Politics

The writer Michael Lewis once told Mr Steerpike that the American equivalent of Boris Johnson wasn’t Donald Trump. It was Tucker Carlson. Carlson is, like Johnson, a journalist by training. Both men are brilliant and funny stylists who made a habit of infuriating their country’s media class by turning themselves into successful conservatives. That was back in the 2010s and Mr S thought it an apt comparison. But the times they have a-changed. These days Boris, now a former prime minister, is a global cheerleader for weapons to Ukraine and has duly launched a sudden broadside against the Fox News host – claiming to be 'horrified' that leading Republicans are afraid of Tucker. Tucker, in return, described Johnson as a 'terrified old woman'.

The omnishambles playing out in Scottish politics makes one thing clear: Nicola Sturgeon has no clue what she is doing when it comes to trans rights. The First Minister's flagship Gender Recognition Reform Bill has hit the buffers. Now an 'urgent review' has been launched on an issue that hardly requires much common sense: that trans women should not be housed in women's prisons. In its wisdom, the Scottish government has tried to build law and policy on magical thinking – that a man can become a woman just because he says so. Sturgeon didn’t listen to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, nor did she listen to Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the German defeat at Stalingrad. Below is The Spectator’s piece from February 1943, available on our fully-digitised archive. Now that the battle of Stalingrad has at length closed it begins to be possible to form an estimate of the nature and dimensions of the German defeat. It could scarcely be more complete and unqualified. The capture or destruction of 330,000 men is an immense achievement ; and when the account is swelled by the vast amount of material which Germany has lost this must be recognised as one of the worst defeats German arms have ever suffered. The circumstances that led up to it merely swell its importance.

In early October 2021 President Joe Biden, the CIA director William Burns and other top members of the US’s national security team gathered in the Oval Office to hear a disturbing briefing from US military chief General Mark Milley. ‘Extraordinary detailed’ intelligence gathered by western spy agencies suggested that Vladimir Putin might be planning to invade Ukraine. According to briefing notes that Milley shared with the Washington Post, the first and most fundamental problem facing Biden was how to ‘underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order’ against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability ‘without going to World War 3’. Milley offered four possible answers: ‘No. 1: Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the US military or Nato with Russia. No.

There’s a new default conversation for Tory MPs at any Westminster drinks party: is this 1992 or 1997? Is the party doomed or not? In 1992 John Major became the only prime minister to have been 20 points behind in the polls and then gone on to win two years later. But in 1997, with the Tories mired in accusations of sleaze, Major lost by such a landslide that his party was out of power for three terms. There are some Tory MPs who argue that a narrow victory would be worse than giving Labour a small majority At last week’s cabinet away day, William Hague was brought in as the evening entertainment to make the case for optimism. The current situation, said Hague, more closely echoed the electoral landscape of 1990, when Major went on to turn the party’s fortunes around.