Features

Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle. And the silver fish between your feet dart past a net, despite not having seen one in 50 years. The jungle has grown over the old British colonial buildings, and the jungle is a harsh place. Four Chagos Islanders have been here more than a week, along with the man who brought them, Adam Holloway – former MP, ex-Guards officer, an adventurer seemingly from an earlier era. This is not, as the Foreign Office briefed journalists, "a political stunt.

My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father, Robert, went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offenses linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimized villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest of the former Prince Andrew shows how fully a newer system has taken hold: one in which guilt is first declared on the homepage and only later, if at all, tested in court. Law is meant to cool passions. The modern content economy is designed to inflame them Old protections – the presumption of innocence, etc – become threadbare once a story enters the global content mill. Defendants are no longer chiefly subjects of legal process.

Years ago, Peter Mandelson, Britain's former ambassador to Washington, shared a key lesson with his protégé Morgan McSweeney – until last week the prime minister Keir Starmer's chief of staff. Reminiscing about his involvement in the Labour party's 1987 general election campaign, he called it the "spray-paint election." The manifesto was a "beautiful technicolor" document but the tax-and-spend shibboleths of statist '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.

Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We discussed globalization, 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.

It was a weekend of mixed emotions for the European Union. There was the news from Donald Trump that he will impose a 10 percent tariff on eight European countries in retaliation for their opposition to his plans to take control of Greenland. But on a brighter note, the EU finally signed the Mercosur trade agreement with several South American countries. The European Commission hailed it as the creation of ‘a free-trade zone of roughly 700 million people’, one which they promise will save EU companies more than €4 billion a year in customs duties. Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission president, said: ‘We choose fair trade over tariffs, we chose a productive long-term partnership over isolation.

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with Christ during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chávez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and number two in Hezbollah until his assassination in 2008.