Watch: Poilievre concedes defeat before Portillo moment

Dear oh dear. Canada’s election results came in early this morning, revealing that – despite only being leader of the Liberal party for two months – ex-Bank of England governor Mark Carney wiped the floor with Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre. And not only did Poilievre’s party lose the election, he even lost his parliamentary seat. Talk about a double whammy…

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, excitement heightened among Canada’s Liberals as Carney’s party was projected to soar to victory in the election. As James Heale wrote for Coffee House this morning, what the economist has pulled off is nothing short of exceptional. At the start of the year, the Liberal party was languishing behind the Conservatives in the polls and even in the lead up to the vote, Carney and Poilievre were neck-and-neck. But as polling day neared and Donald Trump’s attitude towards Canada soured, Carney’s centrist lot managed to gain the upper hand – and currently the Liberals are within touching distance of securing a majority. Golly!

There was no elation in Conservative HQ however as the numbers came in. Just months ago, Poilievre was on track to lead a supermajority Conservative government. Now, he has been turfed out of parliament altogether, after more than two decades, in his very own Portillo moment. Conceding defeat this morning through gritted teeth, Poilievre lamented to his supporters: ‘Change did not get over the finish line tonight. Change takes time.’ Well, after twenty years in frontline politics, he should know eh?

Watch the clip here:

Why Merz’s free US-EU trade idea is a non-starter

Ever since President Trump started his tariff war earlier this month, the European Union’s response has been surprisingly clear. It should retaliate with tariffs of its own. It should focus on its own economic sovereignty. And it should make sure that targeted American industries feel the consequences. In other words, it should hit back, and hit back hard. And yet the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz has proposed a very different response: a grand Atlantic free trade pact. But can he convince Brussels to get on board?

It is certainly a break from the past for the man who next week will take over as Europe’s most significant politician. As he prepares to form his new government, the incoming German chancellor has proposed a free and open trading agreement with the United States. All the tariffs on both sides of the Atlantic would be taken down, and so would the regulatory barriers that make it harder for companies to trade across borders.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

In effect, it would turn into a transatlantic single market. ‘If we can offer this to the Americans, then it could be a chance for us to create a great opportunity for the US and Europe out of the current crisis,’ he told a Christian Democrat party conference in Berlin. 

Merz is of course completely right. If both the US and Europe are to have any hope of matching the growing economic power of China, then it would make a lot more sense for them to strengthen both their economies with free and open trade than to descend into a tit-for-tat tariff war that damages both sides. Indeed, the UK should be throwing its enthusiastic support behind Merz’s proposal. A free trade area covering both the US and Europe would be a huge boost for Britain’s economy.

The trouble is, it is not going to happen. The bureaucratic machine in Brussels won’t like it because it reduces its power too much. 

It is not just that it would involve scrapping the protectionism in industries such as agriculture and cars that have been a core feature of the EU ever since it was founded. It would also mean curbing the power of Brussels to lay down rules for everything from product standards to monetary policy to deficits and even working hours and employment law. The EU has made huge claims for its role as a ‘regulatory superpower’ – even though it was never clear how that benefitted anyone apart from the regulators – and it won’t surrender that lightly.

As German Chancellor, Merz may well be the most powerful politician in Europe. But unless he is willing to dismantle the Brussels bureaucracy, his grand plan for free trade with America is dead on arrival. 

SNP politicians back anti-gender ruling Green MSP

Despite denouncing the Supreme Court judgment that backed the biological definition of a woman, Green MSP Maggie Chapman has bafflingly managed to survive an attempt to remove her from her role as Deputy Convener of the Equalities Committee in the Scottish parliament. It seems the eco-activists can get away with anything these days…

When Chapman took to the streets of Aberdeen some weeks ago to fume about the ‘bigotry, prejudice and hatred that we see coming from the Supreme Court’, women’s rights campaigners, fellow politicians and legal experts were quick to hit out at her remarks. Not only does she hold a leadership position in Holyrood’s equalities committee (a group that has been urged to interact with For Women Scot in the wake of the judgment) but, under the Judiciary and Courts Act, MSPs must uphold the independence of the judiciary – which the eco-zealot quite demonstrably failed to do. Scottish Tory MSP Tess White last week tabled a motion calling for the removal of Chapman from her role, which was voted on today. Yet, despite the Green MSP’s clear rejection of the ruling, she managed to survive attempts to oust her. How very curious…

It transpires that all the SNP MSPs on the committee voted for Chapman to remain in situ – despite nationalist First Minister John Swinney himself condemning her comments as ‘wrong’. It’s not the first time the Nats have joined forces with Patrick Harvie’s barmy army over the gender wars, and today’s development suggests that not all in the SNP have accepted the Supreme Court ruling either. Meanwhile three unionist politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties moved against Chapman – but thanks to the environmentalist refusing to abstain and backing herself in the vote, she has kept hold of her job. Defending herself, the Green politician insisted: ‘I have never questioned the Court’s right to make the ruling that it did – but that does not mean that I must agree with it. I don’t.’ Good heavens…

Scottish Labour are understood to be seeking an apology from the lefty activist who has remained unrepentant about her damning indictment of the highest court in the land. Will she at least offer this up? Don’t hold your breath…

This Remembrance Day in Israel, ‘they deserved it’ is in the air

On the eve of Israel’s Remembrance Day, as sirens pierce the quiet of Israeli streets and the nation stands still to honour its fallen, something different will be happening far beyond Israel’s borders. This year, the pain pulses through the hearts of Jews across the diaspora. The grief is no longer distant – it is raw, personal, and inescapable. The surge in anti-Semitism, venomous and unapologetic, has woven our fates together.

Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, has always been a deeply Israeli ritual. The massacre on 7 October, the hostages still held in Gaza, suspended between life and death, and the high death toll in the war, make this Remembrance Day particularly painful, with so many families joining the ever-growing circle of loss. Mine among them: four members of my family have been killed by Hamas and Hezbollah since October 2023. Two were mother and son killed by a Hezbollah missile while tending to their farm in northern Israel. Since last Remembrance Day, 320 soldiers and 79 civilians have been killed in the war or from acts of terrorism.

Diaspora Jews – a community that I have been a part of for over 16 years, since leaving Israel – while emotionally connected, have often observed from the periphery. 7 October shattered that distance.

In Britain, where hostility festers in protests, on campuses, and in the casual venom of social media, Jews feel the weight of being targeted. The atrocities of 7 October, when families were slaughtered, hostages taken, homes burnt to the ground, and communities razed, were not met with universal horror. Instead, some celebrated. Others justified. A 2024 poll among UK university students, revealed that 29 per cent found Hamas’s attack to be an ‘understandable’ act of resistance. A further 35 per cent were ‘unsure’ if the attack was justified or an act of terrorism.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

The chilling refrain – ‘they deserved it’ – still echoes in the air.

While British Jewish identity and loyalty remains firmly rooted in Britain, the community is also bound by a grief that transcends borders, because the hatred that killed them stalks us too. Across the UK, there has been a rising tide of antisemitism, spiking 589 per cent since 7 October, according to the Community Security Trust. But each synagogue defaced, each slur hurled, each Jewish student harassed, tightens the thread connecting us and Israel’s loss. We mourn not just the dead, but the humanity that fails to mourn with us.

This Remembrance Day, the Jewish diaspora stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel, not out of politics, but out of shared survival. The hostility directed at our very existence as a group, is a bridge that links us to the parents who bury their children, the soldiers who will never return, those young people who just wanted to dance and found their death at the hands of sadistic terrorists.

That unity, though born of pain, has also been forged in resilience. The Jewish diaspora, scattered yet unyielding, finds strength in Israel’s fight for survival. We mourn. We light candles, sing prayers, and hold fast to the stubborn hope that has carried us through centuries of darkness. We grieve as one, but we also stand as one – unbowed, unafraid, and fiercely defiant.

The day after Remembrance Day, Israel will celebrate its 77th Independence Day. From the depths of sorrow, the nation will rise in joy, marking the miracle of its existence – a testament to a people who, despite every attempt to erase them, endure.

For the diaspora, this too is personal. Israel’s independence is our beacon of hope that no amount of hatred can extinguish. As we join in spirit, we celebrate the unbreakable thread that binds us all.

Yet, this moment is shadowed by a growing menace: criticism of Israel’s policies has morphed into something darker – a questioning of Israel’s very right to exist and, by extension, the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. In Britain and beyond, voices deny Jews the legitimacy of a homeland, distorting and weaponising the concept of Zionism, framing it as immoral. This is no mere policy debate; it’s a rejection of our history and our right to define our future.

As we remember Israel’s sacrifice, we affirm our hope and a belief in a future where anti-Semitism, and the jubilation in the death of Jews, will no longer be tolerated.

Kneecap apologises to families of murdered MPs

Well, well, well. The Tories, Labour and even the SNP condemned Irish rap band Kneecap on Monday over a 2023 clip that seemed to show the trio calling for violence against politicians. Now, it transpires, the republican band is attempting to row back. The emergence of video footage – that appeared to show one of the group saying ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’ – sparked outrage across the UK. The hip-hop trio last night finally issued an apology to the families of Sir David Amess and Jo Cox, the two UK parliamentarians tragically killed in constituency surgery attacks over the last decade, by way of a Twitter post. But 18 months on from when the remarks were made, it all seems too little too late…

Taking to Twitter, the group wrote:

To the Amess and Cox families, we send our heartfelt apologies, we never intended to cause you hurt. Establishment figures, desperate to silence us, have combed through hundreds of hours of footage and interviews, extracting a handful of words from months or years ago to manufacture moral hysteria.

Let us be unequivocal: we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah. We condemn all attacks on civilians, always. It is never okay. We know this more than anyone, given our nation’s history. We also reject any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual. Ever. An extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action. This distortion is not only absurd – it is a transparent effort to derail the real conversation.

Er, right. Scotland Yard is reportedly looking into the clip – alongside footage from a 2024 gig in which one band member appeared to yell about proscribed terrorist organisations: ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah.’ Charming…

Alongside the leaders of various UK political parties, Amess’s daughter Katie also blasted the band for the ‘stupidity’ of their comments, saying she was ‘gobsmacked at the stupidity of somebody or a group of people being in the public eye and saying such dangerous, violent rhetoric’. The Prime Minister’s spokesperson has condemned the comments as ‘completely unacceptable’ and suggested the group’s government funding could be cut, Scotland’s First Minister called for the group to be banned from a Glasgow festival and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has demanded Kneecap face prosecution over their remarks. The group may have offered up a semblance of an apology now but will it be enough to let them off the hook? Stay tuned…

A mammoth 100 days of Trump’s America First foreign policy

One hundred days into the second Donald Trump presidency, his presence in the Oval Office represents the largest sea change in US foreign relations since the end of the Cold War. 

Within the space of fewer than four months, Trump has forced Ukraine to deal with reality, by delivering hard truths about what ending the war will require. He has deployed J.D. Vance to shock the international system, with tough messages to our allies in Europe and Asia. Trump’s declaration of a litany of cartels as foreign terror organizations has kicked off a redirection of our relationship with Mexico, Panama and the Western hemisphere. His close relationship with Israel, a clear break with Joe Biden’s approach, has shifted expectations for the Middle East. The possibility of strikes on Iran’s nuclear program are higher than ever – so, too, is the potential for armed conflict between India and Pakistan. And just last night, Trump’s boisterous challenge to Canada – and repeated invitations for them to become the 51st state – has led, unfortunately for their once rising conservatives, to a once unthinkable Liberal party hold.

One notable shift since retaking office has been the President’s rhetoric regarding Russia. He seems increasingly frustrated with Vladimir Putin’s behavior, and while the president’s statements tend to run to the priority of peace, he seems to be irritated at Russian intransigence. His social media post on Putin, “maybe he just doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” is a rare public admission that he may have misjudged another world leader whose moves he has, in the past, defended as logical. If the Kremlin proves to be the major block to ending the war, Trump may be willing to get tougher on Russia than once thought.

Above all, though, the conversation at this moment is dominated by a new Cold War with China. Here, the chaotic nature of the President’s trade war is already having the most impact, with the falling port traffic indicative of what’s to come. The best we can hope for is that this war can stay cold. As Walter Russell Mead writes today:

World tensions are rising, not falling. The danger that escalating tensions between the two superpowers and their associates could trigger a war that nobody wants is more prevalent than ever. Neither China nor the US at this point wants to turn their Cold War hot. Even so, their rivalry increases the escalatory potential of crises wherever their interests collide.

What all this means for the future depends a great deal on how Trump and his team prioritize American interests over the demands of the decaying international order. They have bitten off quite a lot all at once, and additional events could set off dominoes as yet unseen. The next hundred days could bring resolutions in a number of these policy areas, but tensions can only build for so long – and given that the old decrepit international order ignored so many fundamental problems while growing fat and happy with the way things were, those tensions are coming from everywhere. 

Trump ran on a promise to restore American strength and reorient the country for the future. After 100 days, it’s clear achieving that goal may be even harder than his supporters imagined.

Donald Trump was Mark Carney’s greatest asset

This election could have been a lot worse for Canada’s Conservatives. As I write, they have taken 41.7 per cent of the popular vote, their highest share since 1988, and are on track to pick up two dozen seats. They have also managed to make inroads with young people and unionised workers – groups that are famously hard for right-wing parties to win over.

Yet the victor of the night was Mark Carney, who will have a thin but real minority to work with as prime minister of Canada, and now the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is expected to lose his seat. Ill-informed pundits will say that the Tories threw away their double-digit lead ahead of the election, but it would be far more accurate to say that Carney’s Liberals closed the gap, and then some.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

The Liberals, of course, had help, in the form of the President of the United States of America. Whatever the reason for Donald J. Trump’s sudden interest in acquiring Canada – which if nothing else appears to be entirely sincere – his increasingly unhinged interventions since December, coupled with the punitive tariffs he tried out on Canada created a rally around the flag effect, which greatly benefited the Liberals.

The Conservatives pointed out in vain that the last decade of Liberal governance has been a complete disaster. There has been almost no economic growth; runaway house prices have made home ownership impossible for an entire generation; Canada’s immigration system has all but collapsed; and there has been a steep rise in violent crime thanks to the government’s catch-and-release policies. Yet Canadian voters – particularly older ones (the young seemed more interested in quality of life issues) – decided that this was going to be a Trump election. And so it was.

The Liberal party, possibly the most ruthlessly cynical political machine left in the Anglosphere, played the Trump card to its fullest extent. Not a day passed without some fresh accusation that Pierre Poilievre was a miniature Trump, ready to sell out Canada at the first opportunity (the fact that Carney was apparently far more conciliatory than he let on publicly in his only phone call with Trump was glossed over).

At one point, Liberal staffers snuck into a right-wing conference and planted fake MAGA-themed memorabilia, so they could accuse the Conservatives of Trumpism. The operation was only discovered because some of the staffers involved – who still work for the Liberal party – bragged about their scheme in a pub. If the Trump connection did not exist, the Liberals would have to invent it.

Truth be told, Carney and the Liberal party did not run a particularly good campaign. He was accused of lying about his role in moving the headquarters of the investment company he chaired from Canada to the United States. He defended a Liberal candidate who said his opponent should be kidnapped and delivered to the Chinese government for a bounty. Carney snapped at reporters when challenged. He copied many of Poilievre’s policies, sometimes very crudely. But in the face of Trump, none of this really mattered in the end.

What lessons are there for conservatives, both in Canada and elsewhere? First, Poilievre’s basic message worked, and would have made him prime minister at any other time. He managed to galvanise young people who aren’t on the housing ladder, as well as blue collar and unionised workers, with his housebuilding and growth message.

But the headline takeaway remains Trump’s entirely negative role in the election. Last year, many conservatives outside America (including some in Canada) either openly or secretly welcomed Trump’s victory and hoped for some positive spillover in their own countries. But Poilievre’s defeat is a reminder that Trump has shown he has the reverse Midas touch time and time again, especially when it comes to right-wing movements outside his own country.

To put it simply: if you are not American, America First is going to be bad for your country. Trump seems to have contempt for right-wing politicians elsewhere. Just as he spoke far kindlier of Carney than Poilievre (whom he repeatedly attacked), he has been notably warmer toward Sir Keir Starmer than toward Kemi Badenoch. Traditional centre-right parties that are serious about power need to insulate themselves from Trump. Canada won’t be the American President’s last foreign victim.

Does Meghan Markle believe she’s still a royal highness?

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle staged their dramatic departure from the royal family five years ago, there were various conditions attached to their ‘Megxit’. One of the most insistent was that the pair were no longer allowed to use their HRH, or Royal Highness, titles. These were solely reserved for those working royals who are expected to perform often arduous and tedious duties, rather than a pair of chancers who saw the opportunity to monetise their birthright (him) and the chance to cash in on an advantageous marriage (her).

However, old habits have a habit of dying hard, and even Meghan can be forgiven for having moments of wondering ‘what might have been’ had she remained a rather talked-about member of ‘the Firm’. During a recent podcast interview it emerged that, should one be fortunate enough to receive a gift from Meghan – perhaps a pot of her notorious As Ever-branded raspberry jam – it is likely to come with a note, on monogrammed paper no less, reading ‘with the compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex’. Is this an exercise in wish fulfilment, or an apparent oversight?

Most neutral observers would assume that the HRH period of her life had come to an end when she and her husband left Britain for California. But the existence of these cards either suggests that Meghan and Harry had an awful lot of spares knocking about on their departure, or, alternatively, that it has suited her to continue to use her former HRH billing whenever an opportunity presents itself. (Amusingly, given the likelihood that this news would have become public before now had the compliments cards been sent out in quantity, it seems that this is either a very recent development or that relatively few of these gifts have been given. Who can blame her, given the no doubt considerable costs of postage?) In any case, this is a clear violation of the agreement that Meghan and her husband reached with the late Queen not to use their titles after they flounced off to Montecito and their new lives.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

A (put-upon) spokesperson for the Sussexes has issued an unconvincing denial, saying ‘they do not use HRH titles’. This is a surprisingly definite statement given that there is now clear visual indication to the contrary.

If we were to be generous, we might say that it barely matters how Meghan chooses to embroider her stationery. If she wishes to continue to believe that she is HRH in her own self-created kingdom, then who are we to judge?

The whole affair brings to mind the increasingly hapless efforts of Edward, Duke of Windsor, to have his wife Wallis Simpson given the HRH title that he craved for her, something sternly resisted by the Palace and regarded with disinterest by Wallis herself. Yet there was at least one occasion when the title was used freely and with great respect, and that was when Edward and Wallis visited Nazi Germany in October 1937. Had the Duke been installed as a puppet monarch in the event of Hitler conquering Britain, no doubt Wallis could have had all the HRH branding that she might have desired.

It is unlikely, although not entirely impossible, that Harry and Meghan will return to the country in triumph to reign in the event that Britain is invaded by a fascist power. In the meantime, she has to content herself with jam-making, podcasts and increasingly effortful attempts to remain in the public eye.

Still, there has been one particularly terrifying-sounding premonition of things to come. It seems almost inevitable that she will write her own autobiography, following on from her husband’s Spare, and that while we muse on what it might be called (Suited?), she suggested that ‘people are often curious about whether I’d write a memoir, but I’ve got a lot of life to live before I’m there’. No doubt this much-lived life will continue to be led in public, complete with HRH monogrammed compliments cards and all.

Taxing milkshakes won’t solve the obesity crisis

It was supposed to be the broadest shoulders who were going to fund the government’s overspending. Now it seems to be the broadest bellies, too. The government is to extend George Osborne’s sugar tax to milkshakes and other milk-based drinks. It is also to consult on lowering the threshold at which the sugar tax becomes due on drinks from 5 grams per 100 ml to 4 grams. That will see hundreds of products become liable for the levy – many of whose recipes had already been changed to avoid the sugar tax. A lower threshold of 4 grammes would add an average of 18 pence to the price of a litre of soft drink.

It says much that the initiative to increase the sugar tax seems to have come from the Treasury. Health secretary Wes Streeting, on the other hand, said last year that he did not wish to increase taxes on food during a cost of living crisis. If the aim of a sugar tax is mostly to improve our health, surely the government would be congratulating drinks companies on changing their recipes to lower sugar content. Instead, they are being treated as tax avoiders who must now be struck by having the goalposts moved.

But then has the reformulation of sugary drinks done much to improve health anyway? The sugar tax may or may not have contributed to a lowering of sugar intake; contrary to what many people may imagine, per capita sugar intake in Britain has been on a downward trend since the 1970s, and has fallen by around a third since then. Obesity, however, has moved very much in the opposite direction and has continued to increase since the sugar tax was introduced in 2016. If we are fatter, it is either because we are eating more of other kinds of food – or because we are taking less exercise.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

That is the point about food: unlike tobacco, and a lesser extent alcohol, fats and sugars are not poisons. They can be part of a perfectly healthy diet – unless, that is, they are eaten to excess. This is why food taxes are always doomed to failure: what might be a healthy meal for an active person might be grossly too much food for another.

The Conservatives’ efforts to control portion sizes in restaurants – which they tried to do through voluntary agreement with the threat of legislation if that failed – ignored something which should have been obvious: if you are a 6ft 18-year-old who has been playing rugby all afternoon, your need for calories is vastly different from your 4 ft 8, 80-year-old grandmother who has spent the day knitting. Trying to regulate how much they eat through one standard, government-approved portion size is ridiculous.   

What taxes on food do achieve, however, is to impose regressive levies on the poor. It is inevitable that it is they who will end up paying the most, proportionally, because they spend a higher percentage of their income on food. Moreover, the new tax on milkshakes will not apply to drinks prepared in cafes and restaurants, only on prepared drinks sold in containers. Those who can afford to eat out regularly will dodge much of the levy.

If we want to reduce obesity there really is only one way, which is to educate people about the dangers of being overweight – just as the government did with smoking from the 1960s onwards. That approach was hugely successful at reducing smoking prevalence. No one can be under any illusions that smoking is very likely to kill you. Yet with obesity a different approach seems to rule: we are told not to ‘fat shame’ people. Obesity is treated as a disease, rather than as the result of poor decisions. Blame is transferred from the individual to the food industry. This approach has failed miserably, and raising the sugar tax will do nothing to change that.  

What caused Spain’s blackout?

By six o’clock this morning, electricity had been restored to 99 per cent of Spain. Restoring people’s sense of security and a full return to normality, however, will take much longer. Portugal has been similarly affected as, briefly, were parts of southern France.

The sudden outage occurred at 12.33 p.m. yesterday, leaving Madrid without electricity for hours. Where I am in Ávila, seventy miles from the capital, the lights didn’t come on again until 1.30 in the morning.

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez said that an investigation was being carried out into the ‘sudden’ loss of electricity generation. ‘It has never happened before,’ he said yesterday evening. ‘All state resources have been mobilised from minute one.’

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

That didn’t, of course, prevent opposition leader Alberto Feijóo complaining. At 4.50 p.m. yesterday, when Sánchez had still not yet addressed the nation, he deplored the lack of information given to citizens: ‘It is very important that the electricity blackout is not compounded by the government’s information blackout.’ He later reiterated his complaint but added that the government could, of course, count on his party’s support. He also expressed his ‘solidarity’ with citizens, especially with those suffering ‘very distressing situations’.

There were scenes of chaos all over Spain, especially in the major cities. In Madrid, by 2 p.m., people had poured out of the underground into the streets. The city centre, reports El País, Spain’s centre-left newspaper of record, had become a flood of people ‘wandering around like headless chickens’. For many, the only way home was on foot and without Google Maps, they were at a loss. Despite the huge traffic jams which formed, it was a good day for taxi drivers – although with no functioning traffic lights, driving was not easy. Huge queues formed at supermarkets as people rushed to buy bread and fuel for barbecues.

Here in Ávila, people rushed to buy batteries for their battery-operated radios. Some of the shops promptly hiked the price from €3 (£2.55) to €10 (£8.50). There was panic when the hospital’s emergency heating system kicked in, emitting clouds of smoke; from a distance it seemed as if the hospital was on fire. In fact, though, there was no problem at all. There was a total news blackout (no radio) for eight minutes, apparently.

All over Spain, public transport faced disruptions – often for many hours – and mobile phone networks went offline. Sánchez said that some 35,000 people had been rescued from trains, but many were still stranded eleven hours after the outage. At the airports hundreds of flights were either delayed or cancelled. Fortunately, many of the nation’s hospitals were oases of calm, thanks to their backup generators. Many people were trapped in lifts. No information regarding casualties and fatalities is yet available.

This morning, Sánchez reconvened with the National Security Council, chaired by King Felipe VI, to assess the ongoing situation. The cause of the blackout remains unclear, with Sánchez affirming that all possible explanations continue to be investigated.

Mark Carney won’t change Canada for the better

Apparently Canada hasn’t taken enough punishment yet. After a close, hard-fought race that extended into the wee hours of the morning, Mark Carney and the Liberals came away with enough seats to form a minority government. They will form Canada’s fourth consecutive Liberal government since 2015.

The Liberals maintained their edge, in part, thanks to the collapse of the New Democratic party, whose leader Jagmeet Singh resigned. An election day message from Donald Trump on Truth Social, calling for Canadians to join the US, may also have pushed undecided voters towards Carney, whose entire campaign was founded on the idea that he was the best candidate to protect Canada from Trump.  

Though the opinion polls were not in their favour, the Conservatives did better than expected, and as of Monday night were on track to earn 27 more seats than they previously held. But despite an exceptionally disciplined campaign and a major effort to engage with voters, they didn’t manage to push past the Liberals. In his concession speech, Poilievre spoke well and hearteningly to his supporters, reminding them that ‘change takes time’ and congratulating them on a hard-fought campaign.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

Carney’s victory speech, on the other hand, had a strange air of unreality about it. A rather uncomfortable-looking group of supporters was arrayed behind him, like a backdrop of sample citizens, as he gazed intently into the camera and preached, in the swelling tones of the televangelist, on big, soulful topics like humility and ambition and unity and sacrifice.

Once the speech got down to meat and potatoes, it was just what you’d expect from the High Priest of Project Fear. Lest any of his voters fall into the error of thinking the Liberals will bring better days, he disillusioned them. Dark days are coming. ‘As I’ve been warning for months,’ he chanted in an earnest crescendo, ‘America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country.’ President Trump, he insists, is trying to break Canada, so that America can own it.

Watch the setup: there’s an emergency, there’s a crisis, we have to be afraid… And then, comes the kicker: ‘But we also must recognise the reality that our world has fundamentally changed.’ Aaand… there we go. There go the gas cars, the red meat, the cash currency, and the life as we know it. Canada’s world may not have fundamentally changed yet, but with Prophet Carney at the helm, it’s sure going to. 

Canadians can count their blessings in that Carney only got a minority. If Conservatives can enlist the aid of the Bloc Quebecois, some of the worst may be averted. But the Bloc is not known for its Western sympathies, and that’s where the next bout of trouble is coming from. Alberta is sick and tired of Liberal governments that stifle its energy-based economy, while raking in tax money and equalisation payments for their own purposes.

Rumblings of secession have been going on for years, but matters have escalated to new levels of late, especially during the recent tariff war. A fourth straight Liberal term may be all Alberta needs to organise a referendum and threaten to separate – but go where? To become Donald Trump’s cherished 51st state?

It would be a great and terrible tragedy for Canada to break up. And Carney, with his soothing patter and the light of prophecy in his eyes, is, despite all his protestations, the last man to prevent it from happening.

What lessons are there from Canada’s election for Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer? James Heale and Michael Martins join Patrick Gibbons on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:

Mark Carney pulls off exceptional win in Canadian election

Results are still flooding in from Canada – but Mark Carney looks to have done the impossible. The Liberal leader will return to office as Prime Minister, after his Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre formally conceded. The key question is whether Carney will win a majority of 172 seats of Canada’s 343 electoral districts in the new House of Commons. National broadcaster CBC projects the Liberals to win 163 seats, with the Tories on 149 and the Bloc Quebecois on 23.

What Carney has pulled off is nothing short of exceptional. The former Bank of England governor entered the race to replace Justin Trudeau in mid-January, when the Liberals were languishing 25 points behind the Conservatives. After winning the Liberal leadership race in March, he became prime minister and thereafter made a whistle-stop tour of Europe. A quick snap election was called, with the Liberals running a six-week presidential campaign on Carney's character.

Of course, there is one person who he needs to thank in all of this: Donald Trump. The US President has served as Carney's unofficial running mate and bogeyman these past three months. His administration's boorish behaviour towards Canada in recent months – including endless threats of tariffs and talk of making it the '51st state' – unleashed a tidal wave of patriotism on which the Liberals capitalised to win a fourth term since 2015. In a single-issue election, their message of 'Strong' resonated much more than the Tory call for 'Change.'

The Conservatives sought to tie Carney to Trudeau, citing his past advice on economic and climate matters. But the ex-central banker positioned himself perfectly for this election. He ran on his experience and his establishment credentials, while avoiding any taint of incumbency by dint of having never sat in parliament before. He ruthlessly ditched Trudeau's unpopular carbon tax and capital gains policies, shifting the centre-left Liberals back to the 'centre' rather than the 'left.'

For Pierre Poilievre, what does the future hold now? His ally Jason Kenney has already told broadcasters that if he wants to stay as leader, then Poilievre will have overwhelming support from the party to do so. He can certainly cite key achievements in this election: more than 30 seats gained, an expanded base and the party's greatest showing in the popular vote for 40 years. Perhaps, if Carney does secure a minority, it could be a case of 'one more heave' and staying on, like Stephen Harper did in 2004, to win two years later. But that first depends on Poilievre retaining his home seat of Carleton in Ottawa, where a recount is ongoing after a tough re-election bid.

Even if Poilievre wins, the result will be devastating to his supporters across the globe. The Tory leader has plenty of fans in the UK, including both his British counterpart Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. A full post-mortem will come in the next few months, with recriminations likely to focus on whether the Conservatives were quick enough to change tack after the Liberals dumped Trudeau. Some, like Ontario's Doug Ford, think Poilievre should have taken a stronger stand against Trump. Others will ask about the state of preparedness of the Tory campaign machine.

Carney must now steel himself for the task ahead. Speaking to supporters at a victory rally this morning, he asked, 'I have a question, who's ready to stand up for Canada with me?' he said, to cheers. Plotting the path to deliver that, in the face of a hostile White House, will challenge the veteran banker's skills to their limit.

How Liberation Day rocked Switzerland

When President Donald Trump gathered the world’s media to the White House Rose Garden to unveil America’s “Liberation Day,” Swiss viewers were cautious but optimistic. 

Administration insiders had assured us that we had nothing to fear. During Trump’s first term in office, Switzerland had been the port in the storm of European opinion. As outsiders to the European Union, we were able to forge our own relationship with the American superpower. Our small alpine nation, with its population of 9 million, rose from the eighth largest foreign direct investor in the United States to the sixth. Swiss companies, like Nestle, Stadler and Novartis, ramped up their American operations, generating profits and jobs for both countries. Rolex is currently building a $5 billion headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City, two blocks from Trump Tower.

But when Trump brandished his made-for-television tariff chart, three weeks ago, like Moses wielding the Ten Commandments, we were horrified. 

Switzerland had been placed alongside China on Trump’s “list of sinners,” and was getting pummeled with a 31 percent tax. The European Union, which had been font of contempt for MAGA, was only receiving a relatively gentle nudge of 20 percent, and the United Kingdom, led by Labour, a light tap at 10 percent.

How was this possible? Longtime Trump confidants with deep knowledge of Switzerland were equally bewildered.

It soon became clear that Switzerland had fallen victim to fuzzy math. In calculating each country’s the tariff rate, only trade in goods were considered. Not included were services. In the case of Switzerland, our trade position was completely miscalculated. In 2024, the US generated a surplus in services of $21.3 billion. Last year, Switzerland abolished tariffs on imports of US industrial goods.

There was little doubt who was behind all this: Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary; and Peter Navarro, the President’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. 

One person familiar with the matter is unsparing. Lutnick and Navarro “are the worst offenders,” this well-placed source tells me. “They are buffoons. The chart that they put together is completely inaccurate.” I’m told that they’ve even acquired nicknames among fed-up West Wing staff: “Howard Nutlick,” “because he spends so much time kissing the ass of the President”; and “Peter Retardo,” “because who the hell could put a chart like that together and put the President on a podium with it?”

A second source close to Trump concurs. “The President entrusts his advisors to do their freaking homework. These two idiots are ham-handed activists just trying to make a provocative chart that was literally an embarrassment.”

For Switzerland, the damage is done. The largely liberal Swiss press, long on the warpath against the Republican leader, has gone nuclear. 

The political left is attacking the American President as if he was a war criminal. After the fallout with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the president of the Swiss Social Democratic Party, Cédric Wermuth, posted on X, “Fuck you, Mr. President.” Now, he is calling on Switzerland to turn its back on Trump’s America. 

The Swiss government, however, is resisting Trump Derangement Syndrome. It has remained calm and focused on the matter in hand. Switzerland’s reaction is “a textbook example of how two countries who are civilized and work together find a way to address issues,” says a MAGA-world insider.

Thanks to its excellent relations and loyal friends in the President’s circle, Switzerland was one of the first countries to establish a direct line to Trump.

Over the course of a 25-minute phone call, the US President spoke with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter. The Swiss leader was able to persuade Trump to relent. A few hours after their call, Trump announced a 90-day “pause” on his global trade war trade, with the exception of China. Keller-Sutter was the “icebreaker.”

Meanwhile, Lutnick and Navarro are on thin ice. I am told that they are “substantially challenged in their credibility. Nobody believes they have the intellectual acuity to carry out the job. Everyone is looking to Scott Bessent and Jamieson Greer [Trump’s secretary of the treasury and trade representative, respectively], and the adults in the room to do the right thing.”

Are the two indeed on the way out? Or are we rather witnessing a Shakespearian plot? 

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” – with Lutnick and Navarro meant to play villains to soften up the governments with the tariff hammer. And with Bessent who can then step in as the gentle hero to coax the battered targets to accept greater concessions.

Last week Swiss officials met with Bessent in Washington for talks at the highest level. I am told that they were offering a “super deal” with new investments by Swiss firms in the value of up to $300 billion. In return Switzerland rose up to one of Trump’s favorite countries with which he wants to work out a trade agreement quickly. 

It looks like the seemingly chaotic tariff shock treatment is paying off. 

How Ian Hislop failed the gender test

Ian Hislop has found someone to blame for Have I Got News For You‘s failure to tackle the Supreme Court’s gender ruling: the programme’s editors. After the BBC show ignored the big story of the month on its Easter edition, Hislop launched into a rant on the latest episode – insisting that he had spoken about the subject:

‘A lot of people said Have I Got News For You was pathetic, because last week nobody answered this question (on the gender ruling). It was asked, actually. And I answered it at some length. I gave my views about John Stuart Mill’s clash of different rights and competitive demands on a legal system. And I talked for some time about what I thought was a very rational solution of the two parliamentary acts which the Supreme Court had been asked, and they cut it out.’

So Hislop’s defence is that his answer was cut because it was monumentally boring. You might think that a Supreme Court ruling confirming the obvious fact that the word ‘man’ means ‘man’ and the word woman means ‘woman’ is a ripe subject for a satirist. Not so. It turns out that Hislop, his co-host Paul Merton, and the show’s guests, just couldn’t think of anything funny to say about it.

‘It isn’t easy to do this particular subject, as Keir Starmer has found out,’ stammered an unusually flustered-looking Hislop. His teammate, guest Jo Brand, agreed:

‘I think this is a thing that a lot of people wouldn’t want to say anything (about), because it’s a very, sort of, venomous situation, and I think a lot of people are genuinely a bit frightened…no one really wants to get a death threat…’

Death threats from who exactly, Jo? Rabbits? Presbyterians? The Brighouse and Rastrick brass band? Not, I would strongly suspect, from the women who laboured for years at great personal and professional cost to raise the eye-watering sums of cash needed in order to get the highest court in the land to tell us what we all knew when we were two? The death threats, as anybody on the ‘gender critical’ side of this debate can tell you, flow thick and fast – and always from the other side.

The admission of this fear, at long last, is an interesting first step. You’d think it would spark some reflection on the part of the cultural elite, because under our democratic system we are not supposed to be afraid to speak. But the fact people are scared to talk is a sure sign that something is very wrong in Britain.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

It was fascinating to see all the varieties of awkwardness and denial on HIGNFY during the discussion on gender. Guest Richard Osman fell silent, with downcast eyes and the kind of terrified ‘please, please talk about something else, anything else’ look I’ve seen so many times in the last decade.

But then again, who can blame Osman? None of us should ever have had to deal with the madness of genderism. It caught comedians, and everybody else, unaware about ten years ago. Very quickly it became dangerous to even question it, let alone poke fun at it.

The irony, of course, is that there has been so much to poke fun at. The rise of genderism – and the doctrine that a man is a woman if he says so and everyone has to go along with it – has been the funniest thing that has happened in current affairs in my lifetime. There is so much rich material here for the satirist.

In the days following the court’s judgment, for example, it’s been hilarious to watch political figures – Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Green co-leader Carla Denyer, podcast centrist dad Rory Stewart – squirming and obfuscating, appearing to pretend that they simply don’t understand the ruling of the Court. The interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission following the ruling is written in Ladybird Book, Year 4-level English. Yet these luminaries are apparently totally foxed by it. Or are they just frightened? Either way, it is agonising, but very amusing, to behold. As the lawyer Dennis Kavanagh remarked on X, ‘We are not debating this movement. We are babysitting it.’

Radio 4’s The News Quiz has similarly been brought to a belated admission of terror, turning their fear of the subject into a joke. It’s a start, I suppose. But then, I can remember Alexei Sayle taking much the same approach to fundamentalist Islam in 1989, at the time of the declaration of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie – and look how that turned out.

It’s unfair maybe to focus on the antics on a flagging old show like HIGNFY. The show’s cowardice is merely a symptom of wider institutional failure. But what is plain to see is that the unwillingness to joke about gender is a class issue. Comedians today seem desperate to cling on to upper middle-class fads, however barmy they happen to be.

In a healthy, functioning democracy, satire should play an important part in the political and cultural ecosystem – yet on genderism, it failed, and failed badly. If supposedly satirical shows like HIGNFY had been firm with this rubbish at the start, the gender madness might not, perhaps, have ripped through our institutions in the way that it did. Hislop and Brand are correct about one thing, at least: scared satirists are not funny, they are pathetic.

What’s wrong with national stereotypes?

Saying that national generalisations have fallen out of fashion is an understatement. Stereotypes have become less common and less tolerated. But not all is unblemished improvement, and something of value has been lost. National generalisations – often misnamed racial – now veer close to thought crimes. A pity – national generalisations are a basic tool for making sense of the world, and for understanding how people’s backgrounds shape their values, character and culture. Abusus non tollit usum – that something can be misused does not mean it should not be used.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

As a man with a very limited range of anecdotes and conversational gambits, I frequently repeat myself. Handily, I work as a hospital doctor, supported by an ever-shifting cast of juniors and students. They rotate every four weeks or so; my stories and reflections only every three.

Asking them if I am allowed to make national generalisations is a habit. Partly, simple man that I am, it keeps me entertained, and helps reveal our characters to each other. Partly it establishes an atmosphere where even the most junior members of the team, the students, feel free to disagree with me publicly. A key advantage of hospital medics working in teams is that they can spot each other’s errors, or hone each other’s thinking – but that only works if people are willing to risk speaking up. If my juniors are more able to prevent my mistakes then it is not only the patients who benefit. And not much makes youngsters speak more freely than being riled by outrageous generalisations.

When I bring up national generalisations, some of my team shift awkwardly; others peer at me with a degree of interest, perfectly willing to enjoy the prospect of their boss verbally disembowelling himself. Without fail it is the medical students who tell me outright that such generalisations are not allowed.

‘Every single Sri Lankan doctor I have ever met,’ I usually say – intakes of breath, stony expressions, mounting tension – ‘has been excellent.’ My gambits are predictable, and I am not exaggerating when I say that only the limited nature of my intelligence allows me to keep enjoying them all the same. Faces that were braced relax. The room exhales. Students grin, relieved. The juniors, though, often nod in agreement. Many have also noticed that something about education in Sri Lanka – something about Sri Lankan culture – makes their medical emigrants consistently superb.

Nigerian doctors, I often continue, show a much broader spread of quality. Some are lazy, some downright incompetent, many brilliant. Horror returns to my audience until I conclude that, in this regard, I find Nigerian doctors indistinguishable from British – not only in their spread of quality but also in their professional style. Thereafter the subject shifts, but I think there is some truth to my impression that the juniors feel more free to speak, whether to give me their view of the world or to point out when I am walking confidently towards the wrong patient.

Generalisations are the essence of medicine, which is always about playing the odds. Whether making a diagnosis or deciding on a treatment, decisions about individuals are made by extrapolating from generalities. An interesting business it can be too, but much of the pleasure of being a hospital doctor comes from the chat of the team. They are normally a bright and varied bunch. I want them to query my diagnoses and decisions, as well as to tell me their views of the world. I find their thoughts interesting and their observations helpful.

Culture is a difficult thing to describe – but so is much of what matters most in life. Orwell’s famous attempt to describe English character is a masterclass in national generalisation. Trying to discern the nature of a group of people is the opposite of stereotyping – or at least tries to be. One’s generalisations will always be imprecise and wrong, but not to generalise – to treat generalisations as verboten – is either an effort to avoid thinking or a delusion that thinking is avoidable. The modern truism says we should celebrate our differences, and so we should. But cultures are not clones, and to celebrate everything is to properly admire nothing. Appreciation cannot be indiscriminate.

Nationality has long been a target for humour. Racist jokes abound, which should obviously be avoided, but so do jokes seeming to catch some of the truth of a culture. Often those are the jokes nationalities tell about themselves. ‘I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character,’ Freud said, of the Jews. ‘Oedipus, schmoedipus,’ goes one example; ‘so long as he loves his mother.’ Nine words cannot encompass a culture, but they can evoke its flavour. ‘That’s interesting, let’s come back to that,’ is a British phrase that does a little of the same for ours, assuming you understand that it says one thing and means another.

All generalisations are risky; adding nationality raises the stakes. But the fact national generalisations have gone out of fashion does not mean we have stopped making them – only that we keep them quiet, perhaps even to ourselves. The willingness to speak imperfectly, but in good faith, is better, and when we open our mouths we give others the chance to correct us where we have erred and improve us where we have been foolish.

‘Iron sharpeneth iron,’ runs the proverb; ‘so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.’ Something to it. They had a taste for a risky generalisation, those kings of Judah. No coincidence their words are memorable.

Trump is a Large Hadron Collider

By conventional measures President Trump’s first 100 days back in office have not been a success. He hasn’t (at time of writing) restored peace for Europe’s frontier with Russia or tamed inflation in America’s supermarkets. Instead, he’s given the stock market a shock the likes of which it hasn’t felt in decades and blown up some apartment buildings in Yemen. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken apart entire federal agencies, but the very small-government conservatives and libertarians who might be expected to be enthusiastic about this are instead signaling that they were pretty comfortable with the way Washington was – or at least that they don’t want those ways changed unless they’re done by the most proper possible playbook.

Trump is losing deportation cases not only in the courts but in the court of public opinion. His tariffs have made free trade popular again. In line with all of this, the President’s approval ratings are some of the worst on record. When Trump returned to the White House 100 days ago, even his enemies were in awe of him. His re-election upended politics as all American had known it. What wasn’t possible? Yet now, the golden age seems leaden.

Yet all of that is at the level of perception and feelings, which do matter a great deal in ordinary politics, but may not matter to Trump. He’s lived through worse, including years of lawfare and a few assassination attempts. Trump is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur – his whole life has been spent building, losing, and rebuilding empires, renewing his brand and fortunes after every bankruptcy. His first term as president had its shocks and setbacks, too, yet before Covid struck, Trump appeared to be on his way to re-election in 2020. And after his luck ran out that November, Trump refused to concede defeat, fighting on until January 6 the following year, and then fighting on some more through electoral politics, until he had reconquered the Republican party and taken back the White House. Crushing defeat, in Trump’s eyes, is only a prelude to greater victory.

The usual yardsticks don’t apply. President Trump isn’t trying to run Washington better than other politicians, he’s setting out to remake it. The same can be said for the economy, both America’s and the world’s. Even the fits and starts of his trade policy illustrate not so much Trump’s failure to be consistent by other people’s standards as his application of his own style. An entrepreneur is like a gambler, but one whose wagers can remake an industry. If Trump tries one thing and finds it not to his liking – or not sufficiently so to keep his attention – he’ll soon try something else, and he doesn’t have any doubt the next roll of the dice will win if the last one doesn’t. Failure isn’t the opposite of success, it’s just a step in the process of succeeding. It’s part of the fun.

Another way to think about this is to view Donald Trump as an empiricist. Everyone else sees politics in heavily theoretical terms, as an activity defined by rules of good policy and with clearly defined poles of success and failure. MAGA intellectuals, no less than the liberals they disdain, pride themselves on thinking they know the true relationships between causes and effects, and running the country means simply implementing a well-conceived plan. But Trump treats every fact as something to be discovered anew by being put to the test. Will suddenly imposing massive tariffs on most of the world torpedo America’s own economy? If so, what exactly will that look like? What new opportunities will emerge from the wreckage? Trump is a kind of political Large Hadron Collider – it’s one thing to know what the theory says about the behavior of elementary particles, it’s another to find out what actually happens when you smash things into one another at a serious fraction of the speed of light. The difference is that elementary particles are much more predictable than human beings and the social world they create.

So in his first 100 days, Trump has brought about change – indeed, upheavals – from which he will learn and profit, not by confirming anyone else’s theories but by rearranging the landscape itself: of Washington, of the world trade and financial system, and of international relations. Trump doesn’t know exactly what will happen, but he doesn’t need to. He’ll adapt and evolve himself to thrive, eventually, in any environment. He can do this with confidence because he does know two things about everyone else that they won’t admit to themselves. The first is that the seemingly solid world of Washington institutions and expert knowledge is actually fragile and transient, and however popular polls may say free trade or due process in immigration cases is, popular discontent with the status quo is always waiting to be tapped. The second thing Trump knows without having to rely on any theory is that the theorists and institutionalists – the defenders of the status quo – are especially maladapted to survive in a changing environment. Trump might not win every roll of the dice, but his opponents can’t even enjoy the game, and that sets them up to lose.

At least, that’s what Donald Trump’s experience up to now has shown him. The other side – which means not only Democrats but rule-minded Republicans and indeed many theory-besotted MAGA intellectuals – can’t explain Trump’s long record of success (they all predicted his annihilation many times over), but they remain convinced that they’ll be right this time. In the past 100 days, Trump has finally gone too far, and now he’ll have to behave like a normal president; now at last he’ll have to face constraint. You can’t beat the market, after all, and the market has beaten Trump, forcing him to back off his tariffs. The intractability of the Russia-Ukraine war and the persistence of Houthi harassment of shipping in the Red Sea are brute facts from which Trump can’t escape: they force him to recognize the experts were right all along. And so on – after 100 days of running wild, Trump is discovering just how short his leash really is. Perhaps it was never as short as the old guard in Washington believed, but it has limits that Trump has now reached.

Then again, we’ve heard that before, and it’s never been true. Trump could choose to conduct the rest of his presidency as an experiment in normality. Anything’s possible for him. But that’s one possibility I wouldn’t bet on. If Trump is the man we all know him to be, the next 1,361 days (or more) will be every bit as wild as the past 100 have been. That’s the way Trump likes it, and more often than not, that’s how he thrives.

What Warfare forgets about Iraq

In Alex Garland’s new film Warfare, one detail stakes the film’s claim to be the most honest depiction of combat yet. Not the severed foot left lying on an Iraqi street after a bomb blast, nor a wounded US soldier’s screams as a medic bandages up what is left of his leg. Instead, it is that throughout the film’s 20-minute-long gun battle, only one insurgent is shown being felled by a bullet. In real-life combat, enemy fighters do not obligingly linger centre stage – they lurk behind cover, as hard to get a bead on as possible.

This was particularly true of Iraq, where most of the fighting was against a hit-and-run foe that was forever vanishing around the corner. Yet in Warfare, it is not just the baddies who do not follow the standard Hollywood script. Neither do the heroes – if, indeed, one can call them that. The film is based on the memoirs of Ray Mendoza, who worked as a military adviser on Garland’s previous film, Civil War, and who served with a Navy Seal unit in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Warfare depicts a grim day in November 2006, when Mendoza’s unit are holed up in a house in a Ramadi suburb, only to be besieged by insurgents. But that is literally all we learn about them. There is no backstory, no docu-drama interviews, none of the usual devices to make us root for them. We do not even learn why they are there, or why they are camped out alone in such an unfriendly neighbourhood. Nor is there any account of why this particular city is so ferociously hostile, with the troops’ only chance of escape via a rescue from two Bradley fighting vehicles.

This is similar to Garland’s hands-off approach in Civil War, which likewise offers no explanation as to why one half of America has taken up arms against the other. Doing so allows him to avoid accusations of editorialising – yet in Warfare, I would argue that a little more background might not have gone amiss.

After all, nearly 20 years have now passed since the events depicted in the film, and to many younger viewers, the conflict may seem like just another distant military misadventure like Vietnam. But while the film is billed as just another routine bust-up in the Iraq war, Ramadi was no ordinary city, and late 2006 was no ordinary time. On the contrary, it was the very lowest point in the occupation, when America was close to giving up on Iraq altogether – and Ramadi was one of the reasons why.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

I write as someone who was based in Baghdad as a freelance journalist from 2003-2005, the first two years after Saddam Hussein’s fall. By the time I left, all but a few neighbourhoods of the Iraqi capital were overrun by insurgents – Iran-backed militias in the Shia neighbourhoods, al-Qaeda-backed militias in the Sunni ones. But the real ground zero of anti-US resistance lay an hour’s drive west, in the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.

At first glance, they are just two drab satellite towns, Iraq’s answer to Slough and Reading, squatting off the main motorway to Jordan. But they were home to tough, conservative Sunni tribesmen, who had troubled successive rulers of Iraq, from Ottoman and British colonialists through to Saddam Hussein. Rather than fighting them head on, Saddam co-opted them, handing them lucrative jobs as enforcers in his army and security services. When America toppled him, they were disenfranchised overnight, leaving them with little to lose by taking up arms.

Within three months, both cities were hotbeds of rebellion. While US patrols elsewhere still got friendly waves, those in Ramadi and Fallujah got scowls, volleys of stones and, soon, rocket-propelled grenades. A year on, the area was dubbed the ‘Graveyard of the Americans’ – not that casualties got anything so dignified as a burial. When four guards for the US security firm Blackwater were ambushed in Fallujah in March 2004, their burnt, mutilated bodies were strung up on a bridge by a cheering crowd.

That incident – reminiscent of the Black Hawk Down horror in Somalia a decade before – earned Fallujah global notoriety. But while Ramadi never achieved the same infamy, it was just as bad, if not worse. In April 2004, 12 US Marines died during fighting there, one of the biggest single losses of life in the Iraq campaign. By late 2006, when the events in Warfare unfolded, the city was overrun by al-Qaeda, by then the dominant armed group in Sunni areas. Any US forces who fell into their hands could expect torture and a videotaped beheading.

Despite this, US troops would regularly hole up in villas around the city (much of whose population had fled), using them as hideouts for surveillance and sniping. It was not uncommon for such hideouts to get rumbled – as Jim Gilliland, who served as a sniper there,told me in an interview a few years ago. It led to scenes that even the makers of Warfare might have baulked at.

‘There were a couple of occasions when other sniper teams were overrun, and their bodies were tortured and mutilated,’ he said. ‘On one occasion, we had an engagement, and before the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) could extract us, we had about 150 men surrounding our building. Eventually some Bradleys dispersed them, but it was pretty close. It makes you feel the pulse of life a little, shall we say?’

The sheer terror of such sieges is not the only thing Warfare gets right. It also nails the period detail, from the garish, patterned Iraqi blankets on which the snipers rest their rifles, to the Opel saloon car that roams the neighbourhood in suspicious fashion. Opels were long the insurgents’ favoured wheels, offering a combination of speed and affordability (plus an optional gun-turret courtesy of the electronic sunroof).

Yet in the absence of context, many viewers have interpreted the film as simply confirmation of the senselessness of the Iraq war. The closing scene, featuring the insurgents emerging back onto the streets after the fight is over, implies the Americans have a Sisyphean, whack-a-mole task. Why not just pull out? Yet at the time, it was not quite that simple.

By 2006, US troops were not the only ones under fire in Iraq. The country was spiralling into a savage Sunni-Shia civil war, with sectarian death squads murdering thousands every month. With the US body count also spiking, many in America wanted to withdraw and leave the warring sides to it. Instead, President George W. Bush pressed ahead with the ‘troop surge’ the following year, gambling yet more soldiers’ lives on what many already feared was a lost cause. But the groundwork was done the year before, through gruelling counter-insurgency operations in cities like Ramadi.

For the next four years, sectarian violence ebbed in Iraq, allowing the US an orderly pull-out by 2011, rather than the Saigon-style rout that happened in Afghanistan a decade later. True, by 2013, al-Qaeda was back, this time in the form of Islamic State. That was more the fault of Iraq’s new Shia-dominated government, whose sectarian outlook spawned a fresh wave of Sunni extremism. Before then, the counter-insurgency campaigns had at least bought Iraq a few years of relative peace – and showed also that America did not simply abandon messy foreign ventures, even when things got very, very tough. Back then, that was something the world simply took for granted, as it probably still was when Garland started filming Warfare. Should Donald Trump chance to watch it, he might take note.

The frugal luxury of a pod hotel

Right beside the airport I often use to fly home from Italy, there is a pod hotel where I am becoming a regular client. These, as most will know, are dirt-cheap places where sleep is stripped down to its absolute core. For about £35 a night here, you get a tiny berth of a room – a ‘capsule’ about 4ft wide and 6.5ft long – with a narrow bed, a socket to recharge your devices and, if you want to work, a fold-down mini-table for your laptop. It is a bit like you imagine a rather poky Swedish prison cell, decorated with Nordic minimalism: white bed, white walls, fluorescent light, no windows. ‘We make every traveller’s dream come true,’ the leaflet says. ‘Finding a microcosm where, even for just an hour, you can sleep peacefully, concentrate on your PC or simply take a shower and change your clothes.’ For those who always fancied walking to their early morning plane but cannot stretch to the airport Hiltons and Holiday Inns, such places come like a gift.

Most popular

Roger Kimball

Ignore the propaganda war

Joshua T. Katz

An appraisal of judicial vulgarity

Jawad Iqbal

Why Pakistan is brokering peace in Iran

Capsule or pod hotels have been around for nearly half a century. The first, I find out, opened in Osaka, Japan, in 1979. The units, about 3ft high, were stacked on top of each other with stepladders and you simply crawled into your hole and forgot the world. Each gave you a bed mat, air-conditioning, and a small chunky television set suspended from the roof (my pod has a tiny wall-mounted flatscreen, but as there is a 24-hour silence rule in place, it is more decorative than practical).

Capsule hotels were popular with men who had missed the last train or were too drunk to face their angry wives. In Japan, you are often expected, on entry, to swap your clothes and shoes for a bathrobe and slippers, making it oddly like visiting a spa (appropriately, some have saunas and communal baths attached). I had imagined the Asian capsules were as soundproofed as an isolation tank, but this is not the case. When one opened in China in 2012, older guests – or fatties – were asked on arrival if they snored, and if so, were relegated to a special noisy section where they could wheeze and groan to their hearts’ content. Far from dulling sound, the wood or fibreglass pods amplify it, turning a rustle into a roar and a sneezing fit into Götterdämmerung. Yet in their home continent, pod hotels have risen to heights of splendour. One rather swanky one – Sleeep in Hong Kong – looks like its been designed by Muji, with pinewood cladding, adjustable airflow and various ‘relaxation soundtracks’, offering ‘15 hours of quality sleep’ for HK$1,000 (about £97).

My Italian pod hotel is more basic. In a dimly lit industrial space just below ground, the terraced capsules look like human filing cabinets, with enormous ventilation pipes – great elephant trunks wrapped in metal foil – snaking into them from the roof. It reminds you of those storage spaces you have occasionally used between house moves in the UK. The walls are thin and the experience tends to be intimate – every scratch, intake of breath and nocturnal emission comes unfiltered from the cubicle next door (and God knows what they learn about you). Near your capsule, there is a passage of tiny, grey-painted shower rooms which no one has finished decorating and probably never will. There is a lot of bare concrete and unpainted plywood about, bringing back memories of student accommodation in the 1990s, before campus halls of residence seemed to get taken over by Trust House Forte. For those who loved youth hostels but know they are now too old to do it, capsule hotels are the perfect compromise: the chance to let certain standards go and rough it a little.

It is not without amenities. There are vending machines which offer the entire panoply of Lays, Kinder and robot-made coffees but inevitably, you end up using the airport next door as your canteen. This is much better news in Italy than it would be in the UK, as Italian airports are rather sensual, theatrical places and generally are not out to steal from you (an espresso costs about £1, and a filled morning croissant no more £2). Wandering over from my capsule, choosing a café called Nonna Vitti’s (Grandma Vicky’s), I see a range of delicious-looking items that would put Heathrow or Gatwick to shame: trays of trofie pasta with pesto and tomato (the white, green and red of the Italian flag), chunky meatballs in ragu, arancini stuffed with cheese or ground pork, roast chickens and grilled peppers, and all for about €15. After the space-age white walls of your capsule – to which your eyes, over hours, get completely accustomed – the airport seems like a riot of colour.

There is a perfume shop offering scented soaps and room sprays all from the Isle of Capri, confectioners selling the gamut of limoncello and gianduja chocolates, and the airport adverts are a feast. Cups of espresso (with their spume of crema) stand out against shots of the sun-drenched Amalfi coast, while some of the ads have an ooh-er-missus naughtiness that would get you cancelled elsewhere. One shows a gorgeous, winsome beauty biting recklessly into a burrata cheese, splattering her chin and cleavage with drops of creamy liquid. ‘Don’t try this at home,’ says the ad slogan, though you do not know whether it is addressed to hungry customers or British ad creatives who want to hang on to their jobs.

Then, as my fellow customers head for the departure gates, I go back to the Zanussi whiteness of my pod a short walk away, to wait in marvellous privacy till check-in. It is becoming a kind of ritual, this stop-off at the capsule hotel, something I now do several times a year. In Japan a while back, during the Great Recession, people were forced to live in such places, paying a monthly rent, and I often wonder if I could do the same. Were it not for my cats – and the fact there is not room to swing a kitten here – I can think of worse fates. All a writer really needs is a place to lay their head, an internet connection, plentiful cheap espresso and – as Virginia Woolf so nearly put it – a capsule of one’s own.

Who cares about globalization?

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” was the culmination of a 30-year insurgency against the global economic system. It was the most fiscally significant event since lockdown. By the fiat of the President, tens of trillions of dollars were on the move; stock markets trembled; and the US-China relationship – the material basis of globalization – seemed at risk of permanently freezing over. 

Yet just under a week later, tariffs were to be displaced in the news cycle by the case of a deported “Maryland man,” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and his possible gang affiliations. Only one of these events would prompt five Democratic lawmakers to drop everything for an urgent trip abroad. 

To its critics, the status quo in America rests on two pillars: globalization, plus a certain mare-eyed reverence for human rights and established institutions. In this respect, the events of this month have been an education: the latter has been revealed to count for everything, and globalization for nothing at all. 

In November 2018, Steve Bannon claimed that populism was about overturning a globalized economic system and the elites who defended it. If that were the case then all he had to do was sit pretty. In a little over a year, those same elites would cheerfully torch this system over Covid. Their reason? The same kinds of overbearing moral strictures that are now invoked in Garcia’s defense. 

A year later, Joe Biden arrived in the White House with a plan to make some select concessions to the Trumpist agenda. Notice what he kept: his predecessor’s leeriness towards China, and the general turn towards protectionism. Notice what he was not willing to compromise on: the southern border, deportations, criminal justice. To someone of Biden’s character, the former was a matter of indifference; but the latter was the very stuff of civil society. In 2025, Washington has treated Donald Trump’s attempt to revise the terms of global trade in a single afternoon as a strange subplot to the main drama: legal trench warfare over whether any state institution can be reformed, and whether any illegal alien can be deported. 

If it ever did, the opposition to populism no longer has anything to do with a defense of free trade and the global division of labor. What’s really being defended is far more pedestrian: the inviolability of the state bureaucracies; the rights of murderers, sex criminals and illegal immigrants; and the semi-clerical status of podunk judges – in other words, “Our Democracy”: an increasingly shabby euphemism for the status quo.

We’ve been taught to see globalization and this sort of human rights proceduralism as two halves of the same whole. But there was never any necessary relationship between the two. That you have to take one with the other would certainly be news to China, or the UAE, or Singapore – stout defenders of globalization, but not of the kind of human rights maximalism with which it’s now so regularly elided. 

There is nothing inherent in NAFTA, or the WTO, or AIPAC that should have led to illegal migrants being stashed in five-star Manhattan hotels at the taxpayer’s expense – migrants who were not even there to provide cheap labor. It was a historic mistake for advocates of the former to allow their own cause to lumped in with the latter. If globalizers and free traders now want to take back the initiative, then their first task is to put some clear blue water between the two. 

If human rights maximalists no longer care about globalization, then what might the converse look like? It’s an underserved market. But consider this: had Joe Biden inverted his concessions to Trumpism, had he sought a rapprochement with China while rigorously enforcing the southern border and locking up criminals, then he’d probably still be in the Oval Office. 

The Trump White House is government by meme

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 “Wanted”-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.”

Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective. MSNBC was quickly on air displaying the posters, running down the row slowly and somberly as though they were visiting the Vietnam memorial, taking great care to blur out the faces of the recently deported. And with that, the mouse had eaten the cheese.

The Trump administration is hardly some immortal, unopposable force. Half the American population would hate the President even if he made free Bitcoin rain down from digital heaven. Even the most Trump-generous polls show that people are worried about the economy and find his tariff policies dangerous and confusing. There are vulnerabilities.

But Trump is decidedly not vulnerable on immigration, where he’s stood fast on his campaign promise to seal the border, remove illegal aliens with dangerous criminal records and mass-deport other illegals as well. Regional judges and human-rights advocates are screaming for him to stop, but he has a full green light from his base. They voted for him to do this, and, in many cases, only this.

The administration is fully aware that it’s operating from a position of strength on the immigration issue. Its opposition, on the other hand, isn’t. You have Democratic representatives flying down to El Salvador, on the taxpayer’s dime, getting snagged in ludicrous photo ops and making ridiculous speeches, while the government rolls out criminal records of people who would have given Pablo Escobar moral pause. It’s like an endless replication of the AOC-crying-at-the-border photo op, but not nearly as stylish.

So when the administration starts off Monday with a Tom Homan “we’ve sealed the border” press conference, accompanied by an outrageous wall of shame, it’s absolutely inviting the media to attach itself to the Flypaper of the Week. If the media intentionally blurs the faces of accused criminals, it may think it’s behaving ethically, but it’s really just falling into the Trump Meme trap. What they consider speaking truth to power is really just a stylized Instagram background for the perpetually gaslit.

At Monday’s major White House presser announcing a full-court administration press against sanctuary cities, border czar Homan stood up against a media fusillade, saying, “There’s a lot of people in this country that don’t like me. I don’t care… People always want to say, why are you so emotional? Because if they wore my shoes for 40 years, they’d understand why I’m emotional…I’ve talked to little girls as young as nine years old that are raped multiple times by the cartel members.”

Whether you agree with the Trump administration’s immigration policies or not, that’s how they’re framing it. So by proxy, if you oppose that framing, then you’re in favor of some of the most horrific crimes imaginable. Therein lies the Meme Bait, and the media cannot resist.