Donald trump

Yesterday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Streeting resigns, HS2 stalls and ebola spreads to Uganda

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, found his position challenged after Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary. At the same time Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister, announced that her tax troubles had been resolved after a payment of £40,000 in stamp duty that she owed. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, was given permission by the National Executive Committee of the Labour party to stand for parliament in the Makerfield by-election, brought about by the resignation of its MP Josh Simons. Reform chose as its candidate Robert Kenyon, a self-employed plumber, who had stood in 2024. Mr Streeting caused trouble for Mr Burnham by saying that ‘leaving the European Union was a catastrophic mistake’.

Wednesday

Paul Wood

How the Saudis wriggled out of the Iran conflict

Some of the highest-paid sportsmen in history, the golfers of the LIV league, had bad news recently. Saudi Arabia said it was pulling out of LIV Golf after sinking $5-6 billion into it. The highest-paid golfer was reported to have been on a $600 million contract over four years; others were getting more than $100 million. The men in plaid are, in a sense, victims of Donald Trump’s war with Iran. The LIV announcement is not just sports news. The Saudis were, by their standards, already in financial trouble, and then they had to spend tens of billions on defence and propping up their economy during the 38 days of the war. Crude oil prices have gone up but not enough to compensate, given the difficulties in exporting it.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Golders Green attacked, borrowing costs soar and rat virus hits cruise ship 

Home Two Jewish men aged 76 and 34 were stabbed in Golders Green, north London. Essa Suleiman, 45, a British man born in Somalia, was charged with their attempted murder and, earlier on the same day, that of Ishmail Hussein (whom he had known for about 20 years) in Southwark. The Golders Green attack was declared a terrorist incident. Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, condemned Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, for reposting a message on X accusing the police of ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser’; Mr Polanski apologised.

Roya Nikkhah

Queen Camilla’s unusual phone app 

And so to the White House for a ringside seat at the Trump circus. Another assassination attempt on the President wasn’t going to stop the royal machine. After calls between Buckingham Palace, the West Wing and the secret service while the UK press pack nervously checked their phones mid-flight to Washington, praying for the British Airways wifi to hold, the King and Queen kept calm and carried on with their state visit. It was never in doubt. Despite the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting, there was too much fear behind Whitehall and Palace walls of disappointing the Donald to pull the plug. May I commend BA for its wifi and in-flight entertainment, which features The Royals, a lively podcast on the House of Windsor.

Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t blame Trump for food price hikes and cancelled flights

In the hierarchy of factors that will make consumers curse politicians and company bosses this summer, food price inflation probably ranks higher than holiday flight chaos. But both will contribute to an ugly mood that will manifest everywhere from Question Time audiences and airport voxpops to outbreaks of mass shoplifting. And only the last blip of both irritants can truly be blamed on what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. A thinktank report grabbed headlines on Monday with the claim that UK food prices could be 50 per cent higher by November than they were at the onset of the cost-of-living crisis in 2021. But that’s not a particularly startling figure, given that ONS statistics for the five years to November 2025 already showed a 38.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Starmer avoids ethics inquiry, Birmingham’s bin strikes end and Trump is targeted

Home The House of Commons voted 335 to 223 against a Conservative-led motion to refer Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, to the Privileges Committee over his claims about the vetting of Lord Mandelson; 14 Labour MPs voted for the motion. Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, who had recommended the appointment of Lord Mandelson, told the Foreign Affairs Committee that No. 10 had wanted Lord Mandelson in post ‘quickly’ but that officials were never asked to ‘skip steps’. Sir Philip Barton, the former permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, told the committee he was ‘presented with a decision’ made by the PM and ‘told to get on with it’.

Rod Liddle

When will we admit that the special relationship does not exist?

It was to King Charles’s great credit that he refused to fall for the Trump power handshake thing and instead retracted his own hand so that the orange psychotic was left, for a nanosecond, flailing and unsure of what to do with his right arm. It is always good to call the bluff of a bully, because they usually are bluffing. I would have preferred it if Chaz had executed a swift jujitsu move and thrown the President over his shoulder and onto the ground. But one cannot have everything – and of course the King was there to be emollient and to remind Trump of the things he quite likes about the UK: golf and class distinction, basically. He doesn’t seem to like us for any other reason – which is, in fairness, the mindset of almost every previous US president.

Toby Young

Worried your child is being radicalised? Try this tip 

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right’. It was full of heart-rending tales from metropolitan liberals about how their dim-witted parents had been duped into believing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by following people like Rupert Lowe on social media. One particularly exasperated man suggested a course of therapy for his mother, fearing that she might want to join Reform. But is it really the online radicalisation of elderly parents that’s putting families under pressure in the run-up to the local elections? I suspect it has more to do with their children, particularly their daughters, embracing a toxic strain of identity politics imported from America.

Douglas Murray

My night under fire at the White House correspondents’ dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protestors outside waved signs reading ‘Death to tyrants’ and ‘Death to all of them’. The atmosphere inside was more jovial. Donald Trump was attending the dinner for the first time since becoming President, along with most of his cabinet and senior officials. We were expecting him to give the assembled media a good roasting – and some of us were looking forward to it. Attendees had to show invitations to get into the hotel, but there were few ID checks and no screening as we went to the pre-parties thrown by the major news organisations. Only when we walked into the main dinner hall did we pass through metal detectors.

Wednesday

Jawad Iqbal

Who is really leading Iran?

In declaring an extension to the ceasefire in the Iran war, President Trump signalled clearly enough that he would prefer to strike a peace deal with Tehran. J.D. Vance, the vice-president, has been kicking his heels, waiting to return to the Pakistani capital Islamabad for another go at achieving a breakthrough. The Iranians keep blowing hot and cold on whether they are ready to play their part. Trump suggested in a social media post earlier this week that he believes this is because Iran’s government is ‘seriously fractured’. His ceasefire extension is aimed at allowing the regime time to deliver a new proposal. Trump may want to hammer everything out in Islamabad, but he is not dealing with an ordinary government operating under a straightforward power structure.

iran
Peter Jones

How to become a god: a user’s guide

Even the most Magaddicted Maga supporter might have had doubts about Donald Trump depicted as Jesus healing a sick man with his touch, however thrillingly realistic. The trend in Greco-Roman culture for linking mortals with gods was started by Alexander the Great in Persia. In 334 BC, Alexander took his terrifying Macedonian army into Anatolia (Turkey), where Persian power met Greek, and after nine years had conquered most of their vast empire as far as Pakistan. He knew that there was much more to running an empire than conquering an army: one had to win over the people and that meant winning over their leaders, especially the Persian aristocracy at the heart of the governing elite. So he began wearing Persian regal dress and holding court in Persian style.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

Trump’s goals in Iran have always been clear

The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war. In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: ‘We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?’ Who indeed.

Robert Hardman

Why Donald Trump won’t embarrass the royals

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honours list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on Tuesday is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card).

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Trump attacks the Pope, Trump praises the King and Melania goes public

Home Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the former secretary general of Nato, said: ‘We are under attack. We are not safe... Britain’s national security and safety is in peril.’ The government ran out of time to pass legislation to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius before the end of the current session of parliament. Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, visited Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar. He said in the Guardian that renewable energy would give Britain resilience in an unstable world. The IMF forecast that the Iran war would hit Britain’s economy the hardest, among G7 countries, reducing its estimate for growth this year to 0.8 per cent, from the 1.3 per cent predicted in January.

John Bew

What’s Britain’s place in the post-Iran world order?

Midway through James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character J.J. O’Molloytips his hat to ‘Our watchful friend, the Skibbereen Eagle’, a playful reference to an obscure provincial newspaper in the west of Ireland. Under an ambitious new editor, the Skibbereen Eagle had risen fleetingly to prominence in 1898 for its robust response to Tsar Nicholas II’s attempts to gain a warm-water port for the Russian navy by encroaching on China’s Yellow Sea. As its editorial warned in a chiding tone, the Eagle would ‘keep its eye on the Emperor of Russia and all such despotic enemies – whether at home or abroad – of human progression and man’s natural rights’.

Wednesday

Charles Moore

The only ‘civilisation’ Trump will destroy is his own

If, as Donald Trump had threatened, ‘a whole civilisation’ had died on Tuesday night, the whole civilisation concerned would have been that of the United States, not of Iran. If an American president had deliberately ordered the death of a civilisation – whether or not such a thing is achievable – America’s claim to world leadership would have collapsed. Like, I suspect, many, however, I did not go to bed that night thinking that Trump would carry out his threat. I remember my parents telling me that, during the Cuban missile crisis, people truly believed there might be nuclear conflagration at any moment. It did not feel like that this time.

The Spectator

Trump: the boy who cried war

Did Donald Trump ever intend to obliterate Iranian civilisation?  Some will see the past week as one in which the world pulled back from the brink, when an unhinged US president experienced a rare moment of lucidity at the last crucial minute. Trump’s oscillation is, his defenders argue, the ‘madman theory’ in operation. This was the name given to the approach employed by Richard Nixon in Vietnam, when he tried to persuade the North Vietnamese that he had become so unstable he was capable of just about anything – nuclear annihilation included. Nixon believed his foe would have no option but to come to the negotiating table. Trump has succeeded in convincing many western commentators that he is genuinely on the point of lunacy – heedless of slaughter.

Tuesday

Lisa Haseldine

Russia has its eyes on Svalbard

Svalbard The quiet hillside by Longyearbyen’s church gives visitors to the capital of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago an austere but beautiful panorama of the bay that cradles the town. Tall, sharply steep mountains, blanketed with snow, collide with the blue-grey waters of the Arctic below. From that hillside, I watched the quiet bustle of Longyearbyen. Since Donald Trump threatened Nato with the biggest crisis in the alliance’s history by stating his desire to take control of Greenland in the name of US ‘national security’, Svalbard’s residents have been uneasily looking westward. The US President has repeatedly claimed that only he can prevent the island, which is just 185 miles from Svalbard, being used as a staging post for an attack on the West by Russia or China.

Matthew Parris

Iran’s secret weapon of self-sacrifice

Much has been made of the adjective ‘asymmetric’ when discussing warfare in recent years. The word enjoys a renewed currency now that Israel and America are engaged in combat with enemies who, unable to match them with comparable armed forces, instead disperse, hide and strike at the soft underbelly of their foe. David and his sling, I suppose, when David met Goliath thousands of years ago, was a forerunner of this strategy. But I want to discuss another kind of asymmetry, and another Old Testament hero, Samson. Alone, captive and blinded, Samson reached for a secret weapon unavailable to his captors: the weapon of self-sacrifice. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their forces do not fear death.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

The end of Trumpism is nigh

Having Donald Trump as your 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.