-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
Maduro got off lightly
Nicolas Maduro is a very lucky man. The Venezuelan dictator – or ex-dictator now – might not feel that way as he enjoys the hospitality of the U.S. justice system after being snatched from the safety and comfort of his own capital on the orders of President Trump. But once he’s had a bit of time to relax, he should compare photos of his capture, Nike-clad and brandishing a water bottle, to the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was dragged out his “spider hole” in 2003 – or the way Muammar Gaddafi looked when a mob of his own people got done with him.
Maduro didn’t lose a war or get killed in a revolution against this rule. If elements of his own regime collaborated with the U.S. to get rid of him, he nonetheless would have fared worse if some Venezuelan colonel had dealt with him the way Latin American militaries historically deal with inconvenient leaders. No dictator hopes to end up like Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman toppled, arrested, tried, and imprisoned by the United States in the days of the George H.W. Bush administration, but there are far worse fates for those who lead that lifestyle.
‘Venezuela was in no position to resist the U.S. even when Maduro was ensconced in his palace.’
Trump has once again defied the laws of probability, as well as the rules his critics and many of his supporters alike insist he follow. MAGA’s non-interventionist wing says he shouldn’t have acted against Venezuela at all. Neoconservatives and other center-right advocates of regime change say, on the contrary, that cashiering Maduro doesn’t go far enough – now the U.S. must make Venezuela a liberal democracy. Progressives say much the same thing, though on the farther fringes of the left there’s outright pro-Maduro sentiment.
Trump has once again put Democrats in a very awkward position, as he’s done before with immigration and transgender politics. Democrats want to condemn Trump, as always, but do they dare say it’s a bad thing Maduro’s gone?
They will be able to say that if Venezuela collapses into chaos, as Iraq did after George W. Bush took down Saddam Hussein. But Trump is doing the opposite of what Bush did in almost every respect: he hasn’t invaded Venezuela, and he hasn’t expressed idealistic aims for what comes next. Bush went out of his way to maintain that oil had nothing to do with his intentions toward Iraq. Trump, who said a decade ago that Bush should at least have seized Iraq’s oilfields if he was going to go to the trouble of launching an occupation, has been forthright about wanting the U.S. to dispose of Venezuela’s considerable petroleum assets.
And while Washington habitually depicts the democratic opposition to dictators in the rosiest of hues, Trump on Saturday gave very short shrift to Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate whom many regime-change enthusiasts would like to see lead a liberal and democratic Venezuela.
‘I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect,’ the president said.
Yet somebody will have to run Venezuela, and while Trump has made clear he expects it to be someone who will cooperate with Washington. Right now Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, appears to be in charge, and she’s cut from the same cloth as he was. Her statements since Maduro’s abduction have been defiant. And yet…
Venezuela was in no position to resist the U.S. even when Maduro was ensconced in his palace. He knew what was coming, and he – along with the rest of his regime – knew he couldn’t do anything about it. Rodriguez is not in a stronger position than he was. Socialists have held power in Venezuela for nearly 30 years, and ordinary citizens are not only the only ones who have grown frustrated. The military was Maduro’s indispensable support. Do its leaders think there’s a deal to be struck with Trump, who is nothing if not a dealmaker?
What that would look like is unclear. A leftist military regime subservient to Washington is difficult to imagine, though Trump is a master of turning unimaginable things into reality. Venezuela has held socialist ‘elections’ all along. Is some hybrid between regime continuity and a transition to real democracy possible? That would be a difficult enough proposition even without the complications that oil and foreign interests represent.
But Venezuela’s dilemmas are not so different from those facing many other countries at a time when stronger powers increasingly demand a decisive say in the internal politics of weaker neighbors. Trump seems disinclined to invade Venezuela, or anyone else. Yet if Maduro’s policies toward the U.S. (and China) continue now that Maduro is gone, the country’s next leader will face similar treatment, and sooner or later, as ambitious regime elements or foreign-backed anti-regime movements jostle for power, chaos will be the result.
Trump, deal-maker that he is, likes to leave a foreign opponent a way to save face. Delcy Rodriguez, or any other Venezuelan leader, can say whatever she wants in public. What counts with President Trump is what a regime does for America’s interests as he defines them. That’s a lower standard than the one American presidents have applied in the past. George W. Bush never seriously contemplated leaving Baathists in charge of Iraq. Trump is not looking to morally purify the Venezuelan government. He just wants it to do business on his terms.
To an idealist, that may sound monstrous, but anyone who looks at the results of idealism in foreign policy, compared to Trump’s successes, might find a moral as well as practical argument for his transactional approach. Venezuelans now have some transactional matters to settle among themselves, as well as with Trump’s America.
Labour MPs squabble over Venezuela
Oh dear. It seems that all is not well in the party of good comrades. The Americans’ stunning snatch-and-grab operation in Venezuela has divided opinion among Labour MPs. Jeremy Corbyn may no longer be running the show – but it seems some still mourn the ending of Maduro’s regime. Among them was Richard Burgon, Jezza’s onetime business spokesman. The hard-of-thinking socialist reacted with fury to Keir Starmer’s mealy-mouthed statement, tweeting that:
The Prime Minister should respond to an illegal bombing and kidnapping by Trump in exactly the way he would if Putin had carried it out. Either Keir Starmer believes in international law – or he doesn’t. You can’t pick and choose. Time to stand up to Trump’s gangster politics!
It prompted a fellow Labour MP to hit back quickly with new boy David Taylor writing on X that:
You’re in no place to lecture the PM on international ethics given your previous praise for Maduro – not to mention your 11 or so appearances on Putin-controlled Russia TV. Maduro was dictator who killed, tortured and repressed Venezuelans. Enjoy the ’emergency online rally’
Ding, ding, ding! Mr S gives this one to Taylor – good luck surviving in a party with Maduro enthusiasts. Talk about Caracas eh?
Reform and the real populist threat
We’re scarcely into the new year and already luminaries on the liberal left have resumed one of their favourite pastimes: issuing alarmist forebodings about the threat posed by populism, and imploring everyone that Reform UK must be stopped.
That is why Starmer and those on the left will always invoke the bogeyman of Reform and forever diabolise its brand of ‘populism’
Just as the final days of 2025 saw Gillian Tett of the Financial Times warn on Newsnight about ‘the rise of “The Three Ps”: populism, protectionism and extreme patriotism’, this year had barely got started before Sir Chris Powell, the New Labour former advertising strategist, chimed in to remind us of a great peril facing this country: the ‘existential’ and ‘new and terrifying threat’ embodied by Reform.
As Powell writes in the Guardian: ‘We are at a very dangerous moment. We simply cannot afford to allow Reform UK to have a free run, and become established and entrenched as a credible potential government in the minds of disenchanted voters.’ He concludes by urging Keir Starmer to undertake a ‘fundamental reset’ to see off this danger.
Leaving aside the reality that most people think the most ‘terrifying threat’ facing this country comes from people who actively hate it – those who appear to advocate for killing as many Jews ‘as possible’ or who think white people are ‘dogs and monkeys’ – the notion that Reform represents an ‘existential’ threat is obviously scaremongering hyperbole. Certainly, at the moment, a third of the electorate don’t agree.
When liberal-left dignitaries invoke the word ‘populism’ in such a derogatory fashion, they invariably have in mind demagoguery, the inclination by statesmen to appeal to the most grave concerns and fears of the populace, and promise in turn simple remedies – remedies which they either could not possibly deliver, or which would have a detrimental effect on the country if they did.
Some of Reform’s proposals in recent years have met this criterion. These include promising to nationalise the steel and water industries, and scrap the two-child benefit cap, all of which don’t cohere with their otherwise free-market stance, and which would all come at a punitive cost. Yet even Reform have started to show signs of coming to terms with reality, conceding that you can’t promise the earth to a restless yet jaundiced electorate that has had its fill of broken promises: in November, Farage announced modifications to the party’s fiscal policies, admitting that substantial tax cuts were ‘not realistic’ until spending is brought under control and borrowing costs reduced.
The same kind of realism has been conspicuously absent among that other ascendent, more recent, and far more naive populist movement: the Green party. Under the stewardship of Zack Polanski this organisation has jettisoned most pretence at being ‘green’ in its policies and has instead become green in its attitude. Seeing fertile appeal among a traditional hard left that has never understood economics, and appealing to the worst inclinations of a Generation Z mindset that believes everything should be free, and that all problems can be solved by ‘being really nice’, Polanski has steered his party into the realm of fantasy. His policies include seeking to weaken further our national borders, legalising most hard drugs, printing money and taxing to the hilt the super-rich. This cocktail of deranged utopianism would bring ruination upon this country.
Even those on the orthodox left, those whose remit is not to appeal to the most credulous instincts of the politically illiterate, recognise the folly of Polanski’s particular brand of populism. Only this week, the Fabian Society warned that the Greens were offering ‘unicorn’ solutions, with its general secretary, Joe Dromey, saying that Polanski’s wealth tax ‘won’t solve the kind of fiscal challenge that we face…we won’t be able to fund the public services that we need just by a wealth tax that affects the top 0.1 per cent of the population.’
Dromey naturally included Reform as the other dangerous face of populism: ‘one is offering you a unicorn, the other’s peddling hatred’. Such remarks are mandatory for those on the left, irrespective of hue. Progressive voices will always target Reform, forever spreading alarm and instilling fear about its ‘hatred’, because such verbal posturing assuages their egos and serves well their public image. By ignoring the biggest threat to this country today, its fragmentation along sectarian lines, through their evasion and by continually changing the subject, progressives permit themselves to look virtuous and superior to those ghastly, vulgarian merchants of ‘hate’.
Of course Sir Chris Powell doesn’t want ‘to allow Reform UK to have a free run’, and he needn’t tell Keir Starmer this. Our Prime Minister ensured as much last year by postponing local and mayoral elections in areas the party were widely predicted to win.
And that is why Starmer and those on the left will always invoke the bogeyman of Reform and forever diabolise its brand of ‘populism’: they just don’t trust the people.
Social media visa vetting would protect Britain’s Jews
You don’t need to be a fervent admirer of Donald Trump to recognise that, on matters of national security and cultural cohesion, he hits the bullseye our establishment prefers to evade. His administration’s recent proposal – requiring travellers from visa-waiver countries, including Britain, to disclose five years of social media history as part of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) – has drawn the usual transatlantic sneers: an assault on privacy, a chilling of free expression, another Maga excess.
Yet recent events show social media vetting can expose troubling views. If Britain wants to protect its Jewish citizens – especially young scholars besieged on university campuses – it should follow suit without delay.
I have friends who lecture in Oxford’s ancient colleges: moderate men and women who’ve spent decades nurturing young minds. Over quiet dinners in college halls, they confide what official reports only half-admit: Jewish undergraduates arrive wide-eyed with excitement, only to hide kippot under caps, avoid certain quads after dark, or whisper Hebrew in libraries to evade glares – or worse. The Community Security Trust’s (CST) figures are grim: thousands of anti-Semitic incidents nationwide in recent years, with campuses seeing sharp surges no amount of vice-chancellorial hand-wringing can conceal.
Britain, proud shelterer of the persecuted, must not become a haven for their tormentors
CST recorded 272 university-related anti-Semitic incidents in the 2023/24 academic year alone, a 117 per cent increase from the previous year. Though the number of reports fell to 35 in higher education for January to June of last year, levels remain historically high amid ongoing tensions.
My friends describe a more insidious drip of intimidation, often tied to protests importing rhetoric from distant conflicts. Many overseas students hail from regions where anti-Jewish sentiment is regrettably commonplace. They post freely online – endorsing violence against ‘Zionists’ in terms crossing into plain anti-Semitism – then submit polished visa applications.
We demand academic transcripts, bank statements, biometric data; we probe ties to terrorism. Yet we avert our gaze from digital trails revealing hostile intentions. Why? A misplaced delicacy about ‘privacy’ for those seeking the privilege – not right – of entry.
The controversy over Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s return illustrates how inflammatory online histories can resurface. Successive governments lobbied for this dual-national activist’s release from Egyptian prison. Keir Starmer was ‘delighted’ at his Boxing Day arrival. Days later, old posts emerged: appearing to be calls to kill ‘Zionists’, endorsements of violence, abhorrent statements.
Abd el-Fattah apologised unequivocally, claiming the context of his words was twisted – and if you believe that, I have a bridge in London to sell you. Britain has taken for a fool by chancers like this for decades.
This episode exposed an almost surreal, unbelievable oversight in due diligence – one Jewish organisations rightly called deeply concerning. Governments overlooked a public digital record for diplomatic gain, while ordinary visa applicants face no systematic social media checks.
The double standard is stark. Of course, privacy concerns are valid: mandating social media disclosure risks chilling speech, misinterpreting context, or biasing against certain nationalities. Implementation must be fair, with clear guidelines to distinguish incitement from debate. Yet when safety is at stake, the privilege of entry outweighs these risks – especially given existing requirements over things like criminal records.
Trump’s measure is no invasion; it’s prudence. Entry is a host’s courtesy. We already require proof of funds, health checks, criminal histories. Why baulk at public platforms where extremism festers? The proposal targets incitement to violence and terrorism support – not legitimate criticism of any government, including Israel’s. Had Britain mandated similar disclosure for student visas, how many contributors to campus intimidation might have been turned away?
This isn’t about closing doors; Britain benefits from talented foreigners. It’s basic stewardship: safeguarding our social fabric from imported division and hatred. In an age where ancient prejudices revive online and spill onto streets and quads, wilful blindness is negligence.
The Home Office should act: amend our Electronic Travel Authorisation (set to replace many visas) to require five years of social media identifiers. Let officers scan for anti-Semitic incitement or proscribed group support. Objectors can stay home; the rest – including frightened Jewish students seeking peaceful study – would rest easier.
Trump, for all his bluster, is grasping a timeless conservative truth: a nation blind to foreseeable harm abandons its core duty to protect. Britain, proud shelterer of the persecuted, must not become a haven for their tormentors. It’s time to follow America’s lead – with common sense, not cowardice.
Britain’s obsession with dogs is unhealthy
‘Puppiccino or hot dogolate, Bertie? Or will you try our special Christmas blend?’ The barista leaned across the counter, eyes fixed not on the man holding the lead but on the immaculately groomed corgi at his feet. For a moment, I wondered if this was a case of exceptionally poor diction and misplaced attention. Surely Bertie was the human member of the pair – the one capable of vocalising a preference? But no. Bertie’s tail wagged decisively. His companion – in another era known as the owner – translated boldly: ‘Bertie would like the Christmas blend, please.’
British coffee shops have long catered to a diverse clientele: caffeine addicts, closet sugar junkies (‘frappuccino with extra syrup and cream – no espresso’), ethical purists (‘five pounds for a cup of tea? Oh – organic leaves and sustainably sourced?! I’ll take a whole pot!’), and aficionados of alternative milks. Extending hospitality to dogs may have been the logical next step, but while it once felt like a novelty, it is now inescapable. Bertie is not unusual. He is a member of one of Britain’s fastest-growing demographic groups: canes in loco filiorum – dogs as substitutes for children.
In Britain’s case, dogs commandeer attention once devoted to raising the next generation
The numbers are striking. The UK now has over 11 million dogs, up three million in 15 years, with nearly a third of adults owning one, according to the 2025 PDSA PAW Report. Fertility rates, by contrast, have sunk to historic lows: around 1.4 children per woman in England and Wales, 1.25 in Scotland – well below population replacement level. Put plainly: fewer babies, more cockapoos. Some estimates suggest that roughly 7.5 million children under the age of ten live in the UK – over three million fewer than the country’s dogs. A stroll past the children’s play area in my local park makes the shift instantly visible. The swings are still. The dogs are not. Toddlers are routinely outnumbered three to one.
Amid this canine ascendance, Britain has built an evaluative culture around their inclusion. The annual DogFriendly Awards ranks pubs, cafes, attractions, and even entire towns by how welcoming they are to dogs. Cockermouth claimed the 2025 title, displacing last year’s winner, Bury St Edmunds. One wonders whether the town’s name gave this year’s champion a leg up. Dog festivals proliferate: Woofstock, DogFest, Dogstival – celebrations of canine culture complete with music, family entertainment and, in the words of one host, a ‘bustling marketplace featuring artisan food, crafts, and unique shopping stalls’. These festivals are not Crufts, where skills, intelligence, beauty or utility are judged. What is celebrated here is the dog’s full admission to the family table.
This reflects a population increasingly confused about how to order its loves and affections. Britain has long been fond of dogs (Queen Victoria owned no fewer than 88 collies!) and there is nothing wrong with this. They can be both delightful and useful. But the 21st century twist is that they have been hauled from the kennels into the kitchen by owners who style themselves as ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ to their furry pup. Dogs now have birthdays, personalised diets, and workplace wellbeing schemes built around their emotional support credentials. A friend was once instructed by a ‘dog behaviourist’ to feed her client – yes, the dog – chicken curry and rice. And, as Bertie demonstrates, dogs are now invited to exercise consumer choice. We are no longer merely fond of dogs; we have reorganised life around them.
C. S. Lewis warned that civilisation falters when secondary goods are promoted beyond their proper place – when what should decorate life is mistaken for what should direct it. When ‘second things’ are put first, he argued, we lose both the higher purposes of life and the lesser pleasures. ‘The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life’, he wrote with uncanny foresight, ‘loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog keeping’. His solution was simple: put first things first, and second things will follow.
Modern canine culture shows just how easily this inversion occurs. Dogs increasingly function as substitutes not only for children, but for life’s meaning and purpose – the very ‘first things’ that Lewis insisted must not be displaced. In Christian terms, those first things are not vague ideals but a clear ordering of life: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you’ (Matthew 6:33). God before goods, purpose before comfort.
When that order weakens and first things recede, a vacuum opens, into which the second things advance. Passion and attention do not disappear; they are redirected. In Britain’s case, dogs commandeer attention once devoted to raising the next generation, sustaining communities, and orientating life beyond the self – towards God, moral formation, enduring responsibility, and the cultivation of the soul.
It is fitting that it should be a parish in Lewis’ spiritual home – the Church of England – that offered so precise an illustration of the age this Christmas. St John the Baptist Church in Holland Park marked the Nativity with dog-friendly carol services, in which five priests blessed hundreds of dogs and presented their owners with a certificate. A service celebrating the birth of a child – not merely any child, but the one Christians proclaim as God incarnate – was thus proclaimed to pews full of pets. Well-meaning, warmly received, heavily-attended; a quiet surrendering to the idea that the modern path to transcendence may run not through repentance or reverence, but through paws and wagging tails.
The stable at Bethlehem did indeed house animals, but their presence framed the scene; they played no part in it. It was the shepherds who came to worship the child Jesus – not their sheep. Yes, St. Francis preached to the birds and spoke tenderly to animals; but he did so in a world bursting with children, families and vocations, and from a life ordered uncompromisingly around God. We, by contrast, usher our dogs onto centre stage in a country where those first things have thinned out. The difference is not affection but order.
Other churches will doubtless follow suit. Just like the coffee shops and much of the public square, they will be keen to remain welcoming, relevant and inclusive. Perhaps, in time, Bertie will be offered not only a Christmas blend but also a liturgical role. Asked whether he renounces Satan and all his works, he will respond as he always does: with a hopeful wag, a wary growl, or indifferent silence. And somewhere between that silence and the stillness of the swings in the park, we may pause to reflect; and in that pause, decide to restore our attention to the enduring responsibilities that give life its meaning, especially those expressed through raising the next generation. Someone, after all, will need to interpret for Bertie’s offspring.
Kim and Putin’s growing bromance should make us nervous
As Kim Jong-un himself announced at a New Year’s Eve event in Pyongyang, 2025 was an ‘unforgettable year’ for North Korea. During the final weekend of the year, the Supreme Leader supervised a ‘nuclear-capable’ long-range strategic cruise missile test, which he termed an ‘exercise of war deterrence’ against the ‘security threats’ facing Pyongyang.
The test followed a week of oily letters between Kim and his new best friend, none other than Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader lauded the ‘heroic dispatch’ of North Korean troops to assist Russia’s war against Ukraine as an example of the ‘militant fraternity’ between Pyongyang and Moscow. Even if dynamics in the Ukraine war change this year, the West cannot afford to overlook the mounting security threats the ties between these two ‘invincible’ allies present.
Seven years ago, Kim and Donald Trump were in the throes of exchanging what the US president infamously called ‘love letters’. Fast forward to 2026, and Putin has taken Trump’s place. In response to Putin’s missive, the North Korean leader gushed that Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow had become a ‘sincerest alliance of sharing blood, life, and death in the same trench’. It was a not-too-subtle reference to North Korea’s deployment of approximately 14,000 to 15,000 troops to the Kursk region, which, Kim added, would be ‘eternally recorded’ in the history books as a ‘great biography of the alliance’.
Moscow and Pyongyang know that developing a nuclear programme does not come cheap
To welcome the new year, Kim praised North Korean troops serving in Russia for ‘heroically’ preserving his country’s ‘dignity and honour’. Last year marked a significant juncture in Russia-North Korea relations, being the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that both countries referred to each other as ‘allies’.
Kim wants to keep his relations with a client who has so far sent over 12 million rounds of artillery, several hundred missiles, and troops, engineers, construction workers, and deminers to aid Russia’s war machine. At the same time, the North Korean leader’s quest for recognition as a de facto nuclear-armed state has intensified, in no small part owing to remuneration from Russia in the form of military and (likely) missile technology and, at the very least, knowledge. Only last week, Kim inspected factories producing short-range missiles and rockets. Slowing down missile and nuclear development, let alone denuclearising, is one New Year’s resolution the North Korean leader will not be making.
North Korea’s last nuclear test – its sixth – was in 2017. Only Kim can decide whether 2026 will see the long-awaited seventh test. On the one hand, there is no better time than the present. The impotence of the United Nations security council means that Pyongyang can escape sanctions-free. On the other hand, Kim may choose to hold off and, instead, pursue a meeting with Donald Trump to bolster the North Korean leader’s legitimacy, all the while offering vacuous concessions and persuading the man who offered to take him to a baseball game to give him and his country his much-craved recognition.
Trump and Kim failed to meet last October prior to the Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC) summit in Seoul. With the American president now focused on negotiating an increasingly elusive peace in Ukraine, a tête-à-tête with ‘Little Rocket Man’ may not be high on the White House’s agenda.
What we can be more certain about, however, is the widening and deepening cooperation between North Korea and Russia. Moscow’s end-of-year gift to Pyongyang of a portrait of Kim Yo-jong, the vitriolic sister of Kim Jong-un, was more than a mere gesture. Earlier in the year, Moscow pledged to bankroll films praising North Korean soldiers for ‘liberating’ the Kursk region, highlighting Moscow’s indebtedness to its Cold War client.
Both countries also know that developing a nuclear programme does not come cheap. Last year, North Korea stole over £2 billion in cryptocurrency, an increase of over 50 per cent from its earnings in 2024. With comparably fewer attacks last year (than in 2024), Pyongyang’s ability to steal exorbitant sums of cash through new means is only improving. North Korea may be known as a hermit kingdom, but when it comes to funding its weapons of mass destruction programme and filling the Supreme Leader’s slush fund, rapid adaptation is essential. We should not rule out Pyongyang cooperating with Moscow in the cyber domain.
As North Korea prepares for the year ahead, Kim will want to write the next chapter of his ‘great biography’ by strengthening ties with Russia. With Pyongyang underscoring its intention to deter Seoul, Washington, and their allies, the West cannot sit idly by. In Great Britain, one of our own New Year’s resolutions must be to show greater resolve in combatting these strengthening ties between Moscow, Pyongyang, and Beijing. The next time North Korea tests a ‘new’ missile or unveils a ‘new’ weapon, the prospect of Russian involvement in their design or creation is likely to be higher than before.
Before we combat these expanding threats, however, we must get our own house in order. As Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and the Labour party try and patch over their initial praise for the return of Alaa Abd-el-Fattah to our shores, a worrying question remains. If Britain in 2026 openly embraces someone like him, how will it respond to Russia, North Korea, and China, who will do all they can to exploit Britain’s weaknesses?
Can the ‘Donroe doctrine’ really change Venezuela?
During the early hours of Saturday January 3, an official statement from the White House, signed by President Trump, confirmed that the US had captured both President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and taken them out of Venezuela.
At 2 a.m. sharp, thunderous sounds echoed through the capital city, part of what Trump called today “an assault not seen since World War Two… one of the most stunning displays of military might and competence in American history.” It was certainly an attack unlike anything ever seen in Venezuela. Within two hours, all of Caracas looked like a massive fireball, communications were down and areas were without power.
The US deployed fighter jets in strategic areas: they bombed and destroyed the Port of La Guaira (Venezuela’s most important port), as well as El Cuartel de la Montaña, a security and military base created by Hugo Chávez on top of a mountain, as well as various military and intelligence installations. The headquarters of the DGCIM – Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence – burned down.
The Maduro regime issued a lengthy official statement, attributing the attack to the United States, saying, “The objective of this attack is none other than to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, attempting to forcibly break the nation’s political independence. They will not succeed.”
Military sources told me that the Army and National Guard control access routes to major cities. The attack took Venezuelan authorities and military forces completely by surprise, and they were unable to repel the attacks, which ceased after almost two hours. However, airspace over Caracas remains filled with American fighter jets. AH-1Z helicopters struck against military and intelligence targets, including airports, barracks, the Federal Legislative Palace and Fort Tiuna, the country’s largest military base. Many areas of Caracas were without power, including the poorest neighborhoods and the Higuerote Military Base, home to all of Venezuela’s war helicopters, which the US attacks destroyed.
This puts the Venezuelan military in a truly precarious position. Only one major objective remains, where the battle will be fierce: the city of Maracay.
A high-ranking military officer told me around 3 a.m. today that all troops have been assembled and are now confined to their barracks to prepare for a potential ground engagement, as well as to secure the Libertador Air Base in Maracay.
The military is blocking access to all major cities, with main avenues closed off by tanks and military vehicles. Unofficially, this officer told me that while the threat was present, Maduro foolishly hadn’t expected it to escalate, as he had called for dialogue with Trump the previous day, offering cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking and even facilitating oil negotiations.
The US has been laying the groundwork for the strike for nearly a month. On December 9, an American MQ-4C Triton drone (for aerial, land and sea monitoring and surveillance) was detected days later, another similar drone crossed the skies over Maracay.
On December 19, there was an explosion in the La Goajira region, also in Zulia state. They found fragments of an American missile. At midnight on December 24, a massive explosion occurred at a chemical plant in Zulia state, a major oil-producing region.
Then, on the night of December 29, there was another explosion in a warehouse at the racetrack in the city of Valencia, Carabobo state. Sources confirm the existence of a clandestine fentanyl laboratory there.
“We didn’t see this coming, since President Maduro was counting on the possibility of dialogue,” said the source, who wished to remain anonymous.
So why mobilize such a force against a country where the militias seem like something out of an absurdist comedy, where everything is in disarray, and where Maduro looks like a clown who can’t find his way back to the circus? The answer: the real threat was never Maduro. It’s everything behind him that Hugo Chávez began to build through his alliances with Iran, Syria, Russia and China. This is the real enemy, a very dangerous one.
Despite Trump saying “we are going to run the country” until there can be a judicious transfer of power, a “proper transition,” the US has yet to establish complete control.
Maracay is the capital of Aragua state in the heart of Venezuela. Fewer than half a million people live in these valleys along the Venezuelan coast. But strategically, it’s a key city for the Venezuelan military.
Most importantly, it’s home to the Libertador Air Base, the headquarters of Venezuela’s elite fighter jets as well as a large array of dangerous, modern combat aircraft. The base also houses the 83-I UAV Squadron, which operates Iranian-made reconnaissance and attack drones, assembled locally. Last year, between November 28 and 30, the base hosted the Venezuela 2025 Industrial Aeronautics Expo, where aerial displays featuring these operational systems were held. To date, the drone factory remains shrouded in secrecy, although sources within the institution have confirmed to me that Iranian and Russian specialists operate it.
And all of this is the result of that first meeting between Iran and Venezuela in 2005, which established the alliance. Hezbollah’s presence is confirmed, and its cells are expanding throughout almost the entire country. More than 10,000 soldiers are on the ground, ready for anything. If the US has to enact a “much bigger wave” against Venezuela, as Trump says, this will be the target.
Second, but no less important, this area houses the central base of the terrorist organization Tren de Aragua, which Trump has often denounced. Everyone knows where it’s located: inside Tocorón prison, controlled by narco-terrorists and leaders of all organized crime in Venezuela, who have managed to create their own networks outside of Venezuela. They’ve been involved with Black Lives Matter, riots in the United States and international crimes.
Tocorón prison is like stepping into the Twilight Zone: there are restaurants, spas, swimming pools and tunnels for the leaders to come and go – all under the protection of the regime. Nobody in this country messes with Tren de Aragua. These men, supported by the drug trafficking of the Cartel of the Suns, Hezbollah, Colombian guerrillas and the Chavista regime, are the true masters of evil and power.
In the initial attack, Donald Trump has essentially eliminated all military components in Caracas and taken Maduro.
However, the command center for drug trafficking and organized crime, the base of drones capable of engaging in combat and the stronghold of Hezbollah leaders in Maracay, remain untouched. This is the region that could decide the end of more than a quarter-century of dictatorship.
Until last night, the daily life of a Venezuelan largely consisted of trying to find food for the day and being careful not to get stopped by police and/or military personnel, or people in plain-clothes who work for the government and operate with impunity. They’ll take your phone and search to see if you’re criticizing the government, and if so, that’s it, you’ll disappear. This has happened to many fellow journalists. They simply vanished. The regime even created an app called Venapp, so you can become a snitch and send information on anyone who supposedly threatens the government. You can’t trust anyone, not even your family. That’s why, for Venezuelans, it was better to get drunk, buy things with money sent by relatives abroad and, for some, hold onto the hope that the regime would end someday.
That day seems to have finally arrived in the early hours of this morning, in a way few could have imagined. Not even Maduro himself, who just a couple of days ago was dancing and cracking jokes on national television.
But we’re only seeing all this through Instagram and TikTok, since the Venezuelan state seized all media outlets years ago. Every day, without exception, Maduro addressed the nation, repeating the same thing: everything is fine. So very few Venezuelans actually watched or listened to the national media. Their favorite distraction was watching Turkish and Korean soap operas, since the Venezuelan telenovela industry, once one of the most important in the world, has disappeared.
Now, for the first time in decades, Venezuelans have woken up to an unfamiliar country. The places where they used to go for breakfast empanadas are closed, as are markets and bakeries. This morning, a different Venezuela dawned, one for which most of us are unprepared. The parties, the drinking and the games are over. Welcome to a new reality.
At 5 a.m., the American planes disappeared, as did several key figures in the Chavista regime. Rumors abound of dead Chavista leaders. For now, only one fact is clear: the entire military force in Caracas is inactive, destroyed. It only took a few hours to make it happen. The “Donroe Doctrine” is now in place. And Nicolás Maduro has fallen.
The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran
And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colors. They frothed day and night about a “murderous regime” – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum.
It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors
What is it about revolts in Iran that rankle the activist class? These people love to yap about “resistance” and “oppression.” Yet the minute men and women in Iran rise up in resistance against the oppressive theocracy that immiserates and subjugates them, they go coy. Their solidarity evaporates. Their flag-waving ends. They go back to tweeting about TV.
It’s happening again as the latest Iranian uprising enters its seventh day. In cities across Iran, people are protesting the economic mismanagement and clerical tyranny of the Islamist ruling class. It started a week ago, in Tehran, when shopkeepers shuttered their businesses and hit the streets to express their anger about yet another sharp fall in the Iranian currency against the US dollar. They were swiftly joined by other Iranians furious about declining living standards.
The protests are morphing into a collective rage against theocracy itself. Students have joined: young women and men sick of being told what to wear and how to think by the ayatollah classes. It is now the largest revolt to have shaken Iran since the uprising in 2022 over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman from Iranian Kurdistan who was accused by the morality police of not wearing her veil properly.
There have been images of unimaginable bravery from the past week. We’ve seen young women dancing and laughing, their hair freely flowing, in defiance of those cranky old men who think such “sinful” creatures should cover up and shut up. We’ve seen a lone man sitting in the middle of the road, blocking the way of the regime’s riot goons on their motorbikes. It has echoes of Tiananmen Square’s “tank man.”
For those of us who love liberty, who support the freedom of the individual against the dictates of theocratic strongmen, these are stirring scenes. It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors. Women in Iran face huge legal and social discrimination – that many are throwing off their hijabs and saying “No more” is a wonderful blow for equality against cruelty.
So where are the solidarity marches? Where are the gatherings outside Iranian embassies to echo the protesters’ cry for an end to the sexist, regressive rule of the ayatollahs?
It’s an anti-war uprising too. Protesters are chanting “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!,” in glorious protest against the regime’s wasteful spending on its anti-Semitic proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah. Where are the Western anti-imperialists to cheer this demand for social spending over the squandering of billions on a medieval war of attrition against the world’s only Jewish state?
This is where we get to the ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence on Iran. Where Iranian progressives understand that Hezbollah and Hamas are brutal outfits doing the bidding of a ruthless regime, our activist class has a tendency to view them as “resistance” movements.
They could never get behind the Iranian people’s cry for those neo-fascist militias to be defunded because they are drunk on the delusion that these terrorists are an important bulwark against the “real menace” in the Middle East: Israel. Their Israelophobia has so thoroughly shattered their moral compasses that they bristle at the very suggestion that Iran should stop funding Israel’s hateful foes and instead should focus on improving the lot of the Iranian people.
We end up in the truly perverse situation where the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West instinctively want the Iranian regime to survive – in order that it might continue sticking it to evil Israel – while the young of Iran dream of the regime’s withering away. The revolt in Iran has exposed not only the crisis of legitimacy of the ayatollah classes but also the treachery of Western progressives. It’s now clear that their luxury cause of madly hating Israel takes precedence over everything else, including offering solidarity to the freedom-yearning people of Iran. Your liberty will have to wait, guys – we haven’t destroyed the Jewish state yet.
There’s another ingredient in their moral cowardice – the fear of being thought “Islamophobic.” A generation raised to believe that everything from criticizing the Koran to dissing the hijab is a form of bigotry is never going to be able to stand with people who are throwing their hijabs on to open fires and taking the mick out of their Islamic rulers. The left’s sniveling silence on Iran speaks to how far they have fallen down the well of moral relativism.
Maduro’s fall could galvanize the Iranian opposition
On the afternoon of December 28 in a Tehran electronics bazaar, shopkeepers (known as bazaaris) shuttered their shops and walked out, outraged at a planned gas price rise and crippled at the continuing slide in the value of the Iranian currency and the government’s powerlessness to shepherd Iran’s economy toward something better than corruption, unemployment and inflationary cycles. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar was quick to follow suit. A day or so later, several of Tehran’s most prestigious universities staged demonstrations. Smaller cities and towns have since taken up the baton of resistance, with government offices attacked and people openly calling for Khamenei’s death and the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, at a time when one of Iran’s major international allies, Venezuela, is in the process of having its state dismantled by US air strikes and military operations. The fall of the Maduro regime has the distinct potential to galvanize the Iranian opposition as yet another of Tehran’s foreign policy pillars comes tumbling down.
The Islamic Republic has only bad cards to play
Yet as the protests enter their sixth day, it’s important to stress that daily life in Iranian cities large and small continues relatively uninterrupted. “It’s not yet on the same scale as it was in 2022 when millions joined in the Women, Life Freedom protests,” one Iranian said to me yesterday. And although some of Tehran’s bazaars remain shuttered and protests are continuing, Friday prayers across Iran went ahead as planned, showing that for the time being, the Islamic Republic remains in control. But as the regime marks the anniversary of the death of Qasem Soleimani and celebrates a public holiday to mark the birth of the First Imam, few in positions of power will be anything other than extremely uncomfortable at where this could lead, especially after a summer and fall which saw striking Iranian workers, a military humiliation at the hands of Israel and the US and a steady increase in executions of political dissidents.
Iran’s embattled president Masoud Pezeshkian, cutting a forlorn figure, said yesterday that he had instructed the interior ministry to “listen to the legitimate demands of the protesters through dialogue with their representatives.” And at the same time, he performed a pointless reshuffle at the Central Bank of Iran, and the government’s announcement of a bank holiday that might calm things down both smacked of desperation. Bank holidays are surely for celebrations, not voids in which to bury bad news. Iranian hardliners, reaching for the nearest hoary cliché, have been quick to blame it all on Israel and the US.
Wherever these protests lead in the coming days, what is abundantly clear is that the Islamic Republic has only bad cards to play. It has no economic cushion with which to remedy the currency crisis, a short-term imperative to replenish its missile arsenal in preparation for the next Israeli attack and a sense of acute vulnerability that drives it to execute anyone it suspects of being an Israeli spy. Khamenei will rely on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers, the Basiij (a volunteer arm of the IRGC whose ranks now allegedly swell with Syrian and Afghans drafted into kill Iranian protesters) to terrify protesters into remaining at home. There will be more deaths, more arrests and more executions in Iran’s prisons.
Accordingly, Donald Trump’s full-throated support for the protesters came cloaked in a threat that should the Islamic Republic kill any more protesters, the US is ready to intervene. As I’ve written before in these pages, Iranian nationalism, be that on the streets or in the corridors of power, is hardwired to react badly to the faintest whiff of foreign intervention. For all the hatred of the Islamic Republic, any direct US intervention to support the protestors carries a huge risk of discrediting those brave protestors in the eyes of those Iranians who remain at home, but who nonetheless despise what the regime is doing to their country. We saw this over the summer when Bibi Netanyahu tried to rally the Iranian opposition; it largely fell flat. No one in Iran wants to be seen to be doing the bidding of a foreign power.
Trump and other foreign powers must strike a balance between supporting protest and avoiding falling into the trap of discrediting those protestors by associating them with notions of “foreign subversion.” This would play directly in to the hands of Khamenei who loves nothing more than to paint all those who disagree with him as “agents of the West and the Zionists.”
‘Long live the Shah!’ is a slogan that is guaranteed to infuriate the mullahs
Much has been made, as is often the case, of the chants calling for the return to Iran of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last Shah. It was always a beloved trope of UK Foreign Office diplomats to reach, lazily, for the “no one in Iran likes Reza Pahlavi” stick, pointing out that his father’s rule was a long time ago and not nearly as sepia-toned and wonderful as its apologists claim. And while there isn’t a huge amount there with which to disagree, as the Islamic Republic’s wheel of repression turns yet again, the Pahlavi prince’s popularity has only increased. Iranians, pushed to the point of starvation and threatened by Israeli and US bombs, find themselves reaching for the half-light of a partially remembered idyll when their country was richer and freer. Not the stuff of revolutions, those sage mandarins would have you believe, from behind a desk in Whitehall.
But surely the half-light of partially remembered idylls is exactly the sort of hazy counterpoint that drives revolution? Ayatollah Khomeini’s own revolutionary ideology as communicated on scratchy cassette tapes passed around Iran reached back into an almost totally fictional Islamic past, with a dollop of anti-imperial rhetoric. He famously refused to elaborate on his vision for a post-Pahlavi Iran, choosing instead to reach back into a past that never existed, from which he himself claimed to be an emissary of sorts, and talk in angry generalities about the evils of “imperialism” and exhorting the Iranian people to throw off the mantle of oppression, and so on.
That Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is in no way interested in (or perhaps suited to) the role of the next ruler of Iran is, perhaps, beside the point. The protesters themselves know this too; “Long live the Shah!” is a slogan that is guaranteed to infuriate the mullahs. That he is in no way minded to return to Iran to lead the revolution is by the by, it seems. But as the chants, no doubt amplified to the nth degree in anti-Islamic Republic Western outlets, calling for Reza Pahlavi to return to Tehran in triumph reverberate across Iranian cities, we must look seriously at the power of memory in Iran and the role an idealized memory of his father’s rule might play as the crisis unfolds. And in the absence of any real alternative to the Islamic Republic, perhaps something is better than nothing?
Maduro’s fall could galvanise Iran’s opposition
On the afternoon of the 28 December in a Tehran electronics bazaar, shopkeepers (known as bazaaris) shuttered their shops and walked out, outraged at a planned gas price rise and crippled at the continuing slide in the value of the Iranian currency and the government’s powerlessness to shepherd Iran’s economy towards something better than corruption, unemployment and inflationary cycles. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar was quick to follow suit. A day or so later, several of Tehran’s most prestigious universities staged demonstrations. Smaller cities and towns have since taken up the baton of resistance, with government offices attacked and people openly calling for Khamenei’s death and the return of the Pahlavi dynasty, at a time when one of Iran’s major international allies, Venezuela, is in the process of having its state dismantled by US airstrikes and military operations. The fall of the Maduro regime has the distinct potential to galvanise the Iranian opposition as yet another of Tehran’s foreign policy pillars comes tumbling down.
The fall of the Maduro regime has the distinct potential to galvanise the Iranian opposition
Yet as the protests enter their sixth day, it’s important to stress that daily life in Iranian cities large and small continues relatively uninterrupted. ‘It’s not yet on the same scale as it was in 2022 when millions joined in the Women, Life Freedom protests,’ one Iranian said to me yesterday. And although some of Tehran’s bazaars remain shuttered and protests are continuing, Friday prayers across Iran went ahead as planned, showing that for the time being, the Islamic Republic remains in control. But as the regime marks the anniversary of the death of Qassem Soleimani and celebrates a public holiday to mark the birth of the First Imam, few in positions of power will be anything other than extremely uncomfortable at where this could lead, especially after a summer and autumn which saw striking Iranian workers, a military humiliation at the hands of Israel and the US and a steady increase in executions of political dissidents.
Iran’s embattled president Massoud Pezeshkian, cutting a forlorn figure, said yesterday that he had instructed the interior ministry to ‘listen to the legitimate demands of the protesters through dialogue with their representatives.’ And at the same time, he performed a pointless reshuffle at the Central Bank of Iran, and the government’s announcement of a bank holiday that might calm things down both smacked of desperation. Bank holidays are surely for celebrations, not voids in which to bury bad news. Iranian hardliners, reaching for the nearest hoary cliché, have been quick to blame it all on Israel and the US.
Wherever these protests lead in the coming days, what is abundantly clear is that the Islamic Republic has only bad cards to play. It has no economic cushion with which to remedy the currency crisis, a short-term imperative to replenish its missile arsenal in preparation for the next Israeli attack and a sense of acute vulnerability that drives it to execute anyone it suspects of being an Israeli spy. Khamenei will rely on the Islamic Republic’s enforcers, the Basiij (a volunteer arm of the IRGC whose ranks now allegedly swell with Syrian and Afghans drafted into kill Iranian protestors) to terrify protestors into remaining at home. There will be more deaths, more arrests and more executions in Iran’s prisons.
Accordingly, Donald Trump’s full-throated support for the protestors came cloaked in a threat that should the Islamic Republic kill any more protestors, the US is ready to intervene. As I’ve written before in these pages, Iranian nationalism, be that on the streets or in the corridors of power, is hardwired to react badly to the faintest whiff of foreign intervention. For all the hatred of the Islamic Republic, any direct US intervention to support the protestors carries a huge risk of discrediting those brave protestors in the eyes of those Iranians who remain at home, but who nonetheless despise what the regime is doing to their country. We saw this over the summer when Bibi Netanyahu tried to rally the Iranian opposition; it largely fell flat. No one in Iran wants to be seen to be doing the bidding of a foreign power.
Trump and other foreign powers must strike a balance between supporting protest and avoiding falling into the trap of discrediting those protestors by associating them with notions of ‘foreign subversion.’ This would play directly in to the hands of Khamenei who loves nothing more than to paint all those who disagree with him as ‘agents of the West and the Zionists.’
‘Long live the Shah!’ is a slogan that is guaranteed to infuriate the Mullahs
Much has been made, as is often the case, of the chants calling for the return to Iran of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last Shah. It was always a beloved trope of Foreign Office diplomats to reach, lazily, for the ‘no one in Iran likes Reza Pahlavi’ stick, pointing out that his father’s rule was a long time ago and not nearly as sepia toned and wonderful as its apologists claim. And whilst there isn’t a huge amount there with which to disagree, as the Islamic Republic’s wheel of repression turns yet again, the Pahlavi prince’s popularity has only increased. Iranians, pushed to the point of starvation and threatened by Israeli and US bombs, find themselves reaching for the half-light of a partially remembered idyll when their country was richer and freer. Not the stuff of revolutions, those sage Mandarins would have you believe, from behind a desk in Whitehall.
But surely the half-light of partially remembered idylls is exactly the sort of hazy counterpoint that drives revolution? Ayatollah Khomeini’s own revolutionary ideology as communicated on scratchy cassette tapes passed around Iran reached back into an almost totally fictional Islamic past, with a dollop of anti-imperial rhetoric. He famously refused to elaborate on his vision for a post-Pahlavi Iran, choosing instead to reach back into a past that never existed, from which he himself claimed to be an emissary of sorts, and talk in angry generalities about the evils of ‘imperialism,’ and exhorting the Iranian people to throw off the mantle of oppression, and so on.
That Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is in no way interested in (or perhaps suited to) the role of the next ruler of Iran is, perhaps, beside the point. The protestors themselves know this too; ‘Long live the Shah!’ is a slogan that is guaranteed to infuriate the Mullahs. That he is in no way minded to return to Iran to lead the revolution is by the by, it seems. But as the chants, no doubt amplified to the nth degree in anti-Islamic Republic Western outlets, calling for Reza Pahlavi to return to Tehran in triumph reverberate across Iranian cities, we must look seriously at the power of memory in Iran and the role an idealised memory of his father’s rule might play as the crisis unfolds. And in the absence of any real alternative to the Islamic Republic, perhaps something is better than nothing?
Why Trump captured Maduro
Donald Trump likes to start the new year with a bang – or better yet a series of loud bangs. On January 3, 2020, his first administration ordered the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Exactly six years later, his second administration has carried out a large-scale regime-change operation in Venezuela, blowing several sites to smithereens and capturing the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and flying them out of the country. This after a series of military strikes against Venezuelan and cartel targets in recent weeks and months. There had been strong rumors in Washington that Trump would order the operation in the run-up to Christmas. But he’s waited until the start of 2026 before pulling the trigger.
By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests
Few will mourn the departure of Maduro – a left-wing tyrant whose regime has grown ever more corrupt and oppressive as the years have gone by. Venezuela is a gangsterish system in which citizens struggle for food, snitch on each other to the authorities through social media, and drug cartels operate with impunity. But the question of what comes next is of course now paramount. America has been quite successful in recent years at regime decapitation. It’s the change part that proves really difficult.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who was so careful to praise Trump after receiving the award in October, declared three weeks ago that her country had already been invaded – by Russia and Iran.
‘We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime,’ she said.
‘We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 per cent of our populations and not only involved in drug trafficking, but in human trafficking in networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.’
Corina Machado supports Trump’s maximalist pressure campaign against Maduro. We must wait and see if she will play a role in whatever plans the Trump administration now has for Venezuela.
The reports of Hezbollah and Iranian activities in the region are also an important part of the story. Will the regime-change strikes on Caracas be swiftly followed by another similar mission on Tehran? It’s perhaps no coincidence that Bibi Netanyahu just attended Trump’s New Year party in Mar a Lago.
Trump has a deep obsession with energy prices and it’s notable that every country he threatens or attacks happens to have enormous oil reserves. On Christmas Day, he ordered strikes on Nigeria, apparently as a ‘Christmas present’ to protect Christians but cynics suspect other motives.
By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-rich nations whose governments oppose American interests. The other big two are Iran and Russia. Given the increasing talk inside American corridors of power of a peace deal over Ukraine – and the business possibilities stemming from a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington – the Trump foreign-policy agenda of 2026 could already be clear. War with Venezuela and Iran and fossil-fuel-rich peace with Mother Russia. Total energy dominance – the idea will make beautiful sense in Trump’s mind. But as his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama discovered, the problem with forcibly removing leaders is controlling what happens next.
Why Trump captured Maduro
Donald Trump likes to start the new year with a bang – or better yet a series of loud bangs. On January 3, 2020, his first administration ordered the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Exactly six years later, his second administration has carried out a large-scale regime-change operation in Venezuela, blowing several sites to smithereens and capturing the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife and flying them out of the country. This after a series of military strikes against Venezuelan and cartel targets in recent weeks and months. There had been strong rumours in Washington that Trump would order the operation in the run-up to Christmas. But he’s waited until the start of 2026 before pulling the trigger.
By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests
Few will mourn the departure of Maduro – a left-wing tyrant whose regime has grown ever more corrupt and oppressive as the years have gone by. Venezuela is a gangsterish system in which citizens struggle for food, snitch on each other to the authorities through social media, and drug cartels operate with impunity. But the question of what comes next is of course now paramount. America has proven quite successful in recent years at regime decapitation. It’s the change part that proves really difficult.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who was so careful to praise Trump after receiving the award in October, declared three weeks ago that her country had already been invaded – by Russia and Iran.
‘We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime,’ she said.
‘We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 per cent of our populations and not only involved in drug trafficking, but in human trafficking in networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.’
Corina Machado supports Trump’s maximalist pressure campaign against Maduro and will no doubt play an important part in whatever plans the Trump administration has now for Venezuela.
The reports of Hezbollah and Iranian activities in the region are also an important part of the story. Will the regime-change strikes on Caracas be swiftly followed by another similar mission on Tehran? It’s perhaps no coincidence that Bibi Netanyahu just attended Trump’s New Year party in Mar a Lago.
Trump has a deep obsession with energy prices and it’s notable that every country he threatens or attacks happens to have enormous oil reserves. On Christmas Day, he ordered strikes on Nigeria, apparently as a ‘Christmas present’ to protect Christians but cynics suspect other motives.
By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests. The other big two are Iran and Russia. Given the increasing talk inside American corridors of power of a peace deal over Ukraine – and the business possibilities stemming from a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington – the Trump foreign-policy agenda of 2026 could already be clear. War with Venezuela and Iran and fossil-fuel-rich peace with Mother Russia. Total energy dominance – the idea will make beautiful sense in Trump’s mind. But as his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama discovered, the problem with forcibly removing governments is controlling what happens next.
Listen to the latest Americano with Freddy Gray:
Trump says the US has captured Venezuela’s Maduro
Donald Trump’s undeclared war in Venezuela against the Marxist regime of President Nicolas Maduro has erupted into the open. Trump says the US has captured Venezuela’s leader and his wife. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote:
The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.
Trump’s statement emerged after the US carried out strikes on sites inside Venezuela, including military facilities. Explosions were heard early this morning as smoke rose over the capital Caracas.
The Venezuelan government said that it “rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the extremely serious military aggression perpetrated by the current Government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory.” But those words won’t deter Trump from pressing on with his military campaign.
For several months, Trump has ordered strikes against smuggling boats who he says are delivering narcotics to the US. These attacks have taken more than 100 lives at sea since September. Last week, the CIA hit a docking area inside Venezuela which was allegedly used by the smugglers. It was the first piece of direct American action on Venezuelan soil of Trump’s presidency. This morning’s strikes demonstrate how Trump has dramatically stepped up his campaign.
Why is Trump so intent on removing Maduro from power? One reason is that he blames the Venezuelan President for wrecking American communities. Trump says he has flooded cities with illegal migrants and supplied them with drugs such as cocaine and fentanyl which have devastated their social fabrics and boosted crime.
The President may also be interested in getting access to Venezuela’s untapped oil reserves. Estimated at around 300 billion barrels, Venezuela’s reserves are larger than those in Saudi Arabia. The US recently boarded and seized two Venezuelan tankers that Trump accused of exporting oil in defiance of US sanctions.
Despite being an economic basket case, Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. Under Maduro’s socialist rule – and that of his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer in 2013 – the country has been reduced to dire poverty and mass unemployment. The country is predicted to have an inflation rate of 548 percent in 2025, and more than eight million people – a third of the entire population – have fled abroad, making dangerous journeys to the US and other countries in South America. This exodus has fueled social unrest.
Finally, Washington is ideologically opposed to Maduro, who international observers charged with rigging his last presidential election victory in 2024. The country’s leading opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who had been living underground since that poll for fear of arrest, won the Nobel Peace Prize in November for her “peaceful resistance to repression.” She openly backs Trump’s anti-Maduro campaign.
The ongoing confrontation is the most serious clash between the US and one of its Latin American neighbors since the long but unsuccessful campaign to bring down the communist Castro dictatorship in Cuba in the 1960s. President Trump is famously averse to getting the US involved in foreign “forever wars,” but in the case of Venezuela he seems ready to make an exception.
The New Year’s Eve fire shattered the myth of Swiss invulnerability
This was not supposed to happen in Switzerland. In a country where disasters are meant to be engineered out, risk neutralised and failure anticipated, the idea of a crowded bar turning into a death trap feels almost unthinkable. Around 40 people died inside the Constellation bar in Crans Montana on New Year’s Eve, and up to 119 were injured, many suffering serious burns.
Switzerland has become more open and more exposed. It’s also become more complacent
Witnesses describe flames racing across the ceiling within seconds. Systems that were assumed to hold clearly did not and panic set in. The inquiry will take time, but the outline is already visible. The details now emerging are uncomfortably familiar.
Survivors speak of a single, very narrow staircase serving as the main escape route, of people stumbling and falling as others surged behind them, and of the absence of any organised evacuation. The fire spread faster than the crowd could move. Video on social media shows the narrow entrance to the establishment blocked as revellers tried desperately to escape.
Images and survivor accounts suggest a ceiling covered in what appears to be highly flammable acoustic foam, material that has caused catastrophe in similar nightclub fires elsewhere, and which stricter interpretations of fire codes might deem unsuitable. At a press conference on Friday afternoon, the Valais chief prosecutor, Béatrice Pilloud, said investigators believe the fire was very likely triggered by sparklers attached to champagne bottles. Witnesses report the use of sparklers waved close to the ceiling. Officials have confirmed a rapid flashover effect, leading to the sudden spread of flames. The investigation is ongoing. The owners of the bar say they followed all safety regulations and that the venue had been regularly checked by inspectors.
Whatever caused the fire, the crowd inside was strikingly young. There appear to have been fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds celebrating New Year’s Eve, in a venue that appeared packed. Several witnesses have questioned whether meaningful age or capacity checks were carried out as the night wore on. No official conclusions have yet been drawn.
Government officials interviewed on Thursday evening on Swiss television choked up and had tears in their eyes. Flags have been lowered across federal buildings for several days. New Year celebrations were cancelled. The Swiss president rushed to Crans-Montana to meet rescuers and families and described the fire as among the worst tragedies the country has faced in recent memory. In the resort itself, hundreds gathered at vigils, laying candles and flowers in silence.
The horror alone is enough to traumatise a small country. But layered onto the grief is disbelief. Disasters like this are meant to happen elsewhere. In countries that cut corners or that improvise, or in places that tolerate lax enforcement. That’s not supposed to be the case in Switzerland. Not in a resort marketed as the embodiment of Swiss precision.
For decades, Switzerland has sold itself to tourists, investors and to itself as a place where systems hold and where safety’s assumed. Reliability’s not an aspiration but an identity. Trains run on time, infrastructure’s immaculate and rules are obeyed. The state functions not with drama, but with quiet competence.
What makes this disaster so destabilising is that Switzerland has spent the last twenty years quietly becoming a different country, while insisting that nothing fundamental has changed. Switzerland has globalised fast. Alpine resorts now operate as part of a hyper-competitive international leisure market. Capacity is pushed and venues are packed harder and longer. Revenue matters. Alpine resorts, once bastions of discreet Swiss restraint, now chase the same Instagram spectacle and packed venues as anywhere else, revenue imperatives trumping the old caution.
At the same time, the myth of Swiss perfection has outlived the reality. The country still believes that everything’s properly run, properly checked and properly enforced. In truth, enforcement has thinned out and oversight’s fragmented. Compliance is assumed and not always proven.
In theory, Switzerland’s fire protection regime is robust. National norms exist, setting out requirements for materials, evacuation routes, occupancy limits and staff training. In practice, enforcement is decentralised. Cantons transpose the norms and communes inspect. The system relies heavily on local vigilance and on good faith by operators. While we don’t yet know the facts of what happened here, venues have been known to change use without reclassification, or capacity quietly creeps beyond what was originally authorised. A bar begins to function like a nightclub. Temporary fittings become permanent. What looks compliant on paper no longer reflects reality on the ground.
Switzerland’s entire self-image rests on the idea that systems hold. Risks are anticipated and accidents of this kind belong to other places. This tragedy exposes how far that confidence has drifted from reality. The fire did not happen because Switzerland is suddenly careless. It happened because Switzerland’s no longer exceptional in the way it imagines. It’s wealthier, more open and more commercial than it once was, but without the same margin for error. The country still trades on an aura of invincibility that no longer matches how it actually operates.
Crans-Montana is part of a globalised Alpine economy under strain. Shorter and less reliable winter seasons, rising costs and intensified international competition have pushed resorts towards higher density and year-round commercial models. Pressures become structural.
In a changing world, Switzerland’s been slow to recognise how exposed it’s become, precisely because it still believes in its own exceptionalism. The country likes to believe it can still design chaos out of existence. But this was a failure of systems in a country that has built its reputation on the belief that systems do not fail. That belief has survived longer than the conditions that once justified it. Switzerland has become more open and more exposed. It’s also become more complacent. The aura of invincibility still circulates, but it no longer rests on reality.
Will 2026 be Rachel Reeves’s year?
Rachel Reeves enters 2026 more unpopular than she has ever been before. YouGov polling from December has 71 per cent of Britons saying they have an unfavourable opinion of Britain’s first female chancellor. Reeves was meant to be a competent economist who could restore credibility to the Treasury and, in her words, ‘revive economic growth’. How’s that going? Reeve’s tenure in No. 11 has so far been more slapstick than good governance. Her CV unravelled under scrutiny; she broke manifesto commitments; she unveiled an appalling Budget, vowed never to repeat it, and then promptly did. Am I judging her too harshly? Am I being a misogynist? Reeves would probably say so.
We should judge female politicians just as we do men: brutally. The truth is that Margaret Thatcher was the last British female politician whose time in high office did not end in shame and acrimony. She spent more than 11 years in No. 10 (the longest premiership since 1827) and ran the country with a ruthless, disciplined competence that even her critics respected. She demonstrated that a woman could not just hold an important political post, but master it.
Her female successors have poorer records. Theresa May arrived in No. 10 promising stability and prudence. She left a cautionary tale. Her 2017 snap election shredded her majority, leaving her trapped in a government paralysed by Brexit. Her plans to leave the European Union were unveiled, revised, retracted and then contradicted, leaving her Cabinet and the public confused. Her premiership ended literally in tears – not over what she had achieved, but because she had achieved nothing. Where Thatcher’s tears as she left Downing Street marked the end of a decade of political mastery, May’s were a symbol of failure.
Liz Truss did not last long enough to accumulate much symbolism, but her mini-Budget will always haunt Westminster. In 49 days she detonated markets, threatened pensions, compelled emergency intervention from the Bank of England and dismantled Tory credibility. She didn’t cry, probably because she never fully grasped what was happening to her, or the economy, before, during or after the train crash of her premiership.
Now we have Reeves. Faced with questions over a Budget she stuttered to justify, our Chancellor reached for the panic button marked ‘MISOGYNY’. She claimed that sexism remains deeply embedded in British politics – men were apparently trying to ‘mansplain the Budget’ to her. The worried interventions by Reeves’s male colleagues presumably had nothing to do with the fact that she is not up to the job. I imagine Thatcher would have been scornful of Reeves’s words, and would have agreed with what Kemi Badenoch said in response: ‘Woman to woman, people out there aren’t complaining because she is female, it is because she is utterly incompetent.’ When the Chancellor – the second most powerful person in our government – complains of being ‘mansplained’ to, she risks making women throughout Westminster look weak. If Reeves, by her own admission, can be pushed around by men, then how can any other woman in SW1 stand up for herself?
And who could forget that when the weight of her bad calls became too heavy, Reeves cried in the Commons like a sixth former floundering in a debating society? Her defenders blamed it on stress and personal circumstance, rather than the possibility that she was going to lose her job. Women in politics are already under enough pressure. They rely on people such as Reeves to be strong.
Reeves was shielded on her rise to the front bench
This, of course, is not remotely fair. But fairness has never been the currency of working in politics. Authority is a business of optics and competence. A pilot who bursts into tears during landing or a surgeon who cries into an open chest cavity are not figures who inspire confidence. Voters don’t want emotional volatility from those in charge. And when women break down, they pay twice: once for the moment itself, and again for reinforcing a stereotype.
Reeves was shielded on her rise to the front bench. In the spotlight, she has crumbled. What the public has seen is not competence but evasion. Her legacy will not be the glass she shattered on entrance, but the shards she leaves behind. The next woman, if another is trusted in high office any time soon, will have to sweep them up and work twice as hard to prove what Reeves could not: that fiscal mastery is not, and never has been, a male trait.
Trump says the US has ‘captured’ Venezuela’s Maduro
Donald Trump’s undeclared war in Venezuela against the Marxist regime of President Nicolas Maduro has erupted into the open. Trump says the US has captured Venezuela’s leader and his wife. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote:
‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.’
Trump’s statement emerged after the US carried out strikes on sites inside Venezuela, including military facilities. Explosions were heard early this morning as smoke rose over the capital Caracas.
The Venezuelan government said that it ‘rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the extremely serious military aggression perpetrated by the current Government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory.’ But those words won’t deter Trump from pressing on with his military campaign.
For several months, Trump has ordered strikes against smuggling boats who he says are delivering narcotics to the US. These attacks have taken more than 100 lives at sea since September. Last week, the CIA hit a docking area inside Venezuela which was allegedly used by the smugglers. It was the first piece of direct American action on Venezuelan soil of Trump’s presidency. This morning’s strikes demonstrate how Trump has dramatically stepped up his campaign.
Why is Trump so intent on removing Maduro from power? One reason is that he blames the Venezuelan President for wrecking American communities. Trump says he has flooded US cities with illegal migrants and supplied them with drugs such as cocaine and fentanyl which have devastated their social fabrics and boosted crime.
The US President may also be interested in getting access to Venezuela’s untapped oil reserves. Estimated at around 300 billion barrels, Venezuela’s reserves are larger than those in Saudi Arabia. The US recently boarded and seized two Venezuelan tankers that Trump accused of exporting oil in defiance of US sanctions.
Despite being an economic basket case, Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. Under Maduro’s socialist rule – and that of his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer in 2013 – the country has been reduced to dire poverty and mass unemployment. The country is predicted to have an inflation rate of 548 per cent in 2025, and more than eight million people – a third of the entire population – have fled abroad, making dangerous journeys to the US and other countries in South America. This exodus has fuelled social unrest.
Finally, Washington is ideologically opposed to Maduro, who international observers charged with rigging his last presidential election victory in 2024. The country’s leading opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who had been living underground since that poll for fear of arrest, won the Nobel Peace Prize in November for her ‘peaceful resistance to repression’. She openly backs Trump’s anti-Maduro campaign.
The ongoing confrontation is the most serious clash between the US and one of its Latin American neighbours since the long but unsuccessful campaign to bring down the communist Castro dictatorship in Cuba in the 1960s. President Trump is famously averse to getting the US involved in foreign ‘forever wars’, but in the case of Venezuela he seems ready to make an exception.
The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran
And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colours. They frothed day and night about a ‘murderous regime’ – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum.
It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors
What is it about revolts in Iran that rankle the activist class? These people love to yap about ‘resistance’ and ‘oppression’. Yet the minute men and women in Iran rise up in resistance against the oppressive theocracy that immiserates and subjugates them, they go coy. Their solidarity evaporates. Their flag-waving ends. They go back to tweeting about TV.
It’s happening again as the latest Iranian uprising enters its seventh day. In cities across Iran, people are protesting the economic mismanagement and clerical tyranny of the Islamist ruling class. It started a week ago, in Tehran, when shopkeepers shuttered their businesses and hit the streets to express their anger about yet another sharp fall in the Iranian currency against the US dollar. They were swiftly joined by other Iranians furious about declining living standards.
The protests are morphing into a collective rage against theocracy itself. Students have joined: young women and men sick of being told what to wear and how to think by the ayatollah classes. It is now the largest revolt to have shaken Iran since the uprising in 2022 over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman from Iranian Kurdistan who was accused by the morality police of not wearing her veil properly.
There have been images of unimaginable bravery from the past week. We’ve seen young women dancing and laughing, their hair freely flowing, in defiance of those cranky old men who think such ‘sinful’ creatures should cover up and shut up. We’ve seen a lone man sitting in the middle of the road, blocking the way of the regime’s riot goons on their motorbikes. It has echoes of Tiananmen Square’s ‘tank man’.
For those of us who love liberty, who support the freedom of the individual against the dictates of theocratic strongmen, these are stirring scenes. It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors. Women in Iran face huge legal and social discrimination – that many are throwing off their hijabs and saying ‘No more’ is a wonderful blow for equality against cruelty.
So where are the solidarity marches? Where are the gatherings outside Iranian embassies to echo the protesters’ cry for an end to the sexist, regressive rule of the ayatollahs?
It’s an anti-war uprising too. Protesters are chanting ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’, in glorious protest against the regime’s wasteful spending on its anti-Semitic proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah. Where are the Western anti-imperialists to cheer this demand for social spending over the squandering of billions on a medieval war of attrition against the world’s only Jewish state?
This is where we get to the ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence on Iran. Where Iranian progressives understand that Hezbollah and Hamas are brutal outfits doing the bidding of a ruthless regime, our activist class has a tendency to view them as ‘resistance’ movements.
They could never get behind the Iranian people’s cry for those neo-fascist militias to be defunded because they are drunk on the delusion that these terrorists are an important bulwark against the ‘real menace’ in the Middle East: Israel. Their Israelophobia has so thoroughly shattered their moral compasses that they bristle at the very suggestion that Iran should stop funding Israel’s hateful foes and instead should focus on improving the lot of the Iranian people.
We end up in the truly perverse situation where the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West instinctively want the Iranian regime to survive – in order that it might continue sticking it to evil Israel – while the young of Iran dream of the regime’s withering away. The revolt in Iran has exposed not only the crisis of legitimacy of the ayatollah classes but also the treachery of Western progressives. It’s now clear that their luxury cause of madly hating Israel takes precedence over everything else, including offering solidarity to the freedom-yearning people of Iran. Your liberty will have to wait, guys – we haven’t destroyed the Jewish state yet.
There’s another ingredient in their moral cowardice – the fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. A generation raised to believe that everything from criticising the Koran to dissing the hijab is a form of bigotry is never going to be able to stand with people who are throwing their hijabs on to open fires and taking the mick out of their Islamic rulers. The left’s snivelling silence on Iran speaks to how far they have fallen down the well of moral relativism.
David Bowie tore up the definition of pop music
Like many artists lionised by their admirers beyond comprehension, David Bowie – who died nearly a decade ago on 10 January 2016 – was a flawed, capricious figure who got it wrong, especially in his latter-day career, as often as he got it right. And he knew it, too.
The one-time Thin White Duke was at his lowest professional and personal ebb in 1988, having formed a failed hard-rock band called Tin Machine, which promptly imploded after releasing two unsuccessful albums. When its first eponymous record slunk out, the music critic Jon Wilde sorrowfully wrote ‘Hot tramp! We loved you so. Now sit down, man. You’re a fucking disgrace.’
This sense of betrayal – of Bowie having let not just his present-day fans down, but all of those who had supported him since his Space Oddity or Ziggy Stardust eras – went deep to the heart of many. But the artist formerly known as David Jones shrugged. As he once put it:
Bowie’s death canonised him, preserving his genius in aspic forever
It’s an honest, healthy approach for an artist to work only for yourself. I’ve suffered badly when I’ve pandered to the marketplace.
The reason why David Bowie still matters today, a decade on from his premature death aged 69, is because he was cleverer, and therefore more interesting, than everyone else around him. This cleverness didn’t manifest itself in the usual fashion that rock stars like to show off their intelligence – you can enjoy his albums without needing a Cliff’s Notes to parse all the lyrical allusions. It manifested itself in the way in which he tore apart preconceptions about what pop music ‘should’ or ‘could’ be in a way rivalled only by the Beatles.
During his imperial phase of the Seventies and early Eighties, he was releasing breathtakingly accomplished, brilliantly varied albums at the rate of about one a year. If you wanted psychedelic folk, sweeping orchestral balladry, ersatz plastic soul, proto-electronica or intense hard rock, you could find it all, often on the same album and occasionally in the same song.
Bowie was a musical genius who could play virtually every instrument, sometimes picking it up by ear alone, and an offbeat, witty lyricist. He was the missing link between Noël Coward’s very English sensibility (who else would start a song like ‘Life on Mars’ with the lyric ‘It’s a god-awful small affair’?) and subsequent social commentators such as Brett Anderson and Alex Turner. He offered hilarious, Wildean quotes to interviewers that, for my money, are just as good as anything that Morrissey came out with, without the preciousness or the self-consciousness – ‘genius is pain. Oh, dear me’.
Still, only the most blinkered Bowie aficionado would not accept that, post-Let’s Dance, he stuttered and staggered. He produced some stunning albums in the Nineties, including the barely heard Buddha of Suburbia and the prophetic, icy Brian Eno collaboration Outside, but it was the era of Britpop and the Spice Girls, not of the former rock ‘n’ roll messiah. Growing up, I thought of him as another rich, white, middle-aged man, a bit like Sting or Phil Collins, producing music for other rich, white, middle-aged men. He was yesterday’s news, and the papers no longer wanted to know whose shirts he wore.
The Bowie comeback began in earnest with his performance at Glastonbury in 2000, which has often been heralded as the greatest gig ever played at that festival – not least by its co-organiser Emily Eavis. It then continued into such acclaimed Noughties albums as Heathen and Reality, which brought him to a new fanbase and renewed media attention. An on-stage heart attack in 2004 led to a decade away from the spotlight. But when he returned with 2013’s triumphant The Next Day, his re-emergence was treated with both awe and joy by those who had long ago given up any hope of hearing from him again. When he produced 2016’s even better Blackstar, he seemed to have returned not just to the form of his heyday, but to have surpassed it. And then he had the temerity to die.
Death has traditionally been seen as a dodgy career move for most musicians, but in Bowie’s case it canonised him, preserving his genius in aspic forever. As we approach the anniversary of his passing, it is easy to trot out the usual platitudes about ‘the master of reinvention’, ‘the prophet of the internet’, ‘the shape-shifter himself’, etc. But that’s all they are: platitudes. Instead, if we want to understand why millions still idolise Bowie, all we need do is look at what he did. We can listen to the music, watch the films, stream his interviews on YouTube and, if we are so inclined, visit the V&A museum’s David Bowie centre, the permanent home of his archive.
Not everything he attempted worked, and it would be absurd to pretend it did. But at his best, Bowie wasn’t just a great rock star, but a great cultural figure, in all his contradictory, quixotic and finally thrilling talent. He’ll be listened to as long as recorded music still exists, with his songs argued about and discussed by new generations who haven’t even been born yet. I expect we’ll be debating his virtues in another ten, twenty, fifty years. David Bowie was, indeed, unafraid of blowing his own cover, and laughing at himself. And, ten years on from his death, we should love him for it, all over again.
26 lessons for surviving 2026
New Year’s resolutions are a cruel and demoralising prank. Don’t start any personal alterations until April. Spring is the real beginning of the year, as the Romans once knew and the taxman still does. Attempting to remodel yourself as a fountain of self-improvement in the bleak midwinter is just silly.
But in the spirit of the many tip sheets and handy hints lists that pop up everywhere at the beginning of January, here’s mine: 26 for 2026.
- Don’t bother to watch any film or television series made after 2010. It only encourages them. (If the TV series began before 2010, perhaps, but that is the only exception.)
- If and when you lose patience with a young person, make an allowance for their rearing during the stupidest period in world history, surrounded by flashing and blinking distraction boxes that record every stupid thing they’ve ever said or done, and reflect that it was your generation that reared them.
- Do not put any aspect of your real life on the internet. If someone cares enough to look and go ‘aah how sweet’, be assured that there is somebody else who cares enough to try to triangulate your location from the evidence and harass or assassinate you.
- In interactions with bureaucracy always go in affable. The functionary will be so surprised and delighted they will rejoice and melt. If the interlocutor is not responding in kind after three exchanges, you are free to descend to their level.
- Stop obsessing over how much time has passed and doing sums about it. After a certain age, it’s like getting into debt. The figures are meaningless and bankruptcy is inevitable, sooner or later, whatever you do.
- Allow yourself up to 20 minutes, and no more, of despair daily. But don’t tell anybody about it.
- If you see a queue forming at a bar, go right to the front and push in, tapping the rim of a 50 pence piece impatiently on the counter. If challenged, reply ‘This is England’ (or appropriate principality).
- If you feel Christian twinges, read the Bible in an edition that has a good set of annotations. Put C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to one side until you have – they’re not going anywhere, and it’s cheating.
- Abandon any attempt at keeping abreast of what the young people are doing. Because they aren’t actually doing anything. This is a late 20th century western consideration, and in fact unique to that period. It was bad enough then, and it is squalidly laughable now.
- Don’t try to console yourself with the thought that Labour are nefarious and doing it all on purpose because ‘who could be that stupid’. No. They really are that stupid.
- Saying ‘woke’ is acceptable, and we need a word to describe The Rubbish that continues to besiege us, however low status that word is, and anyway –
- Low status is the new high status.
- The culture war isn’t a war, it is a culture annihilation. It is good to care about it, because culture is important.
- Almost every problem we have is caused by white middle class progressives who are British citizens. They are the people we need to deport.
- Try to remember that the actions of these people are just to goad and annoy all the other kinds of white people, so that progressives can feel superior. Avoid falling into their trap – reserve your anger for them, and focus it on them as if through a burning glass.
- Sentimentality is essential in private. In public, it is unforgivable.
- Having delusions is fine. We all need them to get by. Insisting that other people must share them is impolite at best. Passing laws enforcing them is totally unacceptable. Ignore any such laws.
- Almost everything that demands a special day of civic celebration is awful. When it’s a whole month, this is even worse. Ignore such jamborees.
- It is an option to just forget about sex when you are older. Trying to maintain your physical appeal after a certain age just gives others the sad, tiring sensation of hearing Christmas songs in January.
- If a rebellion isn’t costing you anything then it isn’t a rebellion at all, it’s just a pose, and you should stop it immediately.
- ‘Be yourself’ is the worst possible advice. Our ‘authentic’ selves are terrible. Present the thin sliver of your best qualities to the world and hide all the others as much as you possibly can.
- Find something that interests you – it can be anything at all, useful or useless – and make an exhaustive private study of it, for no other purpose than to satisfy your idle curiosity. Even if you can only spare a minute or two to do this, do it every day. Don’t tell anybody else you’re doing it. It’s your little thing.
- If you have a romantic relationship but you aren’t married, never describe the other person as your ‘partner’. It sounds like you’re going into business with them or participating in the Klondike Gold Rush. Any other term – live-in lover, me oppo, that fool Antonia – is preferable. (With the sole exception of ‘husbear’.)
- Don’t be too quick to congratulate yourself on taking a brave stand. Often, courage and stupidity are very difficult to tell apart.
- Console yourself with the happy thought that this is the final Labour government.
- And that at least some of us will make it through.
The National Trust should appreciate its eccentric volunteers
The National Trust has blacklisted a 71-year-old volunteer after he pointed out thousands of spelling mistakes and factual errors on the charity’s website, and then expressed irritation when his painstaking efforts were brushed aside.
Sensible charity managers overlook minor human imperfections, concentrating instead on volunteers’ generosity
Andy Jones had volunteered for the Trust for more than a decade, turning his hand to everything from gardening to membership queries and guiding visitors on walks. Acting entirely on his own initiative, he devoted more than 400 hours to compiling a detailed dossier of errors on the organisation’s website. He sent it, politely enough, to Hilary McGrady, the Trust’s director-general, asking whether she would ‘be so kind as to forward this to whomsoever has the authority and resources to address these errors’.
When he received no reply from the director-general, he sent a follow-up email a few months later, stating: ‘I sincerely hope my work is helpful to the National Trust.’ Again, he received no response from McGrady. After being given the cold shoulder, Jones resigned as a volunteer and wrote to his local manager in terms that were undeniably tetchy, referring to the ‘Oirish [sic] Dame’ and her ‘crappy not fit for purpose webs**te’.
This time he did get a reply: a local manager wrote that she was ‘really disappointed by the language contained within your email’, adding that ‘these comments are not in line with our organisational values’. She said his relationship with the charity had ‘irreversibly broken down’ and told him that ‘we will no longer consider you for any future volunteer positions at any of our places’.
A spokesman told the Daily Telegraph that ‘no-one would be told they were no longer welcome as a volunteer simply for pointing out grammatical errors on a website’, before lapsing into the managerial argot charities now favour, explaining that ‘relationship breakdown tends to occur after a series of incidents’.
What were the ‘series of incidents’? The only one we’re aware of in this case is the tetchy email Jones sent his local manager after his efforts were not recognised. Speaking to the Telegraph, he agreed that his comments were not appropriate but said he was under stress at the time as he was suffering from stage-two prostate cancer.
I’m not sure it’s Jones who should be explaining himself. He only sent the tetchy message after he felt like he had been ignored. No one had asked him to undertake the task, true enough, but would it really have been so difficult to fully acknowledge his efforts, or even to say a proper thank you?
Volunteers are typically people with time on their hands who hope to find purpose, usefulness and human connection. That means they are often older, and sometimes a little out of step with the fashionable values and language of the day. But how serious a defect is that when they are offering their labour freely?
I have volunteered at food banks, animal sanctuaries, homeless groups and litter picks, and I have encountered many dozens of volunteers. There is always an Andy Jones: an older person, perhaps socially awkward, possibly a little rough around the edges. Some are driven less by sentiment than by exasperation, even anger, at the state of the world. Sensible charity managers overlook such minor human imperfections, concentrating instead on volunteers’ generosity and working out how best to deploy it.
There might be more to the Jones story than meets the eye, but as far as we can see he has been treated a bit shoddily. Learning how to manage volunteers is a big part of a charity’s work, so if the National Trust’s bosses can’t manage that, I have to wonder if they’re fit for purpose.
The median pay for chief executives at the UK’s largest 100 charities was around £192,000 in 2025. I do not know what McGrady earns, but her apparent failure to properly acknowledge the efforts of an unpaid septuagenarian volunteer looks arrogant. I think she owes him an apology.