Writing this Diary and the amiable correspondence I have had recently with my old friend Mathias Döpfner as he assumes control of the Telegraph titles remind me of how much more agreeably simple my days are now than when I was Telegraph chairman. Thanks to the internet, my reflections on a number of outlets in different countries ricochet all around the world to an astounding number of people.
Two recent stories sum up the state of Donald Trump’s presidency and underscore the growing gap between him and his working-class support base. First, it emerged that Donald Trump Jr. had his wedding paid for by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch who is also a friend of Vladimir Putin. Kremlev is believed to have stumped up a good proportion of the costs, which included hiring a $100,000-a-night island in the Bahamas as well as a $70,000 firework display. While Trump’s son is not a government employee and therefore not subject to the rules on political gifts, alarm bells ought surely to have been ringing.
Reporting of the war in Ukraine suffers from the tendency of journalism to exaggerate a trend. The most recent one has been Ukraine’s success in drone attacks on key energy and strategic sites deep inside Russia. These are indeed innovative and prodigious. The Russian summer offensive has also failed to break through. This leaves too little room, however, to cover fully the dramatically worsening plight of Ukrainian civilians. Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of the Kyiv Independent, said this week: “Even if you think you’re used to everything, you are not.” Russia has switched tactics from big, one-off aerial bombardments to almost continuous drones. In Kyiv one day last week, the air-raid sirens signaled 13 different attacks.
No one looking back on the last few weeks could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the northeast during this time and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day. On Saturday August 22, we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday, we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.
Affable, unflappable and imposing (he was a 6ft 2in ex-Olympian), the late King Harald of Norway was also blessed with good luck for much of his life. The first notable dose of good fortune occurred at the age of three, when his mother managed to spirit him and his sisters out of their home country hours before the Nazi invasion – and away to safety in the US. He returned to a nation so devoted to its monarchy that the children of postwar Norway pooled their pocket money to help buy his grandfather, King Haakon VII, a royal yacht. The Norge remains in service to this day, funded by an uncomplaining nation. Compare that with Britain’s royal family, who had to wave farewell to their yacht Britannia back in 1997 after a long and toxic political squabble.
The tragic and terrifying Himalayan flash flood was caused by a chunk of mountain collapsing into a narrow gorge, sending a tsunami of mud and rock that gathered mass as it shot down the steep Trisuli river valley. More than that is not yet clear. Did a breakaway hanging glacier take a rock face with it or was it the other way round? Was there time for the debris to dam the valley and form a lake that burst or did the 60-meter flood of mud come from ice, river water, rock and soil that accumulated in the valley as the tsunami descended? Some people are already certain they know what caused this. Either climate change did it or China did it. Assorted greens rushed to blame global warming with confidence bordering on certainty.
In August, Donald Trump sided with consumers by increasing the tariff-free quota on imported beef for 90 days beginning September 1. The concession will last three months. It would be a minor story with any other president in the White House. But under Trump, even dull-sounding trade news can take on a sudden importance, especially when mixed up with foreign affairs. Trump’s justification for favoring Argentina, whose 2026 quota he increased by 80,000 metric tons, is partly geopolitical: he wants to give support to Javier Milei’s free-market regime, seeing it as a foil to left-leaning governments elsewhere in Latin America.
Most of us say we instinctively understand what time is, but struggle to describe it. We clearly live our lives in the flow of time, with the past gone and our perception of the present moving toward an undetermined future. It’s been described as the fire in which we burn. But what actually is it? This occupies the minds of cosmologists and philosophers, and recent research, far from clarifying the concept, makes it even stranger. Time, it seems, may not be fundamental but a by-product of the base structure of the cosmos. For Isaac Newton, time was set in motion by God and was the universal backdrop in which all events occur. It was unchanging and ever-present; it regulated and set the pace for the clockwork universe, living out the laws of science.
Recently I started logging in to Facebook again, mostly to do the depressing thing of posting photos of my children to my late father’s wall. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that it forces me to exit my bubble of people who work in tech and media, and thus are very tech and media literate. The people I see on Facebook inhabit a completely different universe than those I see on X or Substack or even TikTok. I don’t love referring to the people I grew up with as “normies,” but, you know, many of them are normies. Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things. A girl I went to high school with – let’s call her Teresa – has written a book and self-published it on Amazon.
Daqing, China You may have seen clips of the recent Chinese robot Olympics, where a bipedal, humanoid robot beat Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint record by almost a second. Last month, Beijing hosted competitions in soccer, weightlifting, tennis and gymnastics, too. There have also been boxing matches between robots, which occasionally punched each other’s heads off. So far, robots can only really excel at one task at a time, so the prospect of a very fast, very effective fistfighter is some way off. Still, the Chinese government is deeply concerned about employment and has been far stricter at regulating AI than the US. That’s partly because of the differing economies of the two countries. The USA’s comparative advantage is capital.
Every day, I play a game that I call “How Low Can He Go?” Despite the simple premise, it’s harder to win than you might think, since Donald Trump always manages to exceed my worst expectations. Most recently, his shocking appropriation of the political opinions of four American soldiers killed in the war against Iran (he claims that they all supported his idiotic and unconstitutional military campaign) took me by surprise. Wasn’t it impolitic to risk invoking the wrath of the soldiers’ grieving families? Wasn’t Trump aware that American corpses in uniform are no longer guaranteed fodder for rally-round-the-flag rhetoric?
At the beginning of his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” the literary critic (and World War Two Army veteran) Paul Fussell recalled a poetic advertising slogan he used to see on the sides of city buses. In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience. Not having tasted the potation named in the second line, I offer no opinion about the truth of the statement declaring its excellence. About the first line of the couplet, however, I must register a certain skepticism. Is experience “the great teacher” in life? An honest answer, I believe, should begin with the hoary qualification “that depends.
September has become a murderous month. This year it marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And as this month began, the trial of Lindsay Clancy was under way in Massachusetts, a trial notable not only for the appalling character of the crime – Clancy strangled each of her three children – but for the appalling degree of sympathy some women have expressed for the defendant. When Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus last year, many left-wing Americans rejoiced – and his killing is still a cause for levity at Hasan Piker rallies today. The leftist podcaster enjoys leading crowds in an off-key, mocking rendition of an AI-written song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.
When ABC News asked New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about a fellow Democrat who years ago had proposed abolishing prisons, abolishing the police and abolishing Thanksgiving, she replied with a dismissive phrase that she attributed to a city councilman she knew: “Woke 1 was crazy,” AOC said. Half the country was indignant: not the half who’d perpetrated woke, with their safe spaces and their Covid masks and their land acknowledgments, but the half who’d been made to grovel under it. They weren’t going to let AOC off the hook. They wanted to see her grovel in return. But that is never the way gifted politicians offload a discredited stance, and Ocasio-Cortez is a gifted politician.
Midway through a podcast appearance, my host became distracted by a flurry of social media posts claiming that he was a paid agent of the Israeli government. The host was Tim Pool; the accuser was Alex Jones, until then Pool’s friend and ally. The dispute began last month, when Pool suggested that Jones’s recent dip in online viewers had more to do with his wavering on Donald Trump than with any covert censorship. The argument quickly escalated, with Jones asking whether Pool was taking “marching orders” from Benjamin Netanyahu. I have no beef with Jones, but I doubt that Pool, who earns a healthy eight figures from his podcast, would torch his credibility for a little extra money.
Earlier this summer, I sat barefoot in Berkeley with a dozen aspiring “geopolitical traders,” learning how to make money from war. We were at a conference billed as a “festival for predictions, and markets thereof” – that is, a celebration of prediction markets. The venue, a hippie-ish compound, mostly forbade shoes indoors. Our instructor, Mike, claimed to have grown his money eightfold on Polymarket, mostly by trading on politics. Now he would share his wisdom. Prediction markets were legalized in the United States in 2020 on the premise that they would “allow us, more often than not, to predict the future.” That, at least, is what Kalshi’s marketing copy claims.
For much of its history, Albania remained as shadowy and remote as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. Letters to Albania were sometimes returned from Albany, New York, with the postal direction “Try Europe.” The country came into existence only after 1912, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, King Zog, was hounded out by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Five years later, the Italians and their Nazi German allies were expelled in turn by the Albanian nationalist leader Enver Hoxha. A Muslim-born communist, Hoxha turned his Balkan fiefdom into a self-immolated model of Stalinist planning, where party purges, summary arrests and show trials were routine. In the early 1990s, Albania hurtled toward capitalism.
My last night in London, I met a smart journalist (not always an oxymoron) for dinner at the “original” Ivy, who explained the disastrous state of conservatism in a country that badly needs it. For openers, Boris Johnson won a landslide victory in 2019 as the champion of Brexit and a hard-ass immigration enforcer. He then proceeded to quadruple migration to the UK. So trust is low for any politician on the right. I already knew that. What I didn’t know is that Johnson is the monster who implemented Britain’s kooky ban on plastic straws. My companion seemed surprised at how aghast I was, and also the fact that I don’t believe in global warming. I pointed out that, as a late sleeper who’s awoken by light, it is impossible to keep the sun out.
Did you know that in the UK and the US, September is a month devoted to suicide prevention? And that on the 10th of this month, it’s World Suicide Prevention Day? No, neither did I. And neither did any of my friends. Yet we’re all aware that suicide is a serious problem. Every 90 minutes, someone in the UK or Ireland dies that way. It’s the biggest killer of men under 45. And suicides among teenage girls and young women have almost doubled in recent years. We’ve been having these suicide prevention events every September for more than two decades and yet the rates are not going down. Maybe it’s time to challenge what I’d call the suicide prevention consensus.
Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offense in 1915, but every summer the university where I teach draws reverse inspiration from it when the dean flies to China to round up students. Though it’s unlikely that he cruises the teen hangouts of Yichang or Xingtai, slipping laudanum into school leavers’ bubble teas, the demand for Chinese freshers is such that the use of press gangs by British universities would be neither unexpected nor much out of character. More than one in 20 students in Britain are Chinese. They contribute billions to the UK economy annually and without them several universities would go bankrupt and most would struggle.