Boris johnnson

As the political stage that Boris Johnson stands on continues to shrink and become more unstable, I am reminded of how much his career resembles that of another larger-than-life celebrity. Last month, Arnold Schwarzenegger rolled his large black Yukon SUV over a red Prius in Los Angeles. The former California governor was uninjured, but the other driver suffered serious injuries and was hospitalized. Law enforcement sources told TMZ that "they believe the accident was Arnold's fault." They think Arnold made an illegal left turn at an intersection. There’s no word if he will be charged. The incident got me to thinking how both Boris and Arnold have a history of ignoring rules and creating mayhem around them.

While American and Russian officials are yelling at one another in the UN Security Council chamber, another international actor has found itself at the little kids’ table: Europe. It's possible the phrase “little kids’ table” is too harsh. To be fair, French president Emmanuel Macron is at least in direct communication with Russian president Vladimir Putin and urging his European colleagues to formulate a joint European negotiating position on the Ukraine question. France is also a chief mediator of the Normandy Format, which seeks to resolve the eight-year conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region. But Macron is largely an outlier on his own continent.

Political realignments occur when large groups of voters desert one party for one or more other parties, shattering old coalitions and forming new ones. In America and northern Europe, working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, native and white — have been leaving established left-of-center parties. On their way out, they have met college-educated metropolitan professionals and managers migrating the other way. Center-left parties have exchanged the industrial workers who were once their core constituency for a new upscale clientele. The emerging center-left is supported by the college-credentialed middle classes, native minorities and immigrant diasporas.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Montpellier, France As the new year dawned, it was business as usual in France, with transportation paralyzed, hundreds of cars burning in the suburbs, violent demonstrations in the cities, a whiff of tear gas in the Métro, police beating protesters. Train drivers, air-traffic controllers, nurses, garbage collectors, ballet dancers, opera singers were all on strike — and so, even, were lawyers. If the country is not wholly immobilized, it’s because the French are pretty adaptable and, to be honest, some only pretend to strike. My garbage was picked up in the normal way. Making the French swallow bitter medicine is hard, even in a nation of hypochondriacs.

Will Boris Johnson get the majority he needs to 'get Brexit done'? Or has he followed in the footsteps of Theresa May?

For a president about to face ‘The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History’, Donald Trump sounded thoroughly unperturbed when, as presidents often do when the House votes to impeach, he turned his attention to that essential part of the top job: a long, relaxed and amiable phone interview with Nigel Farage, addressing such matters of central import to the American public as the electoral chances of Jeremy Corbyn. Trump was on comedic top form, bantering about ‘Boris’ and ‘Sleepy Joe’ and ‘Pocahontas’, and explaining to his out-of-town audience that impeachment proceedings weren’t going to proceed anywhere because the Republicans control the Senate.

In 2006, as British Euroskepticism was gathering steam, Boris Johnson published a book called The Dream of Rome, in which he held up the Roman Empire as a successful model of European integration and as a foil to the unlovable European Union. That was a rather peculiar choice. You would hardly have expected the future Brexiteer to yearn for a time when Britain was but a marginal province of a ‘European super-state’, a label that Margaret Thatcher had once applied to the EU, yet which is a much better fit for imperial Rome. But Johnson also failed to realize that it had actually been the end of Roman power that launched Europe’s long, tortuous and unique journey toward modernity — a journey in which the sovereign United Kingdom came to play such an outsized role.