America

Queen Elizabeth II, who died a year ago today, has left an unfillable void – not least for the many Americans like myself who so deeply admired Her Majesty. Though the United States rejected monarchy in 1776, Queen Elizabeth was to many of us a living reminder of the noble, just, and humane principles central to our inheritance from our mother country. Throughout her reign, the Queen played a significant role in enhancing the US-UK relationship. She maintained close relations between the two countries and was a robust ally to the United States. The Queen met every sitting US president during her reign, except Lyndon Johnson. Her capacity to charm

It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could call it pluto-utopianism. The latest manifestation of this is California Forever. A number of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have been quietly buying up 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano county, California, and at the end of last week they launched a website revealing what they planned to do with it. Behold, the future of rural America: a new community rising from the empty earth, the vision for which is set out in a series of watercolour-style illustrations.   Here is a version of that anxiety transmitted into town-planning: a sudden burst of

Senator Mitch McConnell appeared to have another elderly moment in Kentucky following an event yesterday, where a question about whether he would run for re-election in 2026 left him silent as the cameras tracked the awkward scene. It is obviously not the first time that this has happened for McConnell — and the eighty-one-year-old deserves the grace that we would grant to anyone struggling with the inevitability of age. But this is also a moment that presents a challenge for the Republican party, an effort that is larger than just one man (despite what diehard fans of Donald Trump would sometimes have you believe), and one that Senate Minority Leader

As Ukraine marked its 32nd national holiday since independence, news from the front lines and the wider world appeared better than perhaps in any week since the recapture of Kherson in November. In Zaporizhzhia, the hard-fought front lines moved a few miles forward. In Crimea, a missile strike took out a Russian S-400 anti-aircraft complex and a team of Ukrainian commandos briefly raised their yellow-and-blue flag on the peninsula for the first time since Russia’s 2014 annexation. A Russian Mi-8 helicopter pilot defected to Ukraine with a load of jet engine parts. Near-nightly waves of drone strikes deep inside Russia blew up two Tu-22M long-range bombers, four Il-78 transport aircraft

It was the last week of August 2013. I was Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The course of the Arab uprisings of 2011, which had been greeted with such naïve optimism at the time, had become bloody, not least in Syria. Only the previous week there had been a chemical weapons attack on opposition-controlled areas of Damascus in the ancient oasis – the Ghouta – that lies to the south-east of the city.  UN inspectors were begrudgingly and belatedly allowed access by the Syrian government. They concluded that the chemical in question was Sarin. Hundreds of people had been killed, many others severely injured. Some may have been insurgents. The overwhelming majority were civilians, men, women and children, all trapped in

In the dog days of summer, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government are skating on thin ice once more.  An August 18-23 national survey by Abacus Data of 2,189 adults revealed that 56 per cent of respondents believed he ‘should step down’ rather than run again for re-election. Only 27 per cent felt he should stay, and 17 per cent were unsure.  The Canadian public is clearly tired of his ineffective, mediocre leadership and want him to return to private life This number is in line with recent polling data in Canada. Pierre Poilievre and the opposition Conservatives have led in almost every opinion poll conducted since he became party leader

The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived: Donald Trump’s mugshot has been released to the world. With a furrowed brow and scowl, the former President posed for his mugshot at Fulton county sheriff’s office in Georgia in his trademark navy suit and red tie yesterday. Trump was booked by the sheriff’s office in Georgia after announcing his intention to surrender, following his indictment for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. At the jail, Trump was formally arrested and will have had to have his fingerprints taken and his height and weight measured. He was released ahead of the trial in October after

One of the reasons that Donald Trump is so despised by the beautiful people of America – the people that the New York Times columnist David Brooks memorably evoked when he began a tweet ‘We in the educated class…’ – is that he consorts with so many unbeautiful people: not just working stiffs but B-list entertainers, Nascar enthusiasts and prize fighters.   It is from the world of the last-named agonistic endeavor that I learned a word that perfectly describes last night’s festivities. The word is ‘undercard’. It means that list of ‘minor or supporting contests printed on the same bill as the main event (primarily fighting or racing).’ Fox News, together with

Who is Perry Johnson? It is a question not many American voters can answer. He has a grand total of 16,000 followers on Twitter and recently pulled in precisely zero votes in a poll in Des Moines, Iowa. He describes himself as a ‘self-made businessman, problem-solver and quality expert from Michigan’. Nevertheless, this slightly cadaverous-looking businessman has joined the running to be the Republican party’s candidate for president. There have been so many upsets in American politics of late that almost everybody thinks they have a chance Does he stand a chance? Nope. The main way through he has found so far is by buying up advertisements on the right-wing

They are the Odd Couple of the United States Senate. She is a progressive Democrat and senior senator from true-blue Massachusetts, he a nationalist Republican and junior senator from ever-reddening Ohio. She has a 100 per cent rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League; he is ‘100 per cent pro-life’. She wants a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens; he wants a wall and to double the border patrol. She backs a federal assault weapons ban; his hero is his grandmother, who owned 19 handguns.  Although hailing from different sides of the culture wars, each is articulating material concerns that matter much more to the lives of Americans than whether Bud Light is woke No, Elizabeth Warren and JD Vance

In our age of mass attention deficit, the manifold legals trials against Donald Trump represent a big challenge. Maybe that’s the point. It’s hard to care when you can’t keep count. The whole objective of ‘lawfare’, as it is called, is to bully your enemy into submission through overwhelming paperwork. It might work. That doesn’t make it just.  Let’s be clear: calling the multi-dimensional legal campaign against Donald Trump ‘lawfare’ isn’t a statement of support for Trump, necessarily. It’s more a summary of observable reality.  The irony is that, at this stage in the presidential campaign, the legal warfare on Trump is increasing his appeal The latest of four criminal

‘Today was hard. I can’t imagine what it was like for the families of those we left behind.’ That was an email from a friend who’d served in Afghanistan, sent as the chaos of the western withdrawal from Afghanistan played out on rolling news almost exactly two years ago. His grief – mirrored across the military and the media establishment on both sides of the Atlantic – now feels a long time ago, at least to those detached from the 20-year fight against the Taliban. Like many a separation, however, over time it becomes clear it was the right thing to do. The US had spent almost a trillion dollars fighting and nation building in Afghanistan. They’d lost more than 2,000 men. And as events post-withdrawal were to

‘My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.’ Every word of destransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to the US Congress was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just 15 years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of the bodily integrity of a teenage girl should rankle the conscience of modern America. ‘Before I was able to legally drive’, she said, they ‘amputated’ my breasts. They were ‘perfectly healthy’, she told a panel of shocked politicians, but still they were cut off and burned, like trash: ‘I had a huge part of my

When Donald Trump’s attorney and spokeswoman Alina Habba took to the streets on Thursday in front of the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, she described the former president as ‘the leading candidate right now for president for either party’. It’s a slight stretch, but only slightly. Trump is within the margin of error against Joe Biden in virtually every poll, largely undamaged by the ever compounding series of ‘solemn days’ when he faces new legal woes. Biden’s team is calculating that Trump is the least formidable candidate for them to take on next autumn The American football cliché usually attributed to the NFL great John Madden is simple: if you’ve got two quarterbacks,

Poor old BBC political editor Chris Mason got a rude awakening during his interview with Donald Trump’s former aide this morning. Sebastian Gorka blasted Mason for putting ‘words in his mouth’ in a fiery appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme. Gorka, who served as Trump’s former deputy assistant, defended his former boss who was charged overnight with attempting to overturn the 2020 US election. But when Mason suggested Gorka was ‘talking down’ the US’ reputation as a ‘rich and vibrant democracy’, with no one being above the law, Trump’s ally was not impressed. ‘Why are you putting words in my mouth? I’m talking about the absolute opposite. Do you not