Features

Thursday

Freddy Gray

American titan: inside Donald Trump’s remarkable political comeback

Palm Beach, Florida Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House has been triumphant. It is a decisive victory and even Trump’s bitterest enemies should recognise him for what he is: an American titan, the most extraordinary politician of our time. He has just pulled off arguably the biggest comeback in US history – a feat greater even than Richard Nixon’s Lazarus-like return in 1968. To understand the scale of his victory, recall how weakly he began. On 15 November 2022, when Trump launched his now-triumphant bid to regain the presidency, he did not seem himself.

Paul Wood

How Trump could temper tensions in the Middle East

One of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign ads was aimed at Jewish voters. Three stereotypical New York bubbes are kvetching about the state of the world. ‘Israel’s under attack. Anti-Semitism like I never thought I would see.’ One says: ‘Oy vey… You know Trump I never cared for, but at least he will keep us safe.’ This was a canny appeal, recognising that many American Jews were traditionally Democrats and would have to hold their noses to vote for Trump. But Trump has been – as he says himself – Israel’s ‘protector’ and Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was the first foreign leader to praise him for his victory: ‘Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!’ Netanyahu signed off his message to Trump ‘in true friendship’.

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend and drove Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez out of town with a hail of mud and stones was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its way. The BBC would like us to be angry at man-made climate change for causing the storm – putting out a headline the very next day: ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse.’ Charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more extreme downpours Yet Valencia had a similarly terrible flood in 1957, in which 81 people died, long before climate change became the go-to excuse for any bad weather.

Imogen Yates

Gen Z love ecstatic dance. Would I?

Two months ago I moved to London and found it a disorientating experience. Most of my friends were already settled when I got here, and I found myself overwhelmed, isolated and always on the wrong Circle line train. Everyone seemed to have their ‘thing’; something they belonged to. What was mine? I tried a 5 a.m. run club. It was horrendous. I tried the East London conceptual art scene, but couldn’t keep a straight face. Then one Friday night I found myself in church, but not for a prayer service. This church was deconsecrated, converted and the activity that evening was something called ‘ecstatic dance’. Yet the setting was appropriate because, as I discovered, for wellness-obsessed millennials and Gen Zers, ecstatic dance is a sort of religion.

Gus Carter

Could inheritance tax changes help farmers in the long run?

Britain’s farmers are in a bind. Despite sitting on land worth millions, they are unable to release that wealth without selling – and many struggle to make money from what they produce. According to Defra, almost one in five farms make a loss, while a quarter made less than £25,000 last year. Yet there are parts of the Labour movement that see farmers as money-grubbing, tweed-clad elites benefiting from special tax breaks and hefty subsidies. James Buckle, a farmer from Suffolk, understands those frustrations: ‘If our farm is worth £10 million, and we’ve got these new inheritance tax rules, we’ve got to pay something like £1.6 million to pass it on. And £10 million is a ridiculous value for an asset that one person owns.

Sean Thomas

My glimpse into a childless world

If you are looking for a pointer for the future of the world, the free-diving fisherwomen on the matriarchal, shamanistic South Korean island of Jeju are not an obvious example of where we’re heading. Because the haenyeo are famously unique. And famously hardy. But what is happening to them should concern us all. In simple wetsuits they spend hours in the cold, clear waters, seeking out sea slugs, oysters, conches and abalone. They are fiercely independent – they spearheaded resistance to the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. But here’s the thing, as Nari (age 70) tells me in the haenyeo’s coastal mud-room: ‘We are probably the last. We have been diving since the men went to war in the 18th century, but maybe no one will do this in 20 years’ time.

Simon Heffer

Labour’s war on the countryside

Two miles from where I am writing, the neighbouring village is plastered with posters demanding ‘Say No to Pylons’. The object of loathing is a 112-mile power line from Norwich to Tilbury that would carry wind-generated electricity from the North Sea to a supposed 1.5 million homes. As a concession to the famous landscape of Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border, the cabling will run underground for 3.3 miles. But because of John Constable’s inexplicable failure to paint the rest of the route, people living near the other 108.7 miles must have their vistas ruined by 160ft pylons. The developers claim it is twice as expensive to bury power lines than to hoist them on great metal towers. Objectors disagree and demand more consultations.

Thursday

Alex Fleming-Brown

Scroll model: confessions of a clickbait writer

Working on a ‘trending’ news desk is the journalistic equivalent of being a battery-farmed hen. When I was still at university, I wrote pieces for one of the most-visited clickbait news sites in the UK, which boasts 300 million followers worldwide. My brief was to pump out a 400-word article in 45 minutes, every 45 minutes, for nine hours straight. My fee for these 12 articles was £125 in total (£13 per hour or, more saliently to a student, a pint for 250 words). All of you will have come across clickbait online. Some of you might even admit to having clicked on it.

Freddy Gray

Team Trump: who’s in – and who’s out?

If Donald Trump wins back the White House next week, adopt the brace position. His opponents will go beserk, inevitably, and try once again to put him in prison. Yet Trump allies might go even more crazy as they scramble for influence. Trump claims to have learned from the mistakes of his first term. But what counts as a mistake depends on who you talk to. And it’s impossible to even guess at what a Trump Redux might mean without some sense of who he talks to these days – and who might shape and influence his agenda if he is elected. The awkward truth – for insiders anyway – is that King Donald and his clan hide in plain sight.

Christopher Caldwell

How quickly would Trump wash his hands of Ukraine?

For American politicians, all wars are two-front wars. There is a hot battlefield somewhere in the Middle East or the South China Sea, and there’s a political battlefield in Washington, D.C. The domestic contest is decisive. The same goes for Europe. With Joe Biden riding into the sunset and the presidential campaign drawing to a close, American interest in Ukraine is winding down, too. Europeans talking tough about ‘standing up’ to Russia had better be prepared to do so on their own. The next president will find the domestic pressure to scale back involvement in Ukraine irresistible Donald Trump’s campaign message, muddled though it is, bodes ill for the Ukrainian war effort. His patience with this war would not extend 24 hours into his presidency, he warns. For J.D.

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

Meet the western conservatives moving to Russia

Tofurious Maximus Crane was sitting in a barber’s chair in Moscow when he received the greatest news of his life. It was 19 August, the day Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreigners to immigrate to Russia. Now, the 46-year-old native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, could finally achieve his life’s dream of remaining in Russia for ever. ‘For me, the decree is the best thing that ever happened in my life besides, you know, family and children,’ says Crane, a charismatic bear of an American who sports a long Old Testament beard and perfectly coiffed hipster hair. ‘I got the notification about the decree, and I jumped up out of the chair and was crying. I was very excited.

Gus Carter

Leaving the ECHR won’t fix Britain’s immigration chaos

If you tuned into the Tory party leadership race, you will have heard rather a lot about the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Robert Jenrick wants Britain to leave because it stops us deporting foreign criminals. Kemi Badenoch argues that leaving won’t fix our immigration woes. She’s not wrong. Of the 144,200 people who have arrived on small boats since the start of the crisis in 2018, just 3,788 have been returned. That’s despite the fact that, according to the left-leaning charity the Refugee Council, some 40 per cent of people who come to the UK this way are not refugees. If you apply that rather liberal calculation to the total number, 57,200 should have been made to leave. And yet here they still are.

Andrew Watts

Who do US psychics predict will win the election?

A week away from the American election, and the polls cannot tell us who will be president. But can they ever? A poll is, as the pundits always remind us, a snapshot of public opinion, not a prediction. Nate Silver himself said that anyone dissecting an individual poll is ‘just doing astrology’. So what predictions are actual astrologers making about the election? She looks relieved when she draws the High Priestess: a trump card, but possibly not a Trump card Under the electoral college system, nationwide data is not as important as predictions for the swing states, so I look for astrologers in the seven states which will decide the election. The drawback to this methodology quickly becomes apparent: predicting the future is illegal in half of them.

Ruaridh Nicoll

The dark side of life in Cuba

The first scent of trouble came when Cuba’s government ordered all its non-essential workers home. By packing them off (and there are plenty of them, given Cuba is one of the world’s last centrally planned communist states) the government hoped the island’s exhausted national power grid would get a breather. It didn’t work, the main power station crashed, and Cuba went dark. At first, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Power cuts in this all-but-bankrupt state have long been a daily scourge. But it turns out there’s a categoric difference between 20 and 24 hours of blackout. I came to Cuba in 2018 for a three-month stay and here I am, now married with a three-year-old son. Friends call this my ‘Cuban midlife crisis’, which I resent.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European peoples, the Illyrians. The country came into existence only after 1912 with the demise of Ottoman power in Europe. Its first ruler, the glorified Muslim chieftain King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when fascist Italy invaded in 1939. (Zog was put up in London for a while at the Ritz.) Five years later the Nazi Germans were expelled by the Albanian resistance fighter Enver Hoxha. Outwardly a Stalinist, the artful Hoxha was a Muslim-born Ottoman dandy figure who terrorised his Balkan fiefdom through retaliatory murders, purges and the trap-door disappearance of class enemies. Albania has long lived in Italy’s shadow.

Kate Andrews

Trump makes America laugh again

‘Tradition holds that I’m supposed to tell a few self-deprecating jokes this evening,’ said Donald Trump in his speech at the Al Smith Dinner in New York on Friday night. ‘So here it goes.’ He paused. ‘Nope. I’ve got nothing… There’s nothing to say. I guess I just don’t see the point at taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me.’ The crowd roared. Many of the jokes were close to the bone: ‘We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child. It’s a person that has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.’ We can’t know whether Harris herself would have laughed.

David Butterfield

Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised

Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left. When I arrived in Cambridge two decades ago, giants were still walking the earth. Students could attend any lecture, at any level, in any department; graduate and research seminars were open to any interested party, and you could sit at the feet of the greats. Unforgettable gatherings of everyone from undergraduates to professors would discuss the big questions late into the night.

Philip Womack

Is it really too much to ask students to read children’s books?

The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate recently claimed that students are struggling to read long books. Depressingly, he’s right. I could have told him the same thing five years ago, when I was teaching at a well-respected Russell Group university. The problem isn’t that students won’t read Moby-Dick in five days. It’s that even if you give them what they want, they’ll still find fault. This all points to a tussle at the heart of modern education: do you cave in to the blighters, or not? To my surprise, when convening a BA course on children’s literature, I discovered that some of my students balked at reading children’s books. The course looked at the whole caboodle from the Romantics to the present day.

Wednesday

Ed West and Niall Ferguson

Kemi vs Robert: who would be the best Tory leader?

Ed West on Robert Jenrick It’s a testimony to the sheer unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s government that only three months after voters gave the Conservatives their biggest electoral kicking in two centuries, Labour has already lost its polling lead. Indeed, it has achieved this so quickly that its opponents still don’t even have a leader. But as much as Labour has failed to impress, its dire poll numbers reflect a wider trend across the western world, where political leaders are now roundly hated almost everywhere. This suggests something more profound is going on. If politicians are disliked, it’s in part because western countries are so badly governed, although Britain seems especially so.

William Finlator

The tragedy of Scotland’s church sell-off

‘We are not a heritage society,’ insisted the Rev David Cameron, Convener of the Assembly Trustees of the Church of Scotland. Speaking to the BBC in January, Mr Cameron claimed the Church has a ‘surplus of buildings and large property’, and that there is a need ‘to address our estate’. A church or kirk is usually the most historically important building in any given town or village In other words, the Church of Scotland is selling off its churches. Not just one or two here or there, but a lot, and for cut-price rates. Of course, the Church insists that the move is ‘painful but essential’, aping the language of a corporate multinational’s HR department. Yet the sheer scale and decisiveness of the move belie the patronising smiles of the Church hierarchy.