Features

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Just how bad are Nato’s armies?

Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France 264,000, 178 and 342; and Italy 165,000, 62 and 142.

Lisa Haseldine

‘J.D. Vance was right’: Is Europe finally waking up?

Munich, Germany The organisers of the Munich security conference weren’t subtle. A large statue of an elephant stood in one of the lobbies. The logo on all official documents was an elephant, this time with bits of countries printed on it. A poster for an exhibition celebrating the meeting’s 60th anniversary had an image of an elephant in a stately room. Everyone understood the meaning of the elephant in the room: it was America’s disregard for Europe. At last year’s meeting, J.D. Vance had declared the biggest threat to Europe was not from Russia or China but ‘from within’. Europe’s leaders were becoming tyrannical, the Vice President argued, arresting citizens for exercising their free speech.

Tim Shipman

The truth about Britain’s hollowed-out armed forces

When Keir Starmer was told his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament was not enough to fund his vision for the armed forces, as outlined in the strategic defence review (SDR), he put his head in his hands and snapped: ‘Why are you doing this to me? I thought this was costed!’ That striking image of a leader on the edge was widely talked about at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Three senior defence figures relayed it to me. Remove the self-pity and it is still a telling insight. The SDR, drawn up by George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, retired General Sir Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill, an adviser to both George W.

Andrew Watts

All aboard the last bus out of Mousehole

It was lucky that the bus was behind schedule – mainly because the driver had stepped out to take his own photograph for social media (#endofanera) – otherwise the young lad in the hoodie might have missed it. ‘Is this the last bus?’ he asked as he fumbled for change. ‘It’s the last bus from Mousehole Harbour, ever,’ the driver replied, before waving him on without paying. People rarely get as nostalgic about buses as they do about trains. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about the 1960s Beeching cuts. It pretty much consists of Michael Flanders reciting the names of closed rail stations to music – and it is an elegiac masterpiece. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when someone sang it at a village hall concert.

Ian Rankin

Who would Inspector Rebus support in the Scottish Premiership?

BBC Radio 4’s Today programme asks me to champion a favourite book and I choose Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It is a subversive piece of work, elegant on the surface but vicious at its core. It is about Edinburgh between the wars and the effect approaching adulthood has on a group of schoolgirls. But above all it is about the dangerous allure of charisma. Miss Brodie, maverick and fantasist that she is, holds the fate of her young charges in her hands, such is the power of her personality. Coincidentally, my Radio 4 stint had been preceded by an appearance on BBC Radio Scotland to discuss the recently deceased author Allan Massie – an essayist not unknown to this magazine.

Andrew Gilligan

Revealed: David Lammy’s curious relationship with Guyanese Big Oil

Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up to (theoretically) channel newfound oil riches to its people, with a bit left over for the board. This was announced on 20 April 2022 in an official press release from the President of Guyana’s office about the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). The statement is still on the government website.

Rupert Hawksley

The gangs terrorising the countryside

Sergeant Rob Goacher was on patrol recently when the radio crackled with a tip-off. Two men were hare coursing – chasing and killing hares with greyhounds or lurchers – in the fields near Winterbourne Monkton, a small village in Wiltshire. When Goacher arrived, a silver Subaru with the exhaust hanging off edged out of a field and accelerated through the country lanes, hitting 60mph before reaching the M4. ‘The driver then suddenly decided to exit the motorway,’ says Goacher. ‘Over a verge, through a fence, and out through the farm. The field was full of cattle, which could have easily escaped onto the motorway. Then we’d be looking at a massive pile-up and fatalities.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

‘Authority is like virginity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone’: Inside Keir Starmer’s downfall

Years ago, Peter Mandelson shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney. Reminiscing about his involvement in Labour’s 1987 general election campaign, he called it the ‘spray-paint election’. The manifesto was a ‘beautiful technicolour’ document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of Old Labour remained, along with the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. ‘I spray-painted the old Ford Cortina,’ Mandelson told McSweeney, ‘but it was still a Cortina. Policy is at the heart of political communication.’ Only after the election – a second three-figure landslide defeat – did Labour launch a policy review, out of which New Labour emerged. Even then it took another decade to win power.

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferrable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

Max Jeffery

Apart from Mandelson, who is Labour’s biggest freebie lover?

Keir Starmer is Labour’s king of freebies. He promised to clean up politics, but has accepted more free stuff than all his party’s leaders since 1997 combined: more than £100,000 in tickets, accommodation and clothing. In 2024, the Prime Minister said it was ‘right to repay’ the cost of some freebies, and stumped up for six Taylor Swift tickets, four tickets to the races and some clothes for his wife (total value: £6,000). Where Starmer has led, his MPs have followed – including those who now might hope to succeed him. Eleven other Labour MPs (and Ed Davey) accepted Taylor Swift tickets courtesy of football clubs and music companies. Seven cabinet members took money from Lord Alli. Few have not watched a football match from complimentary box seats.

Lara Brown

‘Yes, it’s that bad’: inside Oxford’s Saïd Business School

How do you get into the University of Oxford? It is a question asked by thousands of young people every year. In Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973), Charles Highway discovers that the key is to feign socialism and memorise a few book reviews. It turns out there is an even better ruse: the Saïd Business School. Saïd has, at best, a dubious origin story. In 1996 the project was forced through at Oxford’s Congregation, the university’s legislative body, despite concerns that naming a school after Wafic Saïd, known for his role as a ‘fixer’ in the al-Yamamah arms deal, in return for £20 million might not do wonders for the university’s reputation. Its first director departed before completing a single term.

Andrew Lownie

How Andrew could save the royal family

The tsunami of Jeffrey Epstein material released this month has been both horrifying and gratifying. It makes clear the extent of Epstein’s penetration of world elites – potentially even at the direction of various foreign intelligence agencies – and that this is a story as much about national security as financial and sexual irregularities. The lack of any proper oversight of the royal family may have given both the Russian and Chinese intelligence services their entry point into the British Establishment. The depositions also confirm the accuracy of what I had discovered researching Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, which was published last August.

Travis Aaroe

What explains the weird military hype around Al Carns?

If Keir Starmer resigned tomorrow, the Labour party would be thrown into confusion. None of its factions has an obvious candidate to replace him. Yet some Labour MPs and commentators think they have found a solution. Why not send for Al Carns, minister for the armed forces, a former Royal Marines colonel, and MP for Birmingham Selly Oak since 2024? Carns, 45, who was briefly a candidate for the party’s deputy leadership last year, has built up a modest social media profile, posting videos of himself hiking, working out at the gym and training with reservists. One video saw him challenge a fireman to an impromptu pull-up contest, which Carns won 30 to 18. With Westminster in disarray, many think that these stern military virtues are just what the country needs. Carns is not the first.

Mary Wakefield

The new freakish shopping trend

On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the till, and it was eye-opening. Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers queuing for Pokémon cards, and a genuinely troubling number of sad-looking women in their mid-twenties clutching long-eared toy bunnies made by a company called Jellycat.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Is Keir Starmer prepared for the AI-pocalypse?

Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’ When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory rule to the dustbin. But Starmer poured resources into Rishi Sunak’s AI Security Institute and published an AI Opportunities action plan in January last year, declaring (very un-Starmerishly) that he wanted to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the economy. Last week an audit found that 75 per cent of the proposals had already been delivered – a level of success rare in Whitehall.

Melanie McDonagh

The Epstein files are a reminder that emails live forever

Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women, how he considered potential plea deals and exchanges with famous people. There’s Sarah Ferguson’s message: To: Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com] From: Sarah Sent: Sat 1/30/2010 10:22:44 PM You are a legend. I really don’t have the words to describe, my love, gratitude for your generosity and kindness. Xx I am at your service. Just marry me.

Ross Clark

The glaring flaw in Keir Starmer’s AI plan

Like Harold Wilson and his ill-defined ‘white heat of technology’, Keir Starmer has latched on to artificial intelligence as the saviour which is finally going to jolt Britain’s sluggish economy into growth. He once even suggested it would help fill potholes. A year ago he launched his AI Opportunities Action Plan, which is supposed to give the industry a huge boost through the designation of ‘AI Growth Zones’. But there is a big hole in Starmer’s plans. How are we going to power an industry that has become as voracious in its energy needs as the steel, shipbuilding and other heavy industries which it might one day replace? The high energy consumption of AI might not seem obvious to anyone playing around with ChatGPT. It all seems so clean and modern.

Louis Mosley

AI is coming for the lanyard class

Forgive me. I am going to begin by quoting two prominent left-wing Londoners – and agreeing with one. In a speech recently, Sadiq Khan warned that artificial intelligence could become ‘a weapon of mass destruction of jobs’. He did acknowledge AI’s potential to fight cancer and other evils, but his main point was that it needs to be controlled by bureaucracies like the one he leads. He has it the wrong way round. We don’t need bureaucracy to control AI, we need AI to cut bureaucracy. Now Karl Marx: ‘Bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge.

Lara Brown and John Power

‘I want to stop the Antichrist’ – can Peter Thiel succeed?

Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We discussed globalisation, artificial intelligence, and the rise of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. But one subject seemed to particularly exercise Thiel: the Antichrist. He promised to expand on this when we next met – which is how we ended up in the back room of a Cambridge college, surrounded by theologians, venture capitalists and AI engineers, to hear Thiel describe the end of humanity. Standing in front of Gustave Doré’s illustration of Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost, Thiel, a can of Diet Coke in his hand, explained why the most important thing he can do with his money is to identify and then defeat the Antichrist.

Owen Matthews

The secrets of Putin’s shadow fleet

Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s failure to shut that export business down has, so far, been the single most important factor behind Putin’s continued military resilience. Economic sanctions were supposed to be the West’s superpower to punish the Kremlin for invading Ukraine in February 2022. So how come Russia now exports more oil by sea than it did at the beginning of the war?