Politics

With ‘don’t mention the war!’ the order of the day, it felt as if Vladimir Putin’s message to his people this year was haunted by the ghost of Basil Fawlty. The New Year’s message is a Soviet and then Russian tradition dating back to the 1970s. It is watched widely across the country, sometimes with reverence, often with irony, but nonetheless something of a ritual observed almost regardless of class, location or political orientation. Aired just before midnight in each of the country’s 11 time zones, before the chimes of the Kremlin belltower and the national anthem, in the past it was an opportunity for Putin to try and present

Sadiq Khan was hoping to project a message of ‘unity to the world’ with this year’s New Year’s Eve fireworks in London, which of course included the customary genuflections to the NHS, Windrush and inclusivity. But for all the highfalutin spiel about London’s place in the world, the mayor seemed rather less comfortable talking about the situation in the capital itself, when he was interviewed by Sky News shortly before the celebrations began. Asked first about recent figures that showed that knife crime was rising at the fastest rate in five years in London, and knife-point robberies rising by more than a third, Khan touted his ‘public health’ approach to

New Year’s Eve passed off peacefully in France give or take the odd incident. There were 211 arrests in total, announced Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, but overall the country saw in 2024 with good cheer.   In the days leading up to the last day of 2023, there were ominous warnings from the government about the possibility of a terrorist attack. Nearly 100,000 police, gendarmes and soldiers were deployed the length and breadth of France to counter such a threat but nothing materialised.  For a decade ‘populist’ has been the insult of choice for European centrists to describe anyone who dares deviate from their progressive dogma Emmanuel Macron is praying

Before the year ends, I’d like to tell the story of Karol Sikora and attempts to have him removed from a Spectator-sponsored discussion on the NHS at the last Tory conference. It offers an insight not just into how we work at 22 Old Queen Street but the dynamics of sponsored discussions. The Tory conference has become the Edinburgh Festival of political discussion: a place where ministers, activists, advisers, corporates and journalists converge to discuss pretty much everything. As with Edinburgh, the real action is on the fringe rather than the official lineup. When I became editor in 2009, The Spectator had no presence at the conference; now we host

As she faced her final press conference of 2022 last Christmas, the first minister of Scotland seemed unassailable. Nicola Sturgeon had negotiated the Covid pandemic with consummate skill – at least in terms of presentation. Her personal popularity, while not what it was, remained unnaturally high for the leader of a party that had been in government for 15 years. The opposition parties posed no obvious threat to SNP hegemony. She had no internal rivals to worry about.   Political downfalls are rarely so precipitate or dramatic Yet two months later Nicola Sturgeon was history, the SNP leadership was in ruins and Police Scotland were preparing to arrest key SNP figures

In just a few hours’ time, Bully XLs will be banned in England and Wales: breeding, selling, advertising, rehoming, or abandoning a Bully will become illegal. In February, the crackdown will continue: from 1 February 2024, it will also become illegal to own an XL Bully dog unless it is registered on the Index of Exempted Dogs. Rishi Sunak has said the breed is a ‘danger to our communities’. But this law, which will condemn innocent dogs, will fail. Britain has already had breed-specific legislation in place for many years, but the statistics show that the Dangerous Dogs Act (DDA), introduced in 1991, is ineffective: between 1999 and 2019, dog