World

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange has tabled a $37 billion bid for its London rival. Li Ka-shing is buying the pub chain Greene King for $3.3 billion. The American buy-out firm Advent has offered $5 billion for aerospace supplier Cobham. On an almost weekly basis, foreign predators are swooping on one British company after another. But hold on: the UK is meant to be plunging into an economic abyss. A chaotic departure from the European Union, a political system in meltdown and the looming threat of a Marxist hard-left government have made Britain the one country that investors don’t want to touch. To many, the ZAVs — Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Venezuela  — look attractive by comparison. And yet, the flurry of buyouts by foreign firms is not as odd as it may seem.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is suing a British newspaper for publishing a handwritten letter to her father. Prince Harry, for his part, has attacked the press for waging a campaign against his wife ‘with no thought to the consequences’. But it isn’t just the tabloid media that is turning on the American duchess. She’s turning into a royal nightmare. In the cover piece of the first US edition of The Spectator, Rod Liddle argues that the ‘Princess of Woke’ is rubbing up the British the wrong way. Please America, take her back? The great triumph of recent American politics is for the people of your fine country to have elected as president a man who is the precise embodiment of what supercilious Europeans think Americans are really like.

Is Boris Johnson approaching a Brexit breakthrough? That’s the question being asked among Conservative Members of Parliament after there appeared to be movement last week from the government and Democratic Unionist party that could help to secure a deal with the European Union. Today the prime minister met with EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in Luxembourg to discuss the prospect, over a lunch of chicken oysters and risotto. On the conclusions of the meeting, a No. 10 spokesman said the pair had agreed to step up discussions and for Michel Barnier and Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay to hold talks on a political level: ‘The leaders agreed that the discussions needed to intensify and that meetings would soon take place on a daily basis.

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on October 31. This is a massive problem, if it hasn’t worked out what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s UK cover story, this decision plunged millions of European Union nationals into uncertainty. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million living in the country. And what would happen to the other two million on October 31? If they change jobs, how would a French baker who has lived here for 30 years distinguish himself from a French baker just off the ferry if he starts a new job?

In Arthur Miller’s superb examination of the nature of fanaticism, The Crucible, the key moment comes not with the initiation of the Salem witch trials which form the subject of the play, but in the leading character finally and fully rejecting them. The point of crisis comes when John Proctor refuses to sign his name to the condemnation of supposed witches which would justify their horrific punishment. 'How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul, leave me my name.' It is the moment when a man finally finds the courage that is essential to any meaningful masculinity, the courage to defy the absolute consensus of opinion that harms the innocent and taints those who accept it with complicity in evil.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the 'emergency’, the 'international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) 'the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ 'Our house is burning.

Another year, another weird joint letter from Sen. Tom Cotton and his buddies to a foreign power. In 2015, it was a terse warning to the mullahs in Tehran. The Iran nuclear deal was 'nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,' Cotton and 46 other Republican senators wrote. 'The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen… We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system.' In 2019, Cotton & co. turned not to foe but friend. 'Congratulations again to you,' Cotton and 44 others wrote Boris Johnson over the weekend.

Last night, during his entertaining slugfest with Jeremy Hunt, his rival for Number 10, Boris Johnson promised to take Britain off the 'hamster wheel of doom.' I thought it was the best line of the night. Judging from the applause, the audience did, too. I should acknowledge that Boris was somewhat parsimonious about exactly what mechanism he intended to employ to effect the announced emancipation. But about two of the evening’s chief issues — Brexit and Britain’s relations with the United States — Boris really didn’t need details. He needed, and demonstrated, determination. The Sir Humphreys of the world hate Boris, and they hate Brexit.

Dr Johnson, who was right about so many things, was certainly correct about London: when a man is tired of London, he said, he is tired of life. I have been in that great metropolis for the last few days and I am once again impressed by the truth of Johnson’s declaration. Not for the first time, however, I find myself asking myself why I am so impressed. Plenty of other cities have conspicuous charms. Paris, for example, is in many ways more beautiful and picturesque than London, more patently sensual, not to say sybaritic. New York is more virile and commanding. But London, for a Yankee like me, exercises a special fascination. One of these days I will sit down and try to plumb the lineaments of that fascination.