Features

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Don vs Ron: the fight for the American right

When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, he took on a very well-funded politician who had been a successful governor of Florida. And he destroyed him. Trump humiliated ‘low-energy’ Jeb Bush, son of one president and brother of another, and trashed his family’s legacy so comprehensively that the Bush-era Republican party is now widely regarded as a disaster. Political experts tend to forget what a canny campaigner Donald Trump is Jeb messed up again last week. Speaking to Fox News, he semi-endorsed Ron DeSantis, the current Florida governor and Trump’s strongest challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination. ‘I think we’re on the verge of a generational change, kind of hope so,’ said Jeb.

James Heale

How much longer can Simon Case cling on?

When Simon Case was named as cabinet secretary in September 2020 he became, at the age of 41, the youngest appointee in more than 100 years. He will probably earn another distinction soon: the youngest ex-cabinet secretary in history. In Westminster, some say his departure is a question of when not if. Should he go this year, to allow a successor time to bed in, or wait until after the next election? Case arrived at No. 10 in the middle of a pandemic, having never run a government department but boasting a PhD on Whitehall machinery written under the supervision of Peter Hennessy, Britain’s foremost living political historian and exponent of the ‘good chap’ theory of government.

Andrew Roberts

The Lockdown Files are a historian’s dream

For all that the Lockdown Files, as reported in the Telegraph, sometimes read like the screenplay of The Thick of It, they will be a wonderful resource for historians. Whatever one thinks of the morality of Isabel Oakeshott’s actions vis-à-vis Matt Hancock, we now have 2.3 million words of WhatsApp messages that offer a rare psychological profile of ministers acting with emergency powers in a swiftly unfolding global crisis.

Tanya Gold

Michael Caine: no, Zulu doesn’t incite far-right extremism

Michael Caine is 90 this week, and he offers to accept questions by email, which he will then answer by email, as if we are communicating between galaxies. Normally this would bother me – gah, actors – but it is Michael Caine, so I can’t mind. Maurice Micklewhite’s invention Michael Caine – he named himself after The Caine Mutiny – is as luminous a piece of 20th-century British culture as Eleanor Rigby. There are some people you want to be happy. They deserve it.  He replies quickly: this is a functional man. What did I expect? He has been nominated for an Academy Award six times in four separate decades, and won twice, and he is still working. This is work.

Peter Pomerantsev

My case against Russia’s war criminals

Lviv My favourite hotels in Lviv were all booked out over the weekend. The world’s justice elite were in town for a gathering on how to hold Russia accountable for its crimes. The US Attorney General and the Chief Prosecutor from The Hague, as well as President Volodymyr Zelensky, were there. It was an apposite location. In the early 20th century Lviv was home to the lawyers Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, who later gave us a language to define modern evil by coming up with the concepts of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ respectively.

Paulina Neuding

Sweden’s street gangs are gaining power

Stockholm Barely a day goes by in Stockholm without a shooting or a bombing. In one part of the city, housing estate residents have been informed about what to do if their building is a bombing target. For all too many Swedes, this is the new normal. Under Swedish law, children under 15 cannot be sentenced to any criminal punishment and older teenagers are seldom given more than four years in ‘compulsory care’. So mobsters now recruit young people, arm them with thermos-flask bombs or guns and send them out as soldiers in their gang wars. The country’s liberal criminal justice system and the fact that the police were never trained for such problems have made life comfortable for new gangs in immigrant neighbourhoods.

Paul Wood

Meet the architect behind ‘Putin’s palace’

Lanfranco Cirillo, architect and interior decorator to the Russian elite, is shaking his head in horror. ‘Absolutely not. No.’ He is answering my question about whether he put a gold toilet and even a gold toilet brush into a villa he built that the Russian opposition says belongs to President Vladimir Putin – and which they call ‘Putin’s palace’. At one time, protestors used to taunt Putin by waving gold-painted toilet brushes. Cirillo says the whole thing is a calumny. ‘I don’t like gold, first of all, I like marble. And I’m Italian. For an Italian to make a toilet in gold is really anti-historical, anti-cultural. No, no gold toilet, no gold toilet brush.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

My search for London’s cheapest flat

Maternal nocturnal worry number 57a: how are our offspring going to get their toes on any rung of the property ladder if they want to carry on living in London? I’m sure thousands of us mothers of young adults lie awake at 2.30 a.m. contemplating the fact that a one-bedroom flat in Leytonstone now costs £375,000. We curse ourselves for not having bought the whole house next door to us in 1989 when it was for sale for a third of that amount.  What makes these properties cheap is not only that they’re tiny, but also that they’re hard to get to Last week I set out to find the cheapest flat for sale in Greater London.

Wednesday

Peter Frankopan

Is Putin winning? The world order is changing in his favour

‘This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order,’ said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, a month after the invasion. ‘The unipolar world is irretrievably receding into the past … A multi-polar world is being born.’ The US is no longer the world’s policeman, in other words – a message that resonates in countries that have long been suspicious of American power. The West’s core coalition may remain solid, but it has failed to win over many of the countries that refused to pick sides. Moscow’s diplomatic mission to build ties and hone a narrative over the past decade has paid dividends. Look at Africa.

Max Jeffery

The lucrative business of war

‘Yalla! Yalla! Yalla!’ shouts a Saudi man. There are arms dealers, fixers, military men and gun geeks; tanks, assault rifles, mortars and drones. Jets do aerobatics overhead and a band plays Maroon 5. A Chinese robot dog bangs into delegates. Welcome to the International Defence Exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Business is booming. On the conference floor, Erik Prince is talking to the Emirati President, Mohamed bin Zayed. People are taking photos of MBZ, who smiles out from a dark robe and aviator sunglasses, but no one seems to recognise Prince. He’s an ex-Navy Seal who sold mercenaries to the Americans in Iraq, trained Somalis to fight pirates in the Gulf of Aden, and allegedly broke arms-trafficking laws shipping weaponised agricultural planes to Libya.

Emily Rhodes

The tyranny of World Book Day

‘Dear parents, a reminder that we are dressing up for World Book Day! Don’t forget your child should come to school in costume as their favourite character tomorrow…’ It’s the email every parent dreads receiving. (Or one of them, anyway.) It tends to be opened at eight o’clock the evening before World Book Day, to be met with feelings of exasperation, desperation and guilt. Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure How is it that the charity World Book Day, founded by Unesco in 1995 with the laudable mission ‘to promote reading for pleasure’, has morphed into yet another occasion for parents to buy stuff?

Nicholas Farrell

How Giorgia Meloni is remaking Europe

Ravenna, Italy Italy’s first female Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, is steadily becoming the most important political leader in Europe. Some are even saying that it is her destiny to be the next Angela Merkel. If so, that would mean a dramatic change in direction for the European Union towards what she calls a confederal, instead of a federal, Europe – a Europe of sovereign nations rather than a superstate which, she told Italy’s most famous talkshow host Bruno Vespa, would ‘do less, do better’.

Ben Farmer

South Africa’s energy crisis is becoming a political one

Cape Town South Africa is falling apart. Blackouts of up to ten hours a day are bringing businesses to a halt, making teaching harder and turning traffic lights dark. Food is rotting in warm fridges. There were more than 200 blackouts last year and they have continued every day so far in 2023. ANC strategists question whether any party can survive the public anger over the mismanagement of the grid A country that once saw itself as Africa’s industrial powerhouse is now regularly without power. The cause is a debt-ridden and run-down fleet of power stations, which have been starved of repairs and regularly break down. Electricity supplies have to be switched off to stop the grid collapsing.

Katy Balls

How Labour can win: Bridget Phillipson on childcare, Brexit and faith

On 12 April last year, Boris Johnson’s fixed penalty notice was dominating the news. Few noticed another, perhaps equally seismic political story in Bournemouth: a member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet was being booed by the unions. Speaking at the National Education Union’s annual conference, shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson faced a revolt. She had reneged on a Corbyn-era pledge to abolish the schools inspectorate, Ofsted. ‘It began with heckling and then it became louder and there was a mass walkout. They continued the demonstration outside the conference hall,’ Phillipson says nonchalantly. Was she put off? ‘I was taken aback by the degree of hostility. If they are not prepared to listen then that’s rather disrespectful – but that’s on them.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

How did modern sex get so unsexy?

On hearing the rumours that the boxer David Haye is in a ‘throuple’ – a three-person romantic relationship – with Una Healy from the Saturdays and a model named Sian Osborne, I felt a rare flicker of carnal pique. Apparently Victoria Beckham is off her feed (a prawn and two capers) with worry that her baby boy Brooklyn might be in a throuple with his wife Nicola Peltz and singer Selena Gomez, while Rita Ora is still denying that she and her now-husband Taika Waititi were in one with the attractive actress Tessa Thompson a couple of years back. They were papped having what appeared to be a three-way snog on a hotel balcony. You wait ages for a throuple – and then three come along at once!

Wednesday

Andrew Roberts

Farewell to arms: Britain’s depleted military

Ayear ago on Friday, President Vladimir Putin unleashed blitzkrieg on Ukraine. It was an unprovoked assault that has so far led to more than 200,000 people being killed or wounded, but has failed in its intention of establishing Russian hegemony over its democratic neighbour. The West and much of the rest of the civilised world were shocked by the invasion, as well as being horrified and disgusted by the brutality of the Russian armed forces.    So it was with undisguised adulation that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was greeted by a standing-room-only crowd of parliamentarians in a freezing Westminster Hall this month, giving one of the most inspirational addresses to be heard in the 900-year history of that room.

Timothy Garton Ash

The need for speed in Ukraine: the West must be bold

Kyiv General Valeriy Zaluzhny, stocky, forceful, apple-cheeked, sits at the desk in Kyiv from which he commands all Ukraine’s armed forces. I ask him what they need from the West. First, air defence. With a twinkle in his eye, he unzips his khaki fleece to reveal a garish T-shirt demanding ‘F-16s!’ Next on his list are long-range missiles such as the American ATACMS and the Franco-British Storm Shadow, so they can hit Russian targets beyond the range of their current armoury. Now the General jumps up, disappears behind a glass-fronted office cupboard into an improvised sleeping area, and returns with another T-shirt, this time calling for missiles. It seems he has a T-shirt for every weapon system.

Andrew Drury

Shamima Begum is no victim – and I should know

I am a 56-year-old dad of four. I live with my wife and dog in Surrey, where I run a successful building firm. But I also know Shamima Begum, who this week lost her appeal to have her citizenship reinstated, perhaps better than anyone else in Britain – apart from her family. I’ve visited her six times, travelling across thousands of miles and warzones to meet the jihadi bride. That’s because I’m one of the world’s foremost extreme tourists. My holidays have taken me to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, North Korea and Chernobyl. I have infiltrated the KKK, was the first westerner to visit the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu and have embedded myself with Kurdish militias fighting Isis.

Nick Robinson

My meeting with Europe’s new Iron Lady

‘Look at the dates.’ That’s what I am told as I enter the State Elders Room in Tallinn. I’m here to interview the woman dubbed Europe’s new Iron Lady – Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. The walls in the room between her office and the cabinet room are lined with portraits. A small plaque beneath each one records the dates of their birth and, more significantly, death. The first shows that its subject died in 1941. The next I notice also reads 1941. So too the third. And the fourth. The story is soon clear. Each of those elders of this now proud independent wealthy European state died fighting in what they call here the communist terror. This country is haunted by its past and the refusal of so many around the world to believe it could, it would, happen again.

Tim Farron

Faith belongs in the public square

Everyone approaches life with a particular set of values. Atheists and secularists live by an ethos, although they do not stick a label on it in the same way that we Christians do. Perhaps that’s why some people are particularly nervous about Christians in high office. We can all point to people who proudly wear their faith casting judgment or being intolerant, so it is inevitable that Christians will be asked tough questions. As a Christian, I don’t get offended when I see Christians in politics treated differently by those who consider themselves progressives. After all, it will always be countercultural to hold to the Bible’s teachings on how we live. However, as a liberal, this peculiar treatment of Christians troubles me.