Politics Archives

Tuesday

6 January 2026

Trump is misjudging Maduro’s successor

In the chaotic aftermath of Operation Absolute Resolve – the early morning extraction of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their Caracas fortress – Washington is buzzing with a dangerous level of cognitive dissonance. Over the weekend, President Trump characterised Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez, as ‘gracious’ and ‘willing to do what is necessary to make Venezuela great again’. By Sunday, the President was warning she would pay a ‘bigger price than Maduro’ if she fails to cooperate. I believe that Trump is displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the ‘Honduran Blueprint’ he is currently following. The capture of Maduro on Saturday mirrors the 2022 arrest and 2024 sentencing of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. Maduro is currently facing

Patrick West

Woke isn’t dead – and here’s the proof

In one respect, the scaremongers are right: Racism is alive and well in this country, being imbedded in our institutions and abetted by the arms of the state. But this scourge manifests itself not in the hackneyed and often illusionary variety forever invoked by the liberal-left. This is the benevolent, ‘nice’ form of racial discrimination, one which bizarrely presents itself as an extension of anti-racism. Those with a morbid fascination with skin colour are being actively encouraged in their hobby Race obsessives not only remain a real presence, but those with a morbid fascination with skin colour are being actively encouraged in their hobby. Taxpayers are now funding a music

Monday

5 January 2026

Steerpike

Lords force Chagos deal delay

Three cheers for the House of Lords. Labour might be trying to pack Britain’s second chamber with as many placemen as possible – but the noble peers are not going to take it lying down. For tonight, members of the Upper House inflicted yet another defeat on the government, this time over the deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Talk about Labour priorities, eh? Peers voted voting narrowly in favour of renegotiating the agreement, to ensure that Britain would stop making payments if the island’s use ‘for military purposes became impossible.’ Lord Craig of Radley, the crossbench peer and former chief of the defence staff who tabled

David Spencer

The chief of West Midlands Police must resign

The actions of West Midlands Police in the case of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football ban are perhaps the most dramatic demonstration in modern times of what happens when a police force no longer operates ‘without fear or favour’. The information now in the public domain shows there was never sufficient justification to ban the Israeli fans. Yet West Midlands Police have consistently claimed a ban was necessary following consultation with the ‘community’. Yet who exactly are the ‘community’ here? Indeed, who defines what the ‘community’ is? The ‘community’ apparently included three organisations who had previously hosted Islamic preachers who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories or called for the death of

Steerpike

Watch: Labour MP attacks Starmer

It’s all kicking off in the Commons tonight. The smash-and-grab assault on Caracas continues to dominate conversations in Westminster, with left-wingers furious at the Starmer government’s silence. And tonight, one of the Socialist Campaign Group’s most stalwart members, has decided to voice his irritation loudly and proudly. In response to the Foreign Secretary’s statement on Venezuela, Labour MP Richard Burgon told the House that his own leader was taking a ‘cowardly, craven approach’ by failing to condemn Donald Trump’s ‘disgusting attack on Venezuela’: It was the Prime Minister that decided to disregard the UN Charter when it came to Trump’s bombing, killing and kidnapping of a head of state. I

Madeline Grant

There’s a lesson for Britain in the fall of Venice

I’ve just come back from a short holiday in Venice. The city is an unsurpassable monument to the glories of the Renaissance, but its streets and waterways also bear witness to the absolute non-existence of ‘international rules’. When confronted by Bonaparte’s expansionist aims in 1797, the millennium-old Venetian republic responded as it had always done, relying on diplomatic assumptions maintained for centuries. Meanwhile Napoleon, promising to be ‘an Attila to the state of Venice’, simply invaded, bringing the Serene Republic to an ignominious end. Venetian art and treasures were plundered to fund the French war effort. In a particular humiliation for the city-state, Bonaparte began filling in the canals to

Oscar Edmondson

Regime change in Caracas … but not Westminster

20 min listen

It’s our first podcast back in the office of 2026 – and the year has started with a bang, of course, after the successful US operation to remove Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. He will appear in a Manhattan court later today. This throws up all sorts of problems for Labour and the left more broadly – they seem to be hedging their bets on whether to condemn this as a breach of, if not international law, then certainly international norms, or to celebrate the removal of a corrupt regime. Could this be a dividing line for the Labour party? Elsewhere, the battle that Labour want to focus on is the

Gavin Mortimer

Was Maduro’s capture the greatest special forces raid in history?

On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The American president praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as ‘incredible’. The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed ‘Absolute Resolve’ – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. ‘They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro. They were assisted by stealth drones high in the sky overhead and

Jake Wallis Simons

How to stop Venezuela from becoming Iraq

Will the Venezuela adventure end up like Afghanistan, or will it be another Iraq? In the eyes of most commentators, those seem to be the only options, both of which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives while achieving little, especially in the case of Afghanistan. It is clear that if Venezuela is to be the success story that the White House would like to see, there can be no alternative to the Panama model Some have also thrown in the example of the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, after which the rule of law collapsed, human trafficking thrived and instability spread across the region. One analyst

Stephen Daisley

Trump is winning the Maduro meme war

The Vietnam war was the first Americans watched on their nightly TV news, the Gulf War the first that could be followed live on CNN, and the Global War on Terror the first documented online through the work of bloggers, citizen journalists and video-sharing sites like LiveLeak. Meme warfare is being used not only to humiliate the Venezuela regime but also domestic critics of the president’s actions The US invasion of Venezuela, Operation Absolute Resolve, marks another innovation: it is the first armed conflict in which the victor has simultaneously won a conventional military victory and a meme war. Seeing as US forces managed to violate Venezuelan sovereignty, seize and

Stephen Pollard

Hugh Bonneville should pipe down about Israel

Hugh, meet Claire. Claire, meet Hugh. Claire has some guidance that might prove useful for you, Hugh. Should, that is, you not want to come across as any more of an ignorant buffoon than you do already. The problem for Bonneville is that details do matter. And there is a big issue with the detail of his rant To explain: over the weekend, Claire Foy – Queen Elizabeth in the first series of The Crown – had a message that some of her peers could do with taking note of: stick to reading scripts. The fact you might play the role of someone with insights worth listening to doesn’t mean

Yuan Yi Zhu

The Chagos deal could spell environmental catastrophe

This week, the government will try to push its draft deal to surrender the Chagos Islands through Parliament. There are many, many reasons why the deal is bad – from security, to the legitimate rights of the Chagossians, to the fact that the legal basis on which it is constructed is bunk. But there is another reason why the Chagos deal should be canned: it will be a catastrophe for the world’s environment. Currently, the Chagos are protected by one of the world’s largest and strictest marine protected areas, in which all fishing is forbidden. An initiative of the last Labour government, the Marine Protected Area (MPA) has safeguarded one of

Nigel Jones

What are Trump’s post-Maduro plans for Venezuela?

Donald Trump likes to keep both his friends and enemies guessing. It’s no surprise then that his plans for Venezuela’s future after his typically bold and reckless abduction of dictator Nicolas Maduro are a mystery. Trump has awarded the plum of power in Caracas not to Machado but to Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez In his Mar-a-Largo news conference after the bombing and special forces raid on Caracas that caught the mustachioed Marxist napping, and delivered him to US custody, the US president begged as many questions as he answered. Looking and sounding understandably exhausted after watching the nighttime Operation Absolute Resolve unfold on a live feed in real

Sam Leith

The outstanding beigeness of Keir Starmer

‘“I’ll be PM this time next year,” Starmer tells BBC.’ Such was the headline on the BBC’s website over the Prime Minister’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, in a place of some prominence. I feel like I’ve read this one before, don’t you? It is, hilariously yet also, oddly, boringly, the headline that now goes on every interview our useless PM gives. Out he sets, determined, as I expect he sees it, to draw a line under the speculation about his future and talk about the things that really matter to hardworking families, salt-of-the-earth toolmakers, and so on – and the most interesting thing he manages to say is that he’s

Doug Stokes

Maduro’s capture wasn't about oil

The image of Nicolás Maduro in US custody has inevitably resurrected the ghosts of foreign policy past. For the reflexively cynical observer, the narrative writes itself: a Republican White House, a Latin American strongman, and the world’s largest proven oil reserves. As with Iraq in 2003, the slogan of American imperialism and its ‘blood for oil’ foreign policy circulated on social media before the dust had even settled over Caracas. ‘The overnight strikes on Venezuela,’ declared the Guardian, and Trump’s neo-imperial ‘declaration that the US would run the country and sell its oil, have driven another truck through international law and global norms’. This is a comfortable, nostalgic critique, harking

Daniel DePetris

Trump doesn’t care about democracy in Venezuela

The US military operation to track down, capture and fly Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro back to the United States for prosecution on drug trafficking charges went flawlessly. It was well-coordinated, meticulously planned and executed to a tee. Nearly two days after Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into US custody, details of the snatch-and-grab mission are beginning to percolate into the US media. It involved a cyberattack against Caracas’s electricity system, precision bombing against several Venezuelan airfields and ports, a low-flying helicopter assault on Maduro’s hideout and a CIA deployment that was operating in the country since August. By the time Americans woke up on Saturday morning, Maduro,

Sunday

4 January 2026

Max Horder

The long history of kidnapping Latin American Chieftains

One of the few benefits of being an anthropologist is the uncanny exhilaration one feels watching novel current events as re-runs from previous episodes in the history of mankind. Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela, is no exception. Kidnapping Latin American emperors is a continental tradition. It’s simply the most practical method for breaking the chain of command in the region. It triggers succession chaos, enables the extraction of resources, and keeps the rest of the hierarchy more or less intact. In earlier centuries, it was Spain and Portugal. Today, it’s the United States. In the colonial era, the objective was to secure enough gold to beat

Joe Bedell-Brill

Sunday shows round-up: Keir Starmer hasn’t ‘got the full picture at the moment’

Keir Starmer: ‘We simply haven’t got the full picture at the moment’ The US has struck Venezuela’s capital Caracas and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Maduro is now in detention in New York. In a press conference after the military operation, President Trump said that the US will ‘run the country until such time as we can do a safe… transition’, and that America’s ‘greatest oil companies in the world’ will be ‘very much involved’. In a long interview with Prime Minister Keir Starmer this morning, Laura Kuenssberg asked if an American attack on a sovereign state was in breach of international law, and whether the

James Kirkup

AI could make degrees redundant

For decades, British politics has lived in the shadow of a major failure of social and economic policy: the imbalance between graduates and those who don’t go to university. Many politicians have understood the need to do better for the ‘other 50%’ who don’t go to higher education. But few have delivered real change. From Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ to Keir Starmer’s newfound focus on ‘higher-level skills,’ the goal has remained constant: to provide a better deal for those who don’t go to ‘uni’. Yet despite the speeches and the promises, the divide remains a major fault line of our politics. It explains Brexit (grads were Remain, non-grads Leave) and

Daniel McCarthy

Maduro got off lightly

Nicolas Maduro is a very lucky man. The Venezuelan dictator – or ex-dictator now – might not feel that way as he enjoys the hospitality of the U.S. justice system after being snatched from the safety and comfort of his own capital on the orders of President Trump. But once he’s had a bit of time to relax, he should compare photos of his capture, Nike-clad and brandishing a water bottle, to the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was dragged out his “spider hole” in 2003 – or the way Muammar Gaddafi looked when a mob of his own people got done with him. Maduro didn’t lose a war