Why the Afghanistan-Pakistan war matters

More than a decade ago, during a tense visit to Islamabad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton gave Pakistan’s leaders a warning: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” She was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups that Islamabad had long tolerated as part of its “strategic depth” policy aimed at countering India’s regional dominance.

Now, as Pakistan’s jets strike targets inside Afghanistan and the Taliban mobilize forces along the border, that warning seems like a prophecy.

Pakistan is at war with the militant networks it once cultivated for regional power – with consequences that could redraw the region’s security landscape, from Pakistan’s internal stability to the wider balance of power in South Asia.

The Taliban – bankrolled, armed and sheltered by Pakistan’s security establishment during their war against the United States and its NATO allies – are behaving like the snakes Clinton warned might eventually turn on their keeper. Pakistani officials say the immediate trigger for the conflict is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant movement ideologically aligned with the Taliban and dedicated to overthrowing the Pakistani state.

Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021, Islamabad has, ironically, accused them of allowing TTP fighters to regroup on Afghan soil and launch attacks across the frontier. The UN Security Council says the TTP is just one of almost two dozen transnational terrorist and jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda, operating in Afghanistan.

The Taliban deny direct responsibility for the TTP’s intensifying violence, but they have shown little interest in dismantling the movement and the broader jihadist ecosystem flourishing under their protection.

The result was the launch of Operation Righteous Fury, with Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, declaring “open war” against the Taliban, saying: “Our cup of patience has overflowed.”

The latest flashpoint was a Pakistani strike on a former US base in Kabul, now used by the Taliban. It also housed a drug treatment facility. The Taliban claimed this strike caused 400 deaths but this appears to be an inflated number. The UN has suggested that around 150 were killed and 119 wounded in the attack.

The Taliban leadership have made similarly exaggerated claims about successful attacks on Pakistani targets, even as Pakistan’s air force bombs military sites across Afghanistan’s eastern and southern regions, as well as sites in the capital, Kabul, and the group’s “spiritual home” of Kandahar.

Ostensibly, the central issue is the 2,640-kilometre frontier between the two countries, known as the Durand Line. Drawn in 1893 by British colonial officials to divide Afghanistan from British India, the line cut directly through Pashtun tribal lands and has never been formally recognized by successive Afghan governments. The border has since become a porous belt of militant networks, tribal loyalties and competing claims to sovereignty.

Pashtun political leaders say the fighting is already exacting a heavy civilian toll. Mohsin Dawar, chairman of Pakistan’s National Democratic Movement, said the escalating conflict across the Durand Line is disproportionately killing Pashtun civilians. At the same time, Pakistani air strikes continue to hit populated areas in Afghanistan.

Ending the cycle of violence, he said, would require “a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy,” including shutting down what he described as the long-running “project Taliban.”

Former Afghan government adviser Mujib Rahman Rahimi said the fighting is less a war between two states than Pakistan confronting a militant movement it once used for its own strategic ends, while simultaneously exposing the Taliban’s inability to defend Afghanistan’s sovereignty.

In the five years since returning to power, the Taliban’s incompetence, corruption, cruelty and ignorance have transformed Afghanistan into an economic basket case and a playground for larger powers, including Russia and China, seeking to counter American influence.

Rahimi said the war could mark “the beginning of a gradual process of political erosion and decline for the Taliban.”

Some observers have suggested Pakistan has the approval of President Trump, who has repeatedly rued the loss of American control of Bagram Air Base, near Kabul. Speculation about this was fueled by Pakistani jets hitting Bagram on March 1, soon after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met with Trump in Washington.

Afghan and Pakistani sources said the strikes aimed to destroy Taliban military sites and munitions dumps. One source in Kandahar, speaking anonymously, said the Taliban had begun moving weapons and ammunition to avoid stockpiles being hit by Pakistani bombs.

Against the backdrop of the US-Israeli war on the regime in Iran – which borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan – regional powers are maneuvering to contain the fallout of the conflict.

Iran, China and Russia all have an interest in preventing the fighting from widening along one of Asia’s most volatile frontiers. It is China, however, that has taken the most visible role, stepping in as a mediator and urging Islamabad and the Taliban to resolve their differences through dialogue. Chinese diplomats and special envoys have been shuttling between the two capitals as Beijing presses for a return to talks.

For China, stability along the frontier is essential. Pakistan anchors the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a key part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, while Afghanistan offers access to mineral resources and a buffer against militant spillover toward China’s western region of Xinjiang. A widening war along the Durand Line would threaten both of these foreign policy aims.

Meanwhile, more than a decade after Hillary Clinton issued her warning in Islamabad, Pakistan is confronting the consequences of its own shadow war. The snakes Pakistan kept in its backyard are no longer just biting its neighbors.

Brace yourself: inflation is coming

In a surprise to no one, the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has voted nine-zero to hold interest rates at 3.75 per cent. The unanimous decision is the first time the MPC have been in complete agreement since September 2021.

Before Trump and Israel’s bombs rained down on Iran, the markets had been overwhelmingly expecting a rate cut. This would have been welcome news for mortgage holders and the government. But with an energy price shock sending inflation expectations in the wrong direction, we are lucky the MPC didn’t hike rates this time. The markets are now expecting a rate hike towards the end of summer after inevitably higher energy prices lead to higher inflation. 

Even before today’s announcement the mortgage market was feeling the pressure. Data from Moneyfacts shows that as of this morning the average two-year-fixed mortgage has risen to 5.32 per cent – up from 4.83 per cent at the start of the month and the highest rate in nearly a year. 

More depressingly, things are likely to get worse before they get better as the MPC seemed to agree with market expectations of a rate hike in the near future. The committee said: ‘Monetary policy cannot influence global energy prices but aims to ensure that the economic adjustment to them occurs in a way that achieves the 2 per cent target sustainably.’ Economist waffle for: rates may have to go up.

On top of that, the Bank’s updated forecasts expect energy prices to add 0.75 percentage points to inflation in the third quarter of this year, with another 0.25 percentage points added by businesses passing on their costs to customers. This in turn could lead to a further inflationary cycle. 

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Still, there was at least some relatively good economic news this morning, when the ONS reported a slight improvement in the jobs figures. The trouble is: if energy prices keep rising, Britain risks turning a corner only to slam head-on into a concrete wall.

If oil and gas prices continue to surge then we’ll risk serious inflation (possibly higher than 5 per cent) as energy prices feed into the July energy price cap. Rachel Reeves will be under a staggering amount of pressure to make a serious intervention to prevent that cap rising too sharply. But she finds herself in the unenviable position of having neither any political leeway nor much fiscal headroom. Britain is now – almost uniquely – exposed to global crises. There’s not much we can do but hope things get better.

I crashed Rupert Murdoch’s birthday party

“This one is kinda dirty. Let’s see what the other one looks like.” Less than two hours before the guests started arriving for Rupert Murdoch’s 95th birthday party and a manager at the high-end Manhattan chophouse had spotted a stain on the welcome mat. It turns out they keep not one but two back-up red carpets at the Grill. I’d arrived hours earlier, accompanied by my photographer after receiving a tip-off the great and good of Murdoch-world would be descending on the venue. My plan – having learned every tabloid trick in the book from an early career at the Sun – was to have my snapper hose every Murdoch exec, editor and prominent person while I shouted a few questions. I would then publish the photo haul in a special edition of my newsletter, Breaker.

But first I had to show my hand to the two dozen-plus Murdoch security contingent outside the restaurant. “G’day I’m Lachlan,” I told the group of former NYPD cops. “And I run a media company and I’m going to be here tonight with a photographer taking photos and asking questions.” Some of them looked at me as if I were a bad smell. Others nodded their heads in a sign of respect. “Paul” from Fox security approached me. “You can take photos but no questions.” “We will be asking questions, mate,” I responded, firmly. We were on a public street. The irony seemed lost on Paul: he works for a company whose journalists ask questions of public figures every day.

News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks was one of the first to arrive. I asked my former boss what she had gotten her boss, Murdoch, for his birthday. “I’m not telling you that,” she said with a wry smile as she made her way upstairs. Always the operator, she would soon return, accompanied by longtime Murdoch PR consigliere Steven Rubenstein, which gave me the opportunity to pass my present for Rupert, which I had brought with me in an envelope: a lifetime subscription to Breaker. After all, what do you get the man who has everything?

“Somebody is going to trip,” one of the security guards said about the red carpet that was curling on the street, providing an obstacle for guests pulling up in black SUVs. Tape was dispatched to force it to the ground. Rupert arrived in a tux, accompanied by his glamorous wife, Elena Zhukova. Next through the door came his son Lachlan and wife Sarah. My namesake gave me a warm embrace. It was the first time I’d met him. I was struck by how physically fit he is. I made a mental note to get back to the gym – or take up spear fishing. Rupert’s ex Wendi Deng and their daughters Grace and Chloe came next, followed by a casting call of current and former Murdoch execs: Robert Thomson, Keith Poole, Emma Tucker, Victoria Newton, Col Allan (who told me he had bought Murdoch a birthday Mars bar), Les Hinton, Tony Gallagher. Then there were those that arrived with their own security: Jared and Ivanka Trump, Tony Blair and Rishi Sunak.

Lord Rothermere was “disappointed” about losing out to Mathias Döpfner and Axel Springer in his bid to buy the Telegraph. Other Murdoch favorites made their way inside, including Barry Diller, Conrad Black, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Dacre, Doug Burgum and Glenn Youngkin. Donald Trump sent a video message. “Rupert, I know you’re turning 95 but don’t worry. Only the good die young.” Hugh Jackman sprinted through the door. When I asked what he was singing, he said it would be a “mixed bag.” Inside, he belted out Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and a couple from The Greatest Showman. He finished with a rendition of “I Still Call Australia Home.” All the Aussies, including the birthday boy, joined in.

When Murdoch left just after 10 p.m. he said the evening had been “splendid.” Lachlan ensured he got safely into his car. Brooks, Newton and Allan packed into an Uber headed for an afterparty that I was not invited to. But a Fox representative did bring me a slice of Rupert’s cake. I headed back downtown on the subway. Had we just captured one of the last times all these Fleet Street figures would be in the same room?

It was one of those nights I was grateful for the training I got at Wapping as a know-nothing 22-year-old. Many of the people we had papped taught me much of what I know today. I got to my favorite pub in New York: Fanelli Café in Soho, just before 1 a.m. Famished, and with the kitchen about to close, I ordered a steak sandwich. “So what’s news with Murdoch?,” Dan, one of the longstanding bartenders, asked as he made me a dirty martini. I laughed and pointed to the cake in a plastic container in front of me. “That’s Rupert Murdoch’s birthday cake,” I said. “He’s still alive?” asked Dani, his colleague. “Alive and kicking.”

There’s no need to cancel Charles’s US state visit

The so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States seems to have reached a historically unspecial nadir, in large part because of the tensions between Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer over Iran. Amidst this, there remains one particular source of debate: whether King Charles’s state visit to America, scheduled for next month, should still go ahead.

The visit is taking place as part of celebrations intented to mark 250 years since America achieved its independence. It has been suggested on both sides of the Atlantic that despite the President’s clear Anglophilia, manifested most obviously in his sincere love of the royal family, that it is taking place at an inopportune time and should be postponed, if not scrapped altogether.

Those who feel that the timing of the trip is ill-judged may have a point. But the obvious rejoinder, surely, is that state visits by a monarch should not be constrained by politics but should exist on an altogether higher level. Charles’s personal views on Donald Trump (his polar opposite in most regards) can be surmised. Nevertheless, the King did an excellent job at last year’s state visit, when the President visited Britain, of keeping any hint of distaste for his visitor under wraps and of making the trip a conspicuous success. It was an occasion laden with pageantry and pomp, and the beams of satisfaction on President Trump’s face suggested that he lapped up the red carpet welcome that was duly laid out for him.

A very similar reception will be extended to Charles in America. His state visit has been six careful months in the planning. The King has not made an official visit to the United States since 2018, when he represented his late mother at the funeral of George H.W. Bush. As such, courtiers and diplomats in Britain and America alike have been liaising carefully for months, even years, about what one source told the Times will be ‘a substantive visit from the King for the American people’.

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Expectations are firmly being managed. It has been briefed that there will be no policy announcements, no place for Sir Keir Starmer and, above all, no Love Actually moment in which Charles decides to go off script and denounce Trump and Britain’s former colony.

Instead, the relatively brief visit – which will see the King spend only one day in Washington DC before heading to New York and an as yet undisclosed rural location – will be one designed to act as a soft reset of UK-US relations. With Iran very much a live issue, however – and Trump’s criticism of the Prime Minister clearly a sore diplomatic point – it is doubtful that even Charles’s regal presence will do much to mend fences.

But this is not the point of this particular state visit. The relationship between our two countries has not always been the easiest (of which Independence Day remains an annual reminder). There will always be anti-British feeling in the States just as there is anti-American sentiment here. But our shared values and goals transcend party politics and individual leaders. The special relationship might, at times, have been overstated or exaggerated, but it does exist, even in diminished form. Hence the symbolic importance of the King’s trip across the Atlantic.

Ideally, the trip would not be taking place in such eventful circumstances at the court of such a mercurial president. One difficulty that those around the King face is that it is hard to anticipate every eventuality as far as Trump is concerned; few could have foreseen recent events in Iran, for instance. Yet rather than become obsessively concerned with trying to predict whatever his host will do, it is better that Charles should continue to represent Britain’s soft power to the greatest of his, and his country’s, abilities. And, on a personal level, if he feels that his diplomatic skills are not sufficiently appreciated in Washington, there are always other realms left to conquer. I imagine that Montecito, in particular, is very nice at this time of the year.

Badenoch goes traditional at Tory local launch

The Tories launched their local election campaign this morning, with a beaming Kemi Badenoch surrounded by rows of flag-waving party members. The polls remain stubbornly low for the party, but the Conservative leader gave little sign of that getting to her. In a 20-minute speech, she gave an upbeat, on-message performance which centred on her slogan of ‘strong economy, strong country’. It mixed her favoured turf on cultural issues along with a veritable smorgasbord of ‘red meat’ on fiscal policy: a stamp duty cut, a fuel duty cut and slashing business rates too. The figures might be a little iffy – can the Tories really cut £47 billion without touching the triple lock? – but it had the party faithful cheering.

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Badenoch’s framing of the forthcoming elections is one based on traditional Tory themes, framing them as the party of meritocracy against its soft-headed, soft-hearted rivals. ‘Some people want more benefits with Labour, some people want nationalisation with Nigel Farage’, she said. ‘Some people want bigger boobs with Zack Polanski. That’s fine, that’s what they want – we’ve got a better offer: we offer those who want jobs and opportunity.’ Flanked by the furrowed broughs of Mel Stride and the blonde locks of Mims Davies, she talked repeatedly of ‘hard working people’ and ‘taking back our streets’: an update for 2026 on the old Cameron-era themes of ‘workers versus shirkers’. Notably, despite a reference to North Sea oil, there was no reference to Scotland or Wales: an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the shellacking that awaits there. Instead, it was London – so often tough terrain for the Tories – that was both the host venue today and the first place which Badenoch listed when she reeled off a list of key areas across the country.

When it came to questions, Badenoch again showed how much she has grown in the past 15 months as leader. She neatly pivoted each time to focus on her key lines, hammering Sadiq Khan on Brexit, the Lords on the abortion vote and Keir Starmer on Iran. Half the questions, inevitably, focused on the current Tory plight against Reform. Badenoch duly found a series of creative ways to offer upbeat answers. ‘I don’t care what Nigel Farage says,’ she told GB News. ‘I am here to deliver a message, and that is the Conservative party is coming back.’ ‘Last time I checked, not a single vote has been cast,’ she informed the BBC. ‘We’re not coming back just for our sakes – we’re coming back for the country’s sake.’ ‘Obviously a good result would be if we won 100 per cent of all of the seats all over,’ she retorted to the Telegraph. ‘We’re going to keep getting better, but we need the trust of the public to show that this time we are going to get it right.’

Her most interesting remarks were perhaps at the end, when the Guardian asked Badenoch for her view on Nick Timothy’s criticism of Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square. She brushed it off, praising Timothy, speaking of her support for freedom of religion but that ‘I’m very uncomfortable with seeing women pushed to the back in the middle of Trafalgar Square in an event which is exclusionary.’ She added ‘We need to make sure that the religious expression is in conformity with our values, our norms, our beliefs. And sometimes that does mean saying, actually, no, that’s probably too much.’ Coming a week after her call at the Conservative spring conference in Harrogate for ‘cultural enforcement’, talk of conformity raises questions around effective public policy to enforce this. Expect more on this point when we get more details of the ‘Cultural and Integration Commission’, which Badenoch unveiled a fortnight ago.

Why the Afghanistan-Pakistan war matters

More than a decade ago, during a tense visit to Islamabad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton gave Pakistan’s leaders a warning: “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” She was referring to the Taliban and other militant groups that Islamabad had long tolerated as part of its “strategic depth” policy aimed at countering India’s regional dominance.

Now, as Pakistan’s jets strike targets inside Afghanistan and the Taliban mobilize forces along the border, that warning seems like a prophecy.

Pakistan is at war with the militant networks it once cultivated for regional power – with consequences that could redraw the region’s security landscape, from Pakistan’s internal stability to the wider balance of power in South Asia.

The Taliban – bankrolled, armed and sheltered by Pakistan’s security establishment during their war against the United States and its NATO allies – are behaving like the snakes Clinton warned might eventually turn on their keeper. Pakistani officials say the immediate trigger for the conflict is the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant movement ideologically aligned with the Taliban and dedicated to overthrowing the Pakistani state.

Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul in 2021, Islamabad has, ironically, accused them of allowing TTP fighters to regroup on Afghan soil and launch attacks across the frontier. The UN Security Council says the TTP is just one of almost two dozen transnational terrorist and jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda, operating in Afghanistan.

The Taliban deny direct responsibility for the TTP’s intensifying violence, but they have shown little interest in dismantling the movement and the broader jihadist ecosystem flourishing under their protection.

The result was the launch of Operation Righteous Fury, with Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, declaring “open war” against the Taliban, saying: “Our cup of patience has overflowed.”

The latest flashpoint was a Pakistani strike on a former US base in Kabul, now used by the Taliban. It also housed a drug treatment facility. The Taliban claimed this strike caused 400 deaths but this appears to be an inflated number. The UN has suggested that around 150 were killed and 119 wounded in the attack.

The Taliban leadership have made similarly exaggerated claims about successful attacks on Pakistani targets, even as Pakistan’s air force bombs military sites across Afghanistan’s eastern and southern regions, as well as sites in the capital, Kabul, and the group’s “spiritual home” of Kandahar.

Ostensibly, the central issue is the 2,640-kilometre frontier between the two countries, known as the Durand Line. Drawn in 1893 by British colonial officials to divide Afghanistan from British India, the line cut directly through Pashtun tribal lands and has never been formally recognized by successive Afghan governments. The border has since become a porous belt of militant networks, tribal loyalties and competing claims to sovereignty.

Pashtun political leaders say the fighting is already exacting a heavy civilian toll. Mohsin Dawar, chairman of Pakistan’s National Democratic Movement, said the escalating conflict across the Durand Line is disproportionately killing Pashtun civilians. At the same time, Pakistani air strikes continue to hit populated areas in Afghanistan.

Ending the cycle of violence, he said, would require “a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy,” including shutting down what he described as the long-running “project Taliban.”

Former Afghan government adviser Mujib Rahman Rahimi said the fighting is less a war between two states than Pakistan confronting a militant movement it once used for its own strategic ends, while simultaneously exposing the Taliban’s inability to defend Afghanistan’s sovereignty.

In the five years since returning to power, the Taliban’s incompetence, corruption, cruelty and ignorance have transformed Afghanistan into an economic basket case and a playground for larger powers, including Russia and China, seeking to counter American influence.

Rahimi said the war could mark “the beginning of a gradual process of political erosion and decline for the Taliban.”

Some observers have suggested Pakistan has the approval of President Trump, who has repeatedly rued the loss of American control of Bagram Air Base, near Kabul. Speculation about this was fueled by Pakistani jets hitting Bagram on March 1, soon after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met with Trump in Washington.

Afghan and Pakistani sources said the strikes aimed to destroy Taliban military sites and munitions dumps. One source in Kandahar, speaking anonymously, said the Taliban had begun moving weapons and ammunition to avoid stockpiles being hit by Pakistani bombs.

Against the backdrop of the US-Israeli war on the regime in Iran – which borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan – regional powers are maneuvering to contain the fallout of the conflict.

Iran, China and Russia all have an interest in preventing the fighting from widening along one of Asia’s most volatile frontiers. It is China, however, that has taken the most visible role, stepping in as a mediator and urging Islamabad and the Taliban to resolve their differences through dialogue. Chinese diplomats and special envoys have been shuttling between the two capitals as Beijing presses for a return to talks.

For China, stability along the frontier is essential. Pakistan anchors the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a key part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, while Afghanistan offers access to mineral resources and a buffer against militant spillover toward China’s western region of Xinjiang. A widening war along the Durand Line would threaten both of these foreign policy aims.

Meanwhile, more than a decade after Hillary Clinton issued her warning in Islamabad, Pakistan is confronting the consequences of its own shadow war. The snakes Pakistan kept in its backyard are no longer just biting its neighbors.

The bad news keeps mounting for Donald Trump

Donald Trump thought it would be a cakewalk. Determined to oust his adversary almost overnight, the US President quickly discovered that he’s far more wily and tenacious than he had assumed. Far from capitulating, his nemesis seems to be on the comeback trail. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell thus announced yesterday that unless a successor is confirmed by the Senate, he has ‘no intention of leaving’.

The bad news keeps mounting for Trump. Inflation is ticking up, King Charles’s impending visit is starting to look rather iffy, his gilded ballroom project looks as though it will be smacked down by a federal judge, and energy prices are rising precipitously. Indeed, a new sticker being plastered on petrol stations across America shows Trump pointing his finger into the sky and is captioned ‘Iran your gas prices up’.

Poor Trump. 2026 is looking like his personal annus horribilis. As an obstreperous Iran refuses to surrender and lobs missiles at Israel and various Gulf states, the President has become embroiled in what he once denounced: a forever war. His disciples are confounded. Trump’s counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, resigned on Tuesday, contending that the President had been snookered into the conflict by nefarious forces in Israel. This line of argument seeks to exculpate Trump for the debacle, portraying his foray, or, if you prefer, excursion, into Iran as a momentary lapse in judgement. The President was having none of it. He referred to Kent as ‘weak’ – one of his favourite epithets.

Trump’s own advisers offered a different portrait on Capitol Hill as they were interrogated about the case for war yesterday. Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director and leonine of the self-styled foreign policy restrainers, performed something akin to duck and cover. In her official statement, she acknowledged that there was no compelling evidence that Iran was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear programme, which Trump had insisted last summer was ‘obliterated’ by Operation Midnight Hammer. But, in responding to Senator Jon Ossoff, she argued that it was not her duty to reach any conclusions about Iran’s intentions.

Gabbard’s mandate is not to decypher threats but to function as a cypher herself. ‘The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the President,’ Gabbard said. ‘It is not the intelligence community’s duty to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.’ Others on the hawkish right continue to view Gabbard as a threat. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, complained yesterday that Gabbard’s agency remains a ‘resistance shop’ to the deployment of military power abroad.

Where Trump stands on these doctrinal disputes over the true Maga faith remains a mystery. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated, ‘Rest assured, there is a plan.’ Is there?

When women exit stage right

At the event Melania Trump hosted for Women’s History Month, the ladies in the audience had perfect blowouts and wore pastel dresses. But the speakers who took the stage were tough. They included an Olympic athlete, a single mother who worked as a waitress and Melania herself. Most of the women honored were notorious for being abrasive: among them Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt. The women in the crowd didn’t clap politely but cheered and hollered, as if the East Room chairs were bleachers at a football game. Rumor on the street is Leavitt, who is pregnant, will only receive three weeks of maternity leave from her role as White House press secretary. 

The event offered an interesting view into the young women of the right – and what role they had to play in the MAGA movement. A recent article by Sam Adler-Bell published in New York magazine started out by describing why a woman called Anna joined the New Right, only to leave years later. She wanted to exist free from “woke pieties.” She wanted to go to the party, to be a woman welcome in this world of men. She valued family, seeing the longer delays before marriage and children as the main reason modern women were miserable. It was initially an “aesthetic choice” and she “found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.” She left the movement when “the theme of the party,” the extremism and misogyny, became too real to tolerate.

But there was never a stable alliance between the men and women of the New Right. Throughout the 2020s, the women who were drawn to this conservative movement were either enamored by traditional womanhood, intellectually transgressive, or both. What may have once seemed like an escape from the left’s denial of difference became another version of the same. MAGA politics has a masculinizing effect on women, who must cultivate traits like stoicism and the ability to stomach cruelty towards vulnerable people. 

Women who are motivated to become wives and nurture children, who hold the sanctity of human life as a core value, are less prone to support far-right policies based on contempt for the weak. They might laugh off the occasional joke about putting children in cages, but tend to object when faced with the reality. The kind of woman who is spirited enough to join a reactionary movement might flirt with the idea of being less rational than men, but in practice resist it. The women who turned to the right for free speech do not take well to having their opinions dismissed on the basis of their sex. 

Yet there is a kind of public-facing conservative woman who seems to have forgotten she is a woman at all. The reaction to Adler-Bell’s article devolved into abstract scolding. Helen Andrews wrote on X that, in choosing to remain anonymous, Anna had broken an “honor-based” rule that “feminized societies just don’t get.” Andrews’s rhetoric demonstrates why women in these circles have been doomed from the start: in order to last, they must act like the typical online right-wing man, aggressive toward outsiders but loyal to the group, vengeful, anti-social, coarse.

Women have always made tradeoffs; they exchange freedom for love, or love for safety, or love and safety for freedom. However, most women aren’t motivated to act against their own interest. A lot of women on the New Right would have been aligned with Vivian Gornick’s description of her ideal world back in 1969 as the Women’s Movement was rising: “Not only do I believe there is a genuine male or female nature in each of us, but I believe that what is most exciting about the new world that may be coming…  is the complementary elements in those natures meeting without anxiety, of our different biological tasks being performed without profit for one at the expense of the other.” What women moving rightward may have wanted for themselves was to be connected to their female nature, to their biological role and to men, while maintaining most of the freedoms and dignities won for them in the 20th century. This was not the left’s vision for women – nor was it the right’s, so it turns out.  

Gornick describes a “college-educated housewife, fat and neurotic,” announcing, “with arch sweetness, ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t feel oppressed.” A similar false comfort allowed some women to feel cozy on the right even as male counterparts joked about raping them. 

At first, the appeal of the New Right seemed like a wry gesture at the absurdity of the liberal order, and a return to something harder, more durable and mysterious. From the comfort of our phones, deep within liberal society, it can be easy to lose our appreciation for what protects us. If the lie of wokeness was that words mattered more than reality, the lie of anti-wokeness was that words bore almost no relation to reality.

Part of the problem is that the ideas these men are floating sound ridiculous. They call to repeal the 19th Amendment, which ensures women have to same voting rates as men, as a rallying cry. What congresswoman is going to vote to repeal the 19th Amendment? Do they know how many members of Congress have to vote to repeal an amendment? It is all so impractical.

Adler-Bell quotes Nick Fuentes from one of his rants: “Women are either mothers, whores, or nuns… There are no female philosophers. There are no female inventors. There are no female generals or billionaires. They are mothers, whores, nuns. End of list. That’s what you can be.” Well, no. 

It’s a lot easier to tolerate alliances with people who hate you when they sound this naive. But unrealistic propositions can act as a decoy that distracts while more plausible threats get in. Women who want to draw moral lines based on the feminine perspective leave themselves or get cast out. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to leave MAGA, and Congress, over Trump’s initial refusal to release the Epstein files, was significant in this regard. “Standing up for women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor,” read her resignation. 

The women of the New Right may have wanted to go back to the “Italy of their dreams,” as Elizabeth Hardwick called it, “a country of madonnas and widows and no divorce.” They were bound to find out it had been lost forever. For a while now, the question has been: where will they go next?

Iran isn’t Trump’s only ‘imminent threat’

President Trump thought it would be a cakewalk. Far from capitulating, his nemesis seems to be on the comeback trail.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell thus announced on Wednesday that unless a successor is confirmed by the Senate, he has “no intention of leaving.”

The bad news keeps mounting for Trump. Inflation is ticking up, King Charles’ upcoming visit is starting to look rather iffy, the President’s gilded ballroom project looks as though it will be smacked down by a federal judge, and energy prices are rising precipitously. Indeed, a new sticker plastered on petrol stations shows Trump pointing his finger into the sky and is captioned: “Iran your gas prices up.”

Poor Trump. This year is looking like his personal annus horribilis. As an obstreperous Iran refuses to surrender and lobs missiles at Israel and various Gulf states, Trump has become embroiled in what he once denounced: a forever war. His disciples are confounded. Trump’s counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, resigned on Tuesday, contending that Trump had been snookered into the conflict by nefarious forces in Israel. This line of argument seeks to exculpate Trump for the debacle, portraying his foray into Iran as a momentary lapse in judgment. Trump was having none of it. He referred to Kent as “weak,” one of his favorite epithets.

Trump’s own advisers offered a different story as they were interrogated on Capitol Hill about the case for war. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and queen of the self-styled foreign policy restrainers, performed something akin to a duck-and-cover. In her official statement, she acknowledged that there was no compelling evidence that Iran was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program, which Trump had asseverated this past summer was “obliterated” by Operation Midnight Hammer. But Gabbard, in responding to Senator Jon Ossoff, argued that it was not her duty to reach any conclusions about Iran’s intentions. Gabbard’s mandate is not to decipher threats but to function as a cipher herself. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” Gabbard said. “It is not the intelligence community’s duty to determine what is and is not an imminent threat.” Others on the hawkish right continue to view Gabbard as a threat. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, complained on Wednesday that Gabbard’s agency remains a “resistance shop” to the deployment of military power abroad.

Where Trump stands on these doctrinal disputes over the true MAGA faith remains a mystery. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated, “Rest assured, there is a plan.” Is there?

Britain may have finally turned a corner on jobs

Finally, some good economic news: Britain may have turned a corner on jobs. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show the unemployment rate remained flat at 5.2 per cent in January.

On payrolled jobs there was positive news too: employees on PAYE payrolls in February grew at their fastest rate since October 2024, with 20,000 jobs added.

If this really is the turnaround point on jobs, it comes as welcome relief for a Chancellor whose minimum wage hikes and National Insurance raid were to blame for much of the job destruction. Despite today’s welcome increases, we’re still down by over 114,000 jobs since Labour came to power.

Whether this would truly have been the end of the job slump has now been made something of a moot point by events in Iran. This morning, oil has surged to $114 a barrel and gas prices have jumped by 30 per cent. Energy markets remain volatile, but the longer this drags on, the closer we’ll get to a global recession.

Britain is, of course, particularly vulnerable to an energy shock, given we already suffer the highest industrial electricity costs in the world (second highest for domestic).

A slowdown in consumption and an increase in the energy costs involved in running businesses will obviously hit the jobs market badly.

Meanwhile, wage growth slowed to 3.8 per cent in January – down from 4.2 per cent. That would have been welcome news to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, which had wanted to see inflationary wage growth fall before cutting rates further. Indeed, in a different timeline, that data would have reinforced a decision to cut interest rates today. But we live in a very different world now, with inflationary fears very much back on the dashboard. The result: a hold in interest rates almost certain to be announced at midday today.

The Iran conflict is morphing into an energy war

Into the early hours of this morning, Israel and Iran continued exchanging direct strikes, while the fighting spread further across Lebanon and the Gulf, and increasingly centred on energy infrastructure.

Israel widened its campaign inside Iran. Late last night, the Israeli military said it had struck targets in northern Iran for the first time in the current operation, after attacking more than 200 targets in western and central Iran over the previous 24 hours, including ballistic missile storage sites, launch systems, air defences and weapons production facilities. An Israeli strike on the Iranian port of Anzali on the Caspian Sea resulted in at least three vessels catching fire. Iranian reports suggest one ship had returned from Russia just 24 hours earlier, with suspicions that it was carrying drone-related Russian technologies.

The campaign continued to target the Iranian regime’s leadership. Iranian officials confirmed the death of Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib, another major blow following the killings of Ali Larijani, the commander of the Basij and other regime-linked figures. A judge associated with the death sentence against the wrestler Navid Afkari was killed in an Israeli strike. Afkari was an Iranian wrestler executed in 2020 after being convicted of murdering a security guard during anti-government protests, in a case widely condemned internationally due to allegations that his confession was obtained under torture.

Energy sites are now central to the conflict. Israeli strikes hit gas facilities in Asaluyeh, part of the South Pars field, setting off fires. Hours later, Iran struck Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial complex, one of the world’s main liquefied natural gas hubs. Qatari authorities reported extensive damage and fires, condemned the attack as a violation of sovereignty and warned that they reserved the right to respond. Qatar then expelled Iranian military and security attachés, giving them 24 hours to leave the country.

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In Washington, Donald Trump said the United States had not been informed in advance of Israel’s strike on Iranian gas facilities, but warned that any further Iranian attack on Qatar’s LNG infrastructure would bring a massive American response against Iran’s South Pars gas field. There were US strikes in Iraq, including an attack in Baiji targeting the Iran-backed al-Hashd al-Shaabi militia, with casualties reported.

Iranian ballistic missiles targeted Riyadh, with Saudi defences intercepting several and debris falling near a refinery south of the city. Explosions were also reported in Bahrain, and a tanker was struck at Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates. Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan responded with an unusually sharp warning, saying further Iranian attacks, especially on the energy sector, could trigger both diplomatic and military responses.

Iran also launched repeated missile barrages at Israel overnight. The Israeli military issued multiple alerts as missiles were detected and intercepted, with civilians repeatedly ordered into protected spaces. Cluster munitions were used over central Israel and a foreign worker was killed by shrapnel in Adanim, while debris impacts were reported near Nablus and in Netanya.

In the southern West Bank, an Iranian missile hit a hair salon in Beit Awwa, near Hebron, killing at least three Palestinian women and wounding five others; some reports put the death toll at four.

Lebanon remains a major theatre rather than a side front. Israeli ground forces continued operations in the south, while strikes destroyed bridges over the Litani River that Israel said were being used to move Hezbollah fighters and weapons. Lebanese authorities said 56 people were killed on Wednesday alone, bringing the total since the start of the current round of fighting to 968 dead and 2,432 wounded. Hezbollah continued launching rockets into Israel, including a long-range strike of roughly 125 miles fired from 150-90 miles inside Lebanon, signalling the use of longer-range systems and a shift away from purely border-based launches.

Reuters’ Chief National Security reporter has reported that the Trump administration is considering deploying thousands of additional troops to the Middle East as the military prepares options for the possible next phase of the Iran war. One option for securing the Strait of Hormuz includes deploying troops to Iranian shores.

Feeling uncomfortable about Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square isn’t racist

If you hear ‘allahu akbar!’ shouted in the street, you’ll probably run for cover. If a stranger bellows the Jewish equivalent, ‘Baruch hashem!’ in public, you might guess they’re expressing gratitude for their good health when asked how they are. If the words ringing out from the midst of a crowd are ‘Jesus Christ!’ You’ll probably think someone has stubbed their toe, or seen something ridiculous.

Instinctive reactions matter because they expose deeper dispositions, often aligning with the very intention behind the action that provoked them. There is no true equivalence between the three phrases, even if they appear to cover similar ground across the Abrahamic traditions. Comparing our reactions to these religions, and to others, rarely proceeds on a straightforward like-for-like basis.

When Nick Timothy posted a critical comment on X about the recent public Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square, which included the participation of London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, opinion split quickly. Many thanked him for articulating what they felt others were unwilling to say, while others responded with sharp criticism.

“Mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination,” the Conservative MP wrote. “The adhan – which declares there is no god but allah and Muhammad is his messenger – is, when called in a public place, a declaration of domination.” He went on to call the Trafalgar Square gathering “an act of domination and therefore division” noting the “domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook.”

Behind this debate lies the idea that Islam is a religion of dominance, which seeks to confer the rest of us into adherents. It’s a proselytising religion, unlike, say, Judaism, which actively discourages conversion and makes it difficult to achieve. The Islamic concept of Dawah, coupled with the regular manifestations of violent Jihad the UK and the West have had to become accustomed to over recent decades, is one reason why many people feel a genuine and legitimate sense of unease when they hear the same words terrorists shout as they slaughter us, echoing across our nation’s primary public square. It is unsettling.

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Many felt equally uncomfortable seeing videos circulate of Islamic prayer echoing through Windsor Castle, and more recently through Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament. The very room thousands had shuffled through to pay their respect to her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill, in the heart of our Parliamentary buildings, now appeared to some to have been ‘conquered’. Both venues carry the weight of being iconic, historical settings which represent different branches of power in our nation, as does Trafalgar Square. They represent power through royalty, parliament, and military victory.

Labour MP Naseem Shah – the Labour MP who was once suspended from the Labour Party for antisemitism for sharing posts online before she became an MP which suggested that Israel should be ‘relocated’ to the US (‘problem solved’) and warning that ‘the Jews are rallying’ to skew an online poll – responded by saying Timothy’s comments were ‘beyond awful’ because other faith groups regularly celebrate their religious festivals and holidays in Trafalgar Square, but Muslims were being ‘exceptionalised’.

It’s true, I have stood several times under the shadow of Admiral Nelson next to a massive Chanukiah, eating doughnuts and spreading Jewish good cheer. But it is intellectually dishonest, and socially tone-deaf, to equate these events with crowds of Muslim men prostrating on the pavement to the sound of “Allahu akbar” during a full public prayer service. They register differently with Londoners who witness them, shaped by distinct cultural backgrounds and motivations. That, in essence, was the point Nick Timothy was making.

I have often seen small groups of Muslim men praying in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, unfolding their rugs and quietly engaging in their religious practice. Nobody bats an eyelid. Similarly in airports across the world, many observant Jewish men wrap tefillin in groups of ten when it is time for their morning prayers. These episodes tend be uncontroversial because they are clearly quiet, personal moments of religious reflection, respectfully carried out in an unusual place out of necessity, because of travelling schedules, time zones, or a lack of synagogues or mosques nearby to pray in. Mass street worship is different.

Suppressing discussion of the fears surrounding this sensitive subject will only deepen, for some, the sense of being overridden or subordinated.

The debate is not confined to London. New York City is home to nearly one million Muslims, and in late February, soon after Zohran Mamdani became the city’s first Muslim mayor, crowds gathered in Times Square to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer during Ramadan.

In France, since around 2010, when mosque overflow first pushed thousands to pray in the streets in areas such as Goutte d’Or and Argenteuil, the issue has remained a point of contention. Marine Le Pen, then leading the National Front, described those scenes as an “occupation.”

If it’s not an essential requirement, why would you want to pray on the dirty ground of London’s streets, especially if you know the anxiety it causes about your religion?

Islamic history links public congregational prayer and the adhan, the call to prayer, to shifts in political and civilisational dominance. In Mecca, during Islam’s minority phase, early Muslims prayed privately or within homes such as the protected, semi-secret Dar al-Arqam. Public visibility was limited, constrained by vulnerability.

With the move to Medina and the consolidation of power, this changed. Public prayer emerged as an open expression of authority and presence. The adhan became a proclamation, audible and deliberate. The pattern appears again during the conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries: military victory, followed by public adhan and congregational prayer, then mosque construction, and the gradual transformation of space into Islamic territory.

Some interpret modern instances of street prayer in Europe and North America as a continuation of this sequence in attenuated form, a soft replication in which visibility and presence are asserted without military force. They point to core Islamic sources emphasising supremacy, public ritual, and total societal submission. For example, Mohammed is quoted as saying, in Sunan al-Tirmidhi 317, “All of the earth is a place of prayer except graveyards and bathrooms.” Quran 9:33 and 61:9 state that Allah sent Islam “to manifest it over all religion.” Surah Al-Fatihah, recited 17 plus times daily in prayers, includes “Guide us to the straight path…not those You are displeased with,” which is interpreted by some to mean Jews and Christians. All this frames public prayer as affirming dominance over us infidels.

The political part of Islam presents itself as more than personal faith, extending into a comprehensive ideological project. Within that framework, mosques are at times described as outposts in non-Islamic environments, a view reflected in internal Muslim Brotherhood material. A 1991 memorandum, revealed in U.S. court proceedings, outlines a strategy of “civilisational jihad” through settlement, institution-building, and gradual influence. Public prayer, in this reading, functions as a visible marker of presence. You can understand why some people are afraid.

Because contemporary rhetoric from imams and activists in the West often spreads ideas of conquering Europe with prayers and babies, expressing Islamist political action through prayer risks granting it immunity, and even the authority to disrupt.

In Britain, we fiercely protect freedom of religion, and any criticism of someone else’s faith can easily be smeared as discrimination or inequality. It’s not in our nature to do so. But Nick Timothy did not do that. He represented a widely held concern that many ordinary citizens have, and went some way to explaining why they have it. He started a debate, in a calm and respectful way, on a topic of potentially explosive sensitivity. If that isn’t the job of a Member of Parliament, what is?

The French lesson that could save Rachel Reeves – and Britain’s economy

Rachel Reeves faces a strikingly similar predicament to that faced by Pierre Moscovici, who became France’s finance minister under François Hollande in 2012. Moscovici – and Reeves – both inherited the classic problem of the modern centre left: expensive promises and no obvious way to pay for them. The economy was sluggish; unemployment was climbing above ten per cent and public debt was rising. Every proposal to raise revenue further provoked consternation from voters and business alike.

In France, the Socialist Party, elected on promises of redistribution and public investment, looked on any attempt at restraint as a betrayal of principle. Moscovici spent the next two years in a balancing act; raising taxes without provoking flight or revolt, promising spending that would not bankrupt the state, and hoping that the European Commission and financial markets didn’t lose patience.

Over a decade later, Reeves is also in tight spot. Granted Britain in 2026 is not France in 2012. The economy is not teetering on the edge of sovereign default, and there is no European Commission monitoring debt-to-GDP ratios. But the fiscal arithmetic is just as unforgiving, and the politics arguably worse.

Growth has been anaemic for years with productivity increasing by a mere 0.5 per cent annually over the last decade. Meanwhile, Britain is already taxing itself at levels not seen outside wartime, with total receipts exceeding 37 per cent of GDP in each year since 2020/21. The current government’s fiscal headroom is wafer thin. Every pound of new spending must be funded by an equivalent saving elsewhere or borrowed under conditions that markets scrutinise closely.

Reeves has approached the problem with utmost cautiousness, like someone tiptoeing through a puddle. The Chancellor’s first Budget attempted the usual rituals of fiscal responsibility from a left-leaning perspective. There were pledges to keep debt falling, minor tinkering with capital gains and a deeply unpopular rise in employers’ National Insurance contributions which amounted to a tax on hiring.

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Yet the pressures on Reeves are obvious. On one side, there is the desire and supposed moral imperative – at least in the eyes of many Labour MPs – to expand, or at the very least maintain, welfare provision. Working-age disability and incapacity benefits now total about £65 billion annually (projected to exceed £100 billion a year by 2029/30) with over three million recipients, 44 per cent of whom have non-physical conditions, such as mental health and behavioural disorders.

On the other side, there is the hard truth of a high-tax, low-growth economy. Pushing harder on the tax base dampens growth further, prompting capital flight thus failing to raise enough revenue to fund any meaningful new spending.

Moscovici faced almost an identical tension. France’s already high taxes could not fund the Socialist Party’s ambitions without provoking capital outflow or investor anxiety. The infamous proposal to impose a 75 per cent top rate “supertax” on the very wealthiest provoked uproar among entrepreneurs and financiers. This played out whilst left-wing colleagues continued to demand ever more generous distribution. Moscovici had to navigate between ideological insistence and market pressures, grinding any meaningful progress to an overwhelming halt.

Reeves’s political landscape may lack the melodrama of a potential Eurozone bailout, but the tug-of-war between party demands and economic reality is every bit as punishing. Labour backbenchers, many representing constituencies heavily dependent on the state, are predictably hostile to any suggestion of restraint.

Labour MPs have already signalled how difficult this will be. In June 2025, 100 Labour MPs signed an amendment that would give them the opportunity to vote on a proposal to reject the Welfare Reform Bill in its entirety. The Bill was eventually passed, but with significant concessions following the rebellion, such as dropping new PIP eligibility rules for existing claimants and delaying reforms until a further review in 2026. Even modest reforms are treated as ideological betrayal.

Meanwhile, the wider electorate expects continued improvements in health, education and wider public services – all funded without raising the headline tax burden. The political margin for manoeuvre is almost comically narrow.

The obvious temptation is to hope that growth will ride to the rescue, and Labour still pay lip service to this idea. Stronger productivity would increase revenues without the need to raise taxes further, and welfare spending would naturally ease as more people entered employment. But Britain has been waiting for that productivity miracle since the financial crisis, and there are few signs, if any, that this will be imminent. It’s less going for growth, more waiting for Godot.

Those with memories long enough to remember the end of François Hollande’s premiership know where this is going. Initially taxes were raised and a few savings were made here and there, but the Socialist Party ran out of road and Emmanuel Macron, Hollande’s Minister of Economics and Finance, formed a new centrist party. France gradually pivoted towards policies intended to encourage investment. This meant cutting the corporate tax from 33 to 25 per cent. The labour market was also liberalised and there was an unspoken acknowledgement that redistribution is a difficult commitment when the economic pie refuses to expand.

Unlike Hollande’s France, which was teetering on the edge of a sovereign debt crisis, the British economy is not in freefall – yet. Growth has stalled and inflation continues above target. Public sector debt is fast approaching 100 per cent of GDP so all in all, there is little room for manoeuvre.

Are we heading for a French style breakaway? Who knows – but it could possibly be avoided if Labour took the French lesson, that political reincarnation sometimes requires a pivot toward supply-side reform. Upon election as president, Macron tempered rigidities in the labour market and reduced barriers to employment. Investment was encouraged and this was all done without abandoning redistribution entirely.

If Reeves were as serious about growth as her speeches suggest, she might consider something similar. A first step could be to further tone down the Employment Rights Act and focus on getting many of the nine million economically inactive back to work, setting aside the 2.5 million sidelined by long-term sickness. This might not solve the structural malaise of the economy overnight, but it would be a small step in the right direction and one of Labour’s better chances to stay on course between the Scylla and Charybdis of Reform and the Greens.

The hardest battles for any left-of-centre chancellor are internal. Reeves may find that signalling prudence isn’t enough and that a radical move away from socialist political orthodoxy is the only means to allow the economy to breathe. The ultimate question is whether Reeves is willing or be able to pursue this cause. At the moment, that seems unlikely.

Joe Kent’s resignation was an act of political positioning

Reflecting on the resignation of Cyrus Vance, James Thomson, the American historian and journalist, wrote in the Washington Post that the former secretary of state “has done us all a great public service.” In doing so, Thomson argued, Vance gave “new life and spine to a somewhat rare and weak convention in our nation: resignation in protest of an issue of principle.”

The year was 1980. Vance had resigned in protest over the Carter administration’s decision to authorize Operation Eagle Claw, the ill-fated mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran after the Islamic revolution. The mission ended ignominiously. President Carter pulled the plug after equipment failures and a deadly helicopter collision killed eight service members. Vance was vindicated.

Like Cy Vance’s resignation in 1980, Joe Kent’s high-profile departure may come to signify more than a break in principle. More pointedly, it may mark the moment when internal dissent collided with an escalating war. Politically, it may symbolize a moment of reckoning for the Republican Party and accelerate the fight over “America First.”

The failed rescue mission in Iran did not single-handedly end Jimmy Carter’s presidency but it was totemic of perceived political weakness. The incident crystallized public perception that the president had lost control of inflation, the economy, and the Iran hostage crisis.

A plausible parallel exists for the current Trump administration. A partisan war in Iran that produces a butcher’s bill of American casualties, higher costs from the gas pump to the grocery store and escalation rather than victory would be a political disaster. It could wreck Republican hopes in the midterms and turn Trump into a lame duck. Democrats will be quick to revive impeachment efforts while would-be Republican successors will position themselves for a post-Trump future.

Kent may have cast his lot on precisely this scenario. In this rendering, his resignation is not simply a matter of conscience. Rather, for the two-time congressional candidate, it is also an act of political positioning. When the reckoning comes, voters and elites will distinguish between those who embraced the war and those who refused.

One can imagine several scenarios, none mutually exclusive, that prompted his resignation. First, he may have resigned from conscience. He simply could not abide escalation in the war that would needlessly risk the life and limb of American service members. As he wrote in no uncertain terms: “I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.”

Second, he could not stomach the expectation that his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, make the case that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. Kent’s resignation letter makes his opposition to that point unambiguous. For her part, Gabbard explained at Wednesday’s hearing: “The IC assesses that Iran has previously demonstrated space launch and other technology it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035, should Tehran attempt to pursue that capability.” By her own account, the threat was not imminent but deferred by nearly a decade.

Third, he perceives a public break from Trump on this war, arguably the defining act of this still-young administration, as politically prescient. There will be a Republican Party after Donald Trump and Kent has drawn his line in the sand. Here, his account is revealing. Kent touched the third rail in American politics when he claimed “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” To tell the story of the Iran war without mentioning our co-combatant would be an exercise in invention. But whatever one makes of his account of Israeli pressure, it does not alter the decisive fact of executive agency. No foreign government can compel an American president to launch a US military operation. Trump is the decider, to borrow the Bush-era aphorism. The choice was his, the buck stops there, and he owns responsibility for the war’s success or failure.

This makes Kent’s resignation politically significant. He would not have left his position if he thought the president was close to declaring victory and winding things down. Thus, he did more than dissent. He exited the administration to distance himself from what comes next.

Within hours of his resignation, Kent was reportedly set to appear in both Tucker Carlson’s orbit and on Mark Levin’s show. For the online right, these broadcasts represent the magnetic poles of the contemporary conservative ecosystem. Their audiences may not agree but they recognize the stakes. A dividing line is emerging on the American right between those who wanted this war and are willing to own it and those who warned against it. Kent appears determined to be counted squarely among the latter.

Revealed: Keir Starmer’s new plan to get closer to the EU

A Labour MP, reflecting on the problems UK Prime Minister faces over the war in Iran, observed: “Keir got it right, but things keep going wrong.” His point was that Starmer kept Britain out of the Israeli-American air strikes, a position popular both with the parliamentary Labour party and the electorate, yet the impact of that conflict has laid bare three serious problems at the heart of the British state.

First, there has been a fracturing of relations between Starmer and Britain’s defense chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton. Second is the vulnerability of the economy to energy price shocks. Third is Ed Miliband’s net-zero crusade, which has put further pressure on the cost of living, Starmer’s biggest domestic problem.

But ministers also believe the conflict has created an opening to do a deeper economic deal with the European Union – one which the Prime Minister and his chief negotiator Nick Thomas-Symonds plan to get rolling in the coming weeks.

The leak of discussions at a National Security Council meeting on Friday February 27 – the eve of the bombing of Iran – exposed Starmer’s failure to initially persuade his ministers to let the Americans use the bases at Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford to attack Iran’s missile sites.

It can now be revealed that a fault line also opened in that same meeting between No. 10 and Knighton. Jonathan Powell, the National Security Advisor, asked Knighton whether Britain should send warships to the eastern Mediterranean. “What about the carrier?” he pressed, referring to HMS Prince of Wales. Knighton replied: “We don’t need the carrier. We don’t need the Navy. We have an aircraft carrier – it’s called Cyprus.” But the failure to send a warship proved to be a disastrous political judgment that enraged Cyprus, Jordan and the UAE. “Warships are part of diplomatic theater,” says one insider. “They’re symbols as much as they are weapons. And nobody has said that to the Prime Minister.”

It has led to what may be a fatal collapse of confidence in Knighton. As an RAF man, he is seen as too dismissive of the Royal Navy’s ability to “show the flag” and reassure allies. A senior security source reveals that in another top-level meeting, “Powell and other people were saying: ‘Should we put a range of options on the table for the Prime Minister to have a look at?’ And the chief of the defense staff said no. No. 10 is very, very cheesed off. He’s actually not very competent.”

Others point out that Knighton (who has never been to war and has served overseas only once, in Italy) was only given the job to sort out the Ministry of Defence budget, a task at which he had failed before the Iran war began. The Defence Investment Plan is already six months late and there is no sign of it being published soon. “They didn’t want another TV tart,” says a defense source. “He’s a process man, not a war fighter. He was appointed as a bean counter, but he has failed to count the beans.”

Knighton’s performance has not been helped by Starmer’s inexperience in military matters. “The Prime Minister does not know which questions to ask to force the range of answers that he needs to make all the decisions he might want to make,” says a defense veteran. Knighton has only been in the job since September but there is already speculation that he will not serve the usual four-year term.

“The truth is that he’s lost the confidence of No. 10,” says a well-placed source. “Do I think they’re going to fire the chief of the defense staff tomorrow afternoon? No. Do I think he stands a good chance of requesting early retirement? Yes, I do. He has failed to give the Prime Minister military capability, but also diplomatic and political credibility.”

If the military rift is the most acute problem, the most chronic is the government’s lack of money. When the conflict broke out, Rachel Reeves spent the entire weekend in the Treasury. She would have done so anyway, since she was presenting the Spring Statement to parliament, but aides say “90 percent” of her time was devoted to preparing for the economic shocks of the conflict. She told her team: “At the moment, this is a conflict between nations. It’s soon going to become an economic question.”

Crude oil has topped $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. The Office of Budget Responsibility predicted that the oil price shock would put inflation back up to 3 percent. However, Treasury officials stress that, at the moment, this is a “disruption to existing supply” rather than a “permanent cut-off,” as happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. A close aide warns: “If it is a permanent, longer-lasting disruption, there will be consequences.”

Reeves has established an Iran response board within the Treasury, which includes the financial secretary Spencer Livermore, Neil Amin-Smith (the chair of her council of economic advisors) and permanent secretary James Bowler, along with several Treasury directors general.

The government’s immediate response has focused on preventing profiteering, assessing the impact on households reliant on heating oil, and working with the G7 to stabilize supply. It might also need to intervene when the energy price cap is next calculated in July, since that will determine costs in the autumn, when people turn their heating back on.

Pressure is building between the Treasury and Miliband over the headlong pursuit of net zero. The Energy Secretary has overseen the end of new North Sea oil and gas production, leaving the UK increasingly reliant on foreign supply, including Qatari gas. While he is right to say that the price of oil (though not gas) is set on the international market, Reeves would be grateful for the income that selling both would create. Miliband has also canceled a large-scale nuclear energy project that was planned by the Tories.

In a Commons statement on March 9, Reeves said: “I recognize the role that North Sea oil and gas will play in our economy for years to come.” Last week, after a meeting with oil and gas executives, she signaled that she wants to remove the Energy Profits Levy on the sector, which is driving up prices.

Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary, says: “Ed has made three big bets. That we don’t need our own oil and gas production. That clean electricity is more important than cheap electricity. And that renewables are a better bet than nuclear to get you away from gas pricing. He has been proven wrong on all counts.”

Doubts about Miliband are shared at the top of government, according to those familiar with No. 10 discussions. Starmer, the Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden and the former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney were all skeptical about his approach. “No. 10 realized last summer that none of this was going to bring down bills,” a source says. “Ed promised £300 off energy bills and he had no idea how to deliver it. He’s been making electricity expensive. It’s gone up £200 under him. Morgan, Pat, even Keir – nobody thinks that he’s right.”

What is the way out of this mess? Having fallen out with Donald Trump, Starmer is convinced that a new deal with the EU is his get-out-of-jail-free card. Thomas-Symonds is due to be in Brussels for the Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, where he and Maroš Šefčovič, the European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, will hold bilateral meetings. These will push forward existing negotiations – due to wrap up at a summit in June or July – and start a second phase of talks. A senior government source says negotiations over an “SPS deal” on food and animal products are “generally going well,” as are talks on a joint emissions trading scheme, something which “starts to seem much more important” in the context of Iran.

The Iran war has focused minds. The EU is showing greater “willingness” for the UK to join a recently announced Ukraine loan scheme worth about €90 billion to support Kyiv’s war effort and reconstruction. It includes a new mechanism that allows companies from “trusted partner” countries, including Britain, to supply equipment funded by the loans. However, Britain may need to contribute financially to the EU’s borrowing costs if it wants its defense industry to benefit. “There is an opportunity there for our defense sector to supply loads of stuff,” the source says.

The most controversial moment will come when Starmer makes clear his plans to seek “sectoral alignment” with EU rules to get better access to the single market. This will not, as many Labour MPs are demanding, mean reentry into the customs union, but the charge is still likely to be leveled that Labour is taking Britain back into the EU’s regulatory orbit. “We want to do something more ambitious around single-market alignment,” the source says. “It’s very much not the customs union, but we’ll look at where we are already aligning and where it’s in our interest to do so.”

Ministers believe the turbulent state of the world has caused the EU to rethink its approach toward post-Brexit Britain. “I can remember people saying the UK’s not important to the EU, you’re pretty low down the priority list,” says the source. “That situation has significantly changed. The change in the geopolitical environment means they’re much more willing now to look deeper into the UK relationship. There is a window of opportunity.”

Nintendo and the plumber who conquered the world

It’s not more than a parlor game, perhaps, to speculate about history’s most crucial inventions. One invention often makes the next possible. Electric light revolutionized human productivity, allowing us to work well beyond sundown. The combustion engine and later the turbine engine collapsed our sense of distance, putting other continents within a day’s travel. We’re still debating what the internet’s done; how social media offers the double-edged sword of instant communication and addressability for good and ill; how it encourages the avatarization of ourselves as online presences. We’re both ourselves online and not quite ourselves, entirely embodied and yet psychically elsewhere.

But then again, we’ve always experienced this on some level or another. It is a key condition of “play,” as propounded by the Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1938). Play is a concept that is, he argues, older than culture. We are engrossed by play. At play, we forget worldly rules, appetites and obligations (work for the most part) beyond the game at hand. For Huizinga, play is many things, but it is in the first place an activity that is separate from “ordinary” life. It occurs in “the arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice etc.” Today, play is most associated with the video-game console, the controller and the screen. In the history of play, the most crucial inventions have come from Nintendo.

Keza MacDonald’s charming and insightful history of Nintendo traces its origins as a manufacturer of playing cards in late-1890s Kyoto to the internationally admired and beloved powerhouse of gaming innovation it would become a century and a quarter later. And while some readers will know this trajectory, many will be surprised to learn of the diversity of business interests Nintendo has explored over the years – “instant rice, taxis and, notoriously but fleetingly, pay-by-the-hour love hotels.” The book is full of such curiosities.

MacDonald’s story covers the company’s critical evolutions. In the early 1980s, the massively popular arcade game Donkey Kong introduced the character of Mario, who would go on to become Nintendo’s mascot and indeed an icon of Japanese culture. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dressed as Mario and emerged from a green pipe at the closing ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, ahead of Japan’s Olympic Games. In his first iteration, Mario was named “Jumpman” and was a carpenter, not a plumber. It was the popularity of Donkey Kong that helped launch the company’s first console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1983, and fundamentally relocated the video game from the arcade to the home. Mario appeared as a protagonist in his own right with the release of Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

What followed was a period of astonishing innovation which saw Mario invigorate players’ imaginations, running, jumping, flying through one adventure after another. Designed nearly concurrently with Mario, The Legend of Zelda (1986) further solidified Nintendo’s reputation for creativity and invention, giving the player a kingdom to explore in one of the first “open world” games.

In 1996, Pokémon was released for the Game Boy in Japan, sparking a worldwide craze and a subsequent moral panic about children and video games. To date, taking together its TV series, merchandise, trading cards, films, games and so on, the Pokémon franchise has earned more than $100 billion. MacDonald writes wonderfully on the less well-known games Metroid and Kirby and reflects powerfully on the popularity of Animal Crossing during the pandemic, where it offered a sense of community.

As much as the book relates the material achievements of the company, in her interviews with designers, producers and directors MacDonald also offers compelling insights into the philosophies which have underpinned its success. Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as an engineer hired to maintain the machines that made playing cards and later went on to invent the Game Boy. His personal design philosophy was “lateral thinking with withered technology,” which MacDonald rephrases as “finding new ways to work with what you already have and getting the most out of affordable components, rather than chasing the expensive technological cutting edge.” It remains Nintendo’s concept today.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, may enjoy the most name recognition among video-game designers. His colleagues describe him as prone to eureka moments, abounding with creative wisdom. MacDonald sums up one aspect of his approach as fun first: “If it’s not fun, it goes.”

This history is delightfully accented with professional expertise (MacDonald is the Guardian’s video-games editor) and eerily familiar personal recollections of encountering these games as a child – how many of us had a Christmas morning unwrapping a Super Nintendo? What we see is the picture of a company which has, over the years, fluctuated between conservatism and cutting-edge experimentation both in business and artistry, and whose employees are never quite sure how their consoles and games will be received by the public. Yet what emerges most clearly is an institution intrinsically committed to the kindred spirits of play, adventure and fun.

The Iran war won’t help Russia defeat Ukraine

For Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. Just as Moscow was tiring of the American president’s assurances that he could strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky into accepting Russia’s terms for peace in Ukraine, the US-Israeli intervention in Iran caused a spike in the oil price. This has given Russia the chance to supply more oil to the global market and boost its flagging budget revenues.

On balance, the war in the Middle East is set to bring significant benefits for Russia, but they will not be enough to bring about Putin’s most urgent desire: the defeat of Ukraine. Of course, the Russian president can bask in the glory of Russia being recognized by the United States as an indispensable energy superpower. He can also relish the spectacle of Washington’s ties with Europe fraying further as the European allies refuse to heed Trump’s call to join the US in sending naval forces to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.

Then there is the added bonus that, facing competition from the US’s Middle Eastern allies, Ukraine will struggle to receive further deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles. These have been its best defense against Russia’s devastating ballistic missile attacks on its critical infrastructure over the winter. The Kremlin can also see that it will be even harder for Ukraine’s European allies to keep supporting the country economically when they need to shield the vulnerable parts of their own populations from high energy prices.

The benefits of the war in Iran for the Russian economy are also undeniable. Before Trump’s intervention, Russian oil was trading at a substantial discount to global prices because of sanctions. That discount has quickly disappeared, and Russian oil is now being sold at higher prices than Middle Eastern oil. An increase of $10 per barrel in the price of export oil will additionally bring the Russian budget between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion per month.

This is welcome news for the Kremlin. Falling revenues as a result of lower energy prices and an economic slowdown were becoming an increasing source of concern as the war in Ukraine dragged on and the long-term effects of western sanctions made themselves increasingly felt. Russia’s finance ministry had recently been preparing other government departments for a 10 percent budget cut for what it called euphemistically “non-sensitive” expenditure – in other words, excluding funding for the war in Ukraine and social spending.

Economic ties with China have played a vitally important role in stabilizing the Russian economy and keeping the military industry functioning. Yet China shows no interest in investing in Russia and has not replaced European finance, Russia’s traditional source of investment capital.

The Kremlin does, however, have reason to hope that the specter of prolonged instability in the Persian Gulf might encourage China to return to discussions with Russia on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline project that have stalled. Exporting another 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas beyond the current annual volume of 38 billion cubic meters would partially compensate Russia’s lost sales to Europe as a result of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Last year, only 18 billion cubic meters of Russian gas were delivered to Europe compared to more than 180 billion in 2019.

Despite these noteworthy gains, though, the Kremlin understands that caution is appropriate for several reasons. First, the war in Iran may be over quickly and oil prices may fall. They may not fall to February’s levels, but the budgetary boost to the Kremlin’s coffers might be far more modest than hoped.

Secondly, a long war leading to oil prices over $120 would trigger a global recession and destroy demand, effectively wiping out price gains and reducing Russia’s importance for the US and China. With Trump distracted, there is also less chance that Putin can use him as a lever to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky to sue for peace.

Lastly is the fact that Ukraine continues to demonstrate a remarkable determination to fight. This is despite the terrible destruction inflicted on its energy infrastructure over the winter and the resulting considerable hardship for the population at large.

For well over a year, Putin has been claiming that the Russian army holds the strategic advantage along the entire front in Ukraine and that its advance is unstoppable. This has set expectations of victory that remain far from fulfilled. Despite the greater size of its economy and its population, Russia has so far not been able to bring its superior resources to bear or sap Ukraine’s will to fight.

On the battlefield, the Ukrainians have recently gained an advantage in low-altitude drone operations. They have increased their medium-range drone and missile strikes which are destroying Russian air defenses and preparations for the Russian army’s spring-summer offensive. The Ukrainians believe that disrupting the summer offensive can seriously damage the Russian army’s offensive capabilities and force Putin to stop the fighting.

The Ukrainian strategy is to thwart Moscow’s aggression by making the war futile. Strategists in Kyiv believe that the longer the relative stalemate continues, the more questions will be asked in Russia about the purpose of the war. At one level, the argument is convincing. In March 2022, Russia controlled 27 percent of Ukraine’s territory. Four years later, they hold just 19.4 percent. Last year, Putin’s army took 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of one million casualties. Yet, in Russia’s increasingly repressive environment, there are for now no obvious signs of disagreement with the Kremlin’s line.

Having survived the winter and resisted Trump’s pressure, the Ukrainians have felt more confident than in recent months about their ability to fight Russia to a standstill. The Ukrainian army retook significant amounts of territory in February, more than canceling out Moscow’s territorial gains the same month.

Kyiv knows that the Kremlin fears announcing another partial mobilization because it is the main source of anxiety for Russian society. When last attempted in the fall of 2022, it led to around one million Russians leaving the country, including many of its best and brightest.

Ukraine has proved to be a much tougher nut to crack than Putin ever imagined. True, he is now likely to profit from short-term budget relief and weakened Ukrainian air defenses while Kyiv seeks alternative ways to protect its skies in the absence of munitions diverted to American allies in the Middle East. But this will not be enough to tip the balance and ensure the defeat of Ukraine.

Trump’s misadventure in the Middle East resembles Putin’s in Ukraine. Poor planning and faulty assessments of the opponent invariably lead to disastrous outcomes. In both cases, no deus ex machina beckons.

Why Iran will hasten MAGA’s demise

Readers may disagree with the cover line of this issue. Pronouncing “the end of Trumpism” feels somewhat similar to declaring “the end of history” – a provocative, albeit less grandiose, statement that risks being mocked in the near future. We should start by saying we hope that we are wrong. Trumpism, as this magazine understands it, has been a boon to America. As Christopher Caldwell argues, the rise of Donald Trump was a healthy democratic response to a fetid political system.

On many fronts, the Trump administration, now in its second and more dynamic term, has made great progress. It has fought illegal immigration with vigor. It has tackled the politically correct shibboleths which have done so much to derange America’s elite institutions, from the horrors of DEI to the self-defeating dogma of global environmentalism.

It has confronted China’s increasingly malign influence on the world stage and exposed the Democratic party as a self-serving cadre of shallow opportunists and ideologues. “Trumponomics,” the President’s protectionist agenda, is a mixed bag, though Trump’s tariffs and other policies can at least be justified as a daring attempt to improve the lives of America’s lower and middle-classes.

But the President’s war in Iran could end up destroying all that success. He has, as Caldwell says, “pressed his luck” and the consequences for his political legacy already look disastrous. For all America’s energy abundance, the instability in the Middle East – and Iran’s choking of the Strait of Hormuz – will mean higher gas prices at home, a concomitant inflationary spike, and perhaps a global economic downturn from which the US will not be immune. The President’s party will suffer as a result in November’s midterms as Trump’s Make America Great Again movement begins to unravel. 

Thanks to his unique character, courage and remarkable survival instincts, Trump has, throughout his life, managed to snatch victory from the jaws of disaster. Yet, as Enoch Powell said, “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.” In his preposterously ambitious bid to reshape the Middle East, Trump may finally have stumbled into a mess from which he cannot entirely escape. 

The Iranian regime has not yet crumbled and now the United States finds itself edging toward a protracted conflict that could impose unbearably large costs in terms of blood and treasure. Trump’s “America First” credo promised to make him distinct from his predecessors. But Trump has made a similar mistake to George W. Bush in his conviction that the awesome tactical power of the US military can bring about formerly unthinkable strategic ends.

Trump has already convinced himself that, in forcing allies and even China to confront their vulnerabilities in the Strait of Hormuz, he has done the world a favor. The President and his colleagues now talk about Operation Epic Fury as if it were a noble exercise in nettle-grasping: a painful process that had to be undergone in order to achieve, as Trump puts it, “everlasting peace.” By this logic, in decapitating the Iranian leadership, Trump has finally cut off “the head of the snake.” But the oil-rich Middle East has always been an impossible nest of vipers. 

It’s increasingly evident that neither America nor its regional allies had a coherent plan for replacing the Islamic Republic. Talk of a brave democratic revolution in Iran, which Trump mooted as he launched the war, now sounds naive at best. Short of regime change, the hope now must be that, through ever more bombardment, America and Israel can compel their adversary to accept peace on more humiliating terms than Tehran was willing to accept last month.

That is a gamble that has not yet paid off, to put it mildly. The White House and the Pentagon can insist that the extensive air campaign has surgically removed Iran’s ability to project power, and no doubt it has. But as long as a hostile Iranian regime survives, and remains defiant, the destruction of its assets can only ever be a short-term win. America instead seems to be creating the conditions for a failed state while urging a network of international and regional partners to contain the inevitable bloody chaos. That is a morally flawed and impossibly complicated project, one that could take decades to complete. Trump has less than three years left in charge. 

Much has been said about the President betraying voters who believed that he and Vice President J.D. Vance represented the peace ticket in 2024. “I am MAGA,” replies Trump, when asked about that. Le Trumpisme, c’est moi. He draws comfort from polls that indicate Republican voters continue to back him. There is already evidence, however, that his successful coalition, representing as it did a number of independents and former Democrats, is coming apart. The podcast sphere, so often credited with helping Trump win, is at war with itself over Israel’s influence in American affairs. Joe Kent, the head of Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center, has resigned in protest. The real worry for MAGA is that Trump is right: after him, the movement must fall apart. The war on Iran has only hastened its demise.

PMQs was ruined by Starmer’s verbal epilepsy

When a fully greased Sir Keir Starmer is finally bundled, squealing, out of Downing Street, one wonders what he might turn his hand to by way of work to keep a roof over his head? I suspect his time as a lawyer doesn’t bear repetition and he’s hardly going to be asked to do after-dinner speaking. Perhaps he could mimic other PMs and turn to writing. I suspect, though, it will need to be children’s books that help him pay the bills.

Boys and girls across the country could be delighted by stories with titles such as The Mysterious Expenses Claim, The Majority that Vanished and The Mandy, the Paedo and Me. 

Most popular

Christopher Caldwell

The end of Trumpism

John R. MacArthur

The outrageous cynicism of the Democrats on Iran

John Keiger

Why America and France are always arguing

Yes – having tried to wriggle out of answering questions on his failures by releasing the documents about Lord Mandelson’s vetting shortly after last week’s PMQs, we were back on the subject of why it was that Sir Keir had been so determined to appoint him, despite repeated warnings from more sensible people, and his attempts to mislead the House about it. This was the main topic of the leader of the opposition’s questions. It was not the topic of Sir Keir’s replies.

Today Sir Keir faced his fate with dignity. Nah, just kidding. He was like a cornered animal, lashing and wriggling as his failures were laid out in front of him. I have seen people drop a whole cream trifle with more grace. 

Mrs Badenoch’s first question met with a squeal of indignation. ‘She should apologise for advocating an attack on Iran’. One might charitably think that Sir Keir was indulging in some sort of absurdist word association exercise. His answers were so unrelated to anything in the questions that at times it was like watching some sort of avant-garde improv routine. We were only lucky that he didn’t start not answering through the medium of interpretative dance.

After repeated bouts of verbal epilepsy, Sir Keir finally made a brief allusion to the issue by repeating that ‘the process was clear. It’s been looked at by the independent adviser’, twice. Cue groans, not all of them from the Conservative party.

This scandal has been a long time coming for Sir Keir, who, during the many failings of a certain Boris Johnson, appointed himself as a latter-day Matthew Hopkins on account of the strength of his moral compass. I don’t suppose Mr Johnson has the patience to enjoy a dish served at any temperature other than piping hot, but the similarities between Sir Keir’s death by a thousand nonces and his own moral collapse are not without an echo of Greek tragicomedy. 

He turned on Nick Timothy, who had the audacity to point out that having the Adhan – the prayer which calls Muslims to ‘success’ and says there is no God but Allah and that Muhammed is his messenger – broadcast at high decibels over Trafalgar Square, as happened this week, might look a teeny bit domineering. Having failed to make everything about Iran, Sir Keir made this his next distraction, accusing Mr Timothy of not paying sufficient lip service to the myth of diversity being our strength.

‘If he was in my team, he’d be gone!’ bellowed the Prime Minister. Well given that what has actually seen members of his team ‘go’ are fraud, tax avoidance and, of course, falling on their swords to protect Sir Keir from allegations of promoting the Paedo’s Friend, it seems that that bar isn’t quite as much a mark of probity as Sir Keir thinks. 

Sir Keir’s record of actually answering questions each week is probably about as good as – to pick an example out of the blue – Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer. Parliamentary protocol forbids him from simply oinking the words ‘no comment’, so he goes on these mad and maddening side-tracks instead. Today was his most shameless episode yet. No attempt to answer any form of question, just unrelated lashings-out.

Things grew so bad that Lindsay Hoyle got his excuses in: ‘Can I just say I’m not responsible for the answers’. He had to tell the House this twice, so febrile was the atmosphere. Tory backbenchers Sir Julian Lewis, Paul Holmes and Andrew Snowdon all complained, with varying degrees of anger, about Sir Keir’s scrutiny-phobic evasions, to no avail. The PM blinked, glowered, and turned a deeper shade of puce. 

Sir Keir’s final ‘answer’ (please don’t sue me under the Trade Descriptions Act) was his most lamentable. ‘She talks about dshdooah’, he said before launching into a final rant about Iran, Greenland and Nick Timothy rolled into one. Clearly, he’d given up even using words, instead coming out with a noise both panicked and guttural. Goodness knows where this emission came from; perhaps it was some shamanistic invocation to make the questions go away, maybe he was trying to communicate with Lord Mandelson in his native parseltongue? Either way, it was like watching one of the three little pigs get exorcised. There were no shouts of ‘more!’ on the Labour benches. 

The end of Trumpism

Having Donald Trump as President probably resembles being a heroin addict: you undergo regular episodes of sweating terror and mortal danger, the end result of which is to get you – at best – back to normal. A year ago, the Liberation Day tariffs nearly caused the American economy to seize up, before China mercifully let the matter drop. Then came the even more reckless decision to join Israel in bombing Iran’s Fordow nuclear installation; Iran agreed to halt hostilities just as it was figuring out how to penetrate Israeli airspace with its missiles.

But now the President has pressed his luck. He has joined Israel in a campaign of aerial assassination and bombardment against Iran – this time of an almost incredible violence – and has wound up trapped. American air power proved sufficient to kill Iran’s 86-year-old leader and dozens of schoolgirls, flatten residential apartment blocks and blow up much of the country’s navy, but not to neutralize Iran’s missiles, which have been able to rain destruction on America’s bases and Tel Aviv’s neighborhoods.

Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. The reversal has not brought out the President’s dignified side. He now boasts about the comprehensiveness of his glorious victory, while imploring America’s hitherto unconsulted allies to join him in a naval campaign to get the strait back open. The message seems to be: “Help! Help! We’re kicking ass!”

Trump has escaped other predicaments of his own making, but there is something different about this one. The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Those with claims to speak for Trumpism – Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly – have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. Trump may entertain himself with the presidency for the next three years (barring impeachment), but the mutual respect between him and his movement has been ruptured, and his revolution is essentially over.

Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration. At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.

The Trump movement is what happened when Americans discovered the system could not be reformed democratically, only dismantled. It was not a move against democracy, or even liberalism. In fact it was a return to the original constitutional understanding that Alexander Hamilton laid out in Federalist No. 70: Americans are led not by a class-based bureaucracy but by an executive they choose.

Unfortunately, this democratic idea is dangerous. That is why no one ever dared try an American-style presidential system before 1788, and it is why progressives hemmed the presidency in with the deep state. Without it, there are really only two safeguards against a rogue executive: first, the public must elect a public-spirited person of unimpeachable character, and, second, that person must honor the constitution. The Iran assault shows neither condition to be operative.

No one who witnessed Trump’s bravery after being hit with a would-be assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania in 2024 will doubt he has character. But his virtues are not the ones you need to run a free country. Never has a president so availed himself of the public trust to line his own pockets. Trump welcomed Qatar’s offer of a new presidential airplane intended as a personal gift; he established a personal memecoin into which petitioners for presidential favor could drop multimillion-dollar contributions. We could go on.

Trump has indeed made progress in fixing the deep state. His supporters like to think of him as a rough-hewn, corner-cutting, hard-bargainer of the Andrew Jackson sort, with the fortitude to ignore pleas from special interests.

But there has always been a red line: Americans did not expect Trump’s character flaws to endanger them in the realm of foreign policy. America’s Iran policy has been made over the past year by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s real-estate crony Steve Witkoff, working in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both Kushner and Witkoff carry the title “special envoy for peace,” but neither of them has been confirmed by the Senate, as top diplomats and cabinet members must be. Kushner did not even release a financial-disclosure statement. So these two go to the Middle East to discuss with Netanyahu what to do about Iran. Netanyahu lays out Israel’s priorities, which involve, at the very least, disarming Iran. What American priorities are Kushner and Witkoff advancing?

It would be an understatement to say Kushner is close to the Israeli government. On visits to the Kushner family when Jared was growing up, Netanyahu literally stayed in his bedroom. Kushner is also close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who overruled Saudi regulators to invest $2 billion of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund in Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity. Two weeks into Trump’s war, the New York Times alleged that Kushner has continued to raise money for his firm in the Middle East while working as an envoy.

Witkoff’s family joined Trump’s to found World Liberty Financial, a crypto company. Last year, the United Arab Emirates put $2 billion into the firm, and shortly thereafter received clearance to import hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia chips, despite the country’s ties to China.

Kushner and Witkoff are neither financiers nor diplomats by trade, but real-estate moguls. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, with President Trump in attendance, the pair unveiled an artist’s rendition of a gigantic, Dubai-esque oceanfront development called “New Gaza,” complete with a timeline for its construction. Of course, ground couldn’t be broken until the property had been purchased by whoever planned to develop it, unless Israel planned to neutralize the place by force of arms in the meantime.

By law, Senate and House leaders must be informed of impending military operations – but no one informed them about Iran. They would have been curious to know that the United States had volunteered its military to take on the regional rival of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the say-so of two irregular “diplomats” with interests in those countries.

You cannot blame Netanyahu for taking advantage. Probably never again would his country get to deal with a president so gullible. But as soon as the attacks began on Iran, the news brought talk of tactical “divergences” between Israel and the United States. Israel wanted Iran wrecked and weak, and was hitting oil infrastructure that the United States had warned it not to. The United States wanted the oil industry up and running: first to lay claim to the oil for Trump, as happened in Venezuela; later to prevent the tit-for-tat strikes on Middle Eastern oil that could cause a global depression.

In fact, the only divergence between Israel and the United States, when it comes to war aims, is that Israel has them and the United States does not. That, of course, could be problem enough. For Europeans now marching against the war, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is evidence the US is abetting an escalation of Israel’s unpopular Gaza war. For a growing part of Trump’s own base, while Iran remains the bigger threat to America’s global position, Israel is the bigger threat to America’s democracy. As the war entered its third week, Joe Kent, head of Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center and a top aide to National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, resigned in protest, alleging: “It is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

President Trump’s case for going to war in the Middle East is a lot like George W. Bush’s back in 2003. We hear a collection of stirring phrases about weapons of mass destruction, terrorists (“tairsts,” as Bush called them), countdowns to this and that and how many times some politician said “Death to America” in 1985. But now, as then, having many arguments does not add up to having a good argument. Like Bush, the President and his aides treat America’s superior weaponry as the whole solution. Given its tendency to lure the United States into unaffordable but inescapable wars, it can sometimes look more like the whole problem.

Again, Trump has a gift for escaping seemingly impossible situations of his own making. It’s easy to underestimate him. His flaws – his ignorance, his incuriosity – are in plain sight. He really does seem to have gone to war thinking his abduction of the President of Venezuela augured a similar success in Iran. Trump’s strengths, by contrast, are often hidden. As John Judis writes in a profound recent essay on Trump and Hegel, Trump is somehow a world-historical catalyst. He may already be – incredible though it sounds – one of the half-dozen most important Americans who ever lived.

That will not keep his movement alive. Trumpism is about democracy or it’s about nothing. For Trump’s base, the sense of betrayal is acute. The international relations professor John Mearsheimer recently remarked of Trump: “He treats allies worse than he treats adversaries.” He does the same in domestic politics. Trump is now carrying out the policy of the very think-tankers and democracy-spreaders he rose to power by promising to fight. And it has apparently been many months since the people in whose name he campaigned have even flitted across his mind.