Freddy Gray is deputy editor of The Spectator
You can tell when Donald Trump has just achieved something: he starts being strangely amiable, and his critics start frothing at the mouth. He’s just met supposedly one of the most dangerous, evil men in the world — and made him look like a sweet overgrown child. He and Kim Jong-un just signed an agreement
If the BBC really is, as Steve Bannon says, a communications department of the global elite, they messed up badly last night. Emily Maitlis’s 20-minute long interview with Bannon on Newsnight was mesmerising television — even, or especially, if you can’t bear the subject. It was also the longest advertisement for economic nationalism yet delivered to
Did anybody really think President Donald J Trump wasn’t going to pull out of the Iran deal? He’s said all along he would and this Commander-in-Chief’s number one public image rule is that, unlike most politicians, he honours his word. Trump’s other big rule is that anything Obama has done he’ll undo. And Obama’s biggest achievement,
From 2009 to 2010 Sven Hughes worked for SCL group, the parent company of the controversial — now deceased — Cambridge Analytica. SCL/Cambridge Analytica and its CEO Alexander Nix have been in the news a lot lately, chiefly because of their role in the Trump campaign. The fall of Cambridge Analytica was prompted by a
As I’ve said before, but it needs saying again because these people never stop — the let’s-bomb-Syria brigade has never quite gotten over the horror of being rebuffed by Parliament in 2013. And this week, what with the latest reported use of chemical weapons by Assad in Syria, they’ve got their tails up again. We don’t
Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal relationship as leaders of their respective countries by interlocking palms and refusing to let go. They kept at it for a good 30 seconds. They didn’t release even as Trump began kissing Macron’s wife. It
You could call it the John Bolton effect. The President’s new National Security Adviser has only been in the job a few days, and already Donald Trump is threatening war with Russia on Twitter: SMART! One can almost imagine Bolton’s moustache brushing Trump’s ear on that one. Trump didn’t talk about Russia like that before.
Nobody likes the sound of trade war, and rightly so. China’s new retaliatory tariffs moves against US products feel like the beginning of something bad: an escalating tit-for-tat trade conflict between the world’s richest countries which could choke the global economy. But there are good reasons to think that, far from being another silly move
The Cambridge Analytica story is full of hot air. Everybody delights in talking about how scary Facebook is, and lots of people believe the Donald Trump and Brexit campaigns somehow hoodwinked whole electorates — because, well, how else could they have won? We hear about creepy and sophisticated–sounding techniques such as ‘micro-targeting’ and ‘psychographics’. But
The Cambridge Analytica story is full of hot air. Everybody delights in talking about how scary Facebook is, and lots of people believe the Donald Trump and Brexit campaigns somehow hoodwinked whole electorates — because, well, how else could they have won? We hear about creepy and sophisticated-sounding techniques such as ‘micro-targeting’ and ‘psychographics’. But
Another massive America news blizzard yesterday: Trump lawyer quits, tariffs tariffs tariffs, stock-market slide, former alleged mistresses of the President speaking out, McMaster out (finally), Bolton in (finally). And then, as a night cap, the Senate approves a whooping $1.3 trillion spending plan to prevent a government shutdown. The Bolton news has, so far, been
Every few weeks, it seems, Carole Cadwalladr drops a long piece for the Guardian or the Observer about how the Trump and Brexit campaigns mind-hacked democracy. On both sides of the Atlantic, people who don’t like Trump or Brexit share these pieces and shriek. The latest article, which lit up the political internet at the weekend, has the added spice
My objection to Steve Bell, the Guardian cartoonist, is not that he is risqué. Nor is it that he’s rabidly anti-Tory. It’s that his cartoons are often unfunny to the point of being humourless. I’m not exactly his target audience, though, so I would say that. But a friend has pointed out that his drawing
Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew.
Sometimes it’s almost as if Donald Trump wants the world to think he’s a Russian patsy. Yesterday, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, warned Putin that Russia’s alleged assassination attempt on British soil would trigger ‘a response’. Today he’s been sacked. But the sacking almost certainly isn’t about Russia. It seems Trump asked Tillerson to
Theresa May might regret using such strong language in her statement on the Skripal case last night. Saying that there had been the ‘unlawful use of force’ on British soil and that a response would be imminent has led to a lot of people invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty – something mentioned in
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‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. As President, that still seems to be his mantra. Everybody knows that he feels America has been ripped off for decades when it comes to global trade — and that he intends address imbalances that hurt his country wherever he can. But his
Every week is extraordinary in the Trump administration — but this week seems stranger than most. Matters are rumbling in the belly of the beast. On Tuesday, we learned that Jared Kushner had his security clearance downgraded. Today, we learn that Hope Hicks, famously Trump’s most trusted aide, has resigned, a day after she testified
It was always ridiculous that Jared Kushner, an amiable 37-year-old who had no diplomatic, political or military experience, should have had top-level ‘SCI’ security access as a senior member of the White House — just because he happened to be the President’s son-in-law. Well now, he’s been downgraded, as Politico reports. He continues to have
