesn’t need to. Instead, there are broad pledges to cooperate and coordinate on ‘the effective use of investment and security measures, export controls, and ICT [information and communications technology] vendor security’, and ‘to address non-market policies of third countries’ – all tailor-made for China, even if the country is not

Putin only wants to talk to one man

A week of diplomatic manoeuvring, ultimatums and psychological gambits has ended with a sadly predictable result: Vladimir Putin will not be coming to the negotiating table in Istanbul. Nor will he be sending a single cabinet-level negotiator. Instead the Russian delegation will be headed by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky – the same low-level minion that Putin sent to the last round of talks in Istanbul in March-April 2022. Instead of a breakthrough, the great diplomatic effort led by Zelensky and the combined leaders of Europe have elicited nothing beyond a calculated insult from a defiant Kremlin.  This latest cycle of hope and failure in the endgame to the Ukraine