Washington

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK's new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post three months, yet he’s already had to handle a string of bilateral crises – none his fault. US-UK relations are under intense strain over Iran, Ukraine and now the Falklands. And the Jeffrey Epstein stench still lingers thanks to his predecessor, Peter Mandelson. The King’s visit was meant to gloss over all that unpleasantness. Word went round last week that a grateful Donald Trump would pack King Charles and Camilla off and promptly declare the US-UK trade deal had been finalized. Then, on Tuesday, the first morning of the visit, news broke of a leaked tape.

The evening had started pleasantly enough. The most alarming thing about the party I was attending in the Hilton Hotel where the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner was being held were the $18 martinis. Those, and the woman in the nice black dress screaming “criminals” at the police as they dragged her out the door as I arrived. Protesters had gathered outside. They chanted indiscriminately at guests filing through the entrance, calling for an end to the war in Iran and to free Palestine. I was one floor above the main dinner at a party hosted by ABC, engaged in the kind of self-congratulatory socializing this weekend was designed for, when heavily armed police officers started moving through the room. First one, then several – and they wouldn't explain why.

Today, you can choose to follow your inner adolescent and search for one of the Soros-funded “No Kings” protests cropping up wherever the number of Democrats is high and the collective IQ is low. Alternatively, you can pop down to the draining swamp of Washington, DC and watch the United States Army commemorate its 250th anniversary with a snazzy military parade among patriotically inclined Americans.If you think I have loaded the dice somewhat with charged rhetoric, you’re right. The whole “No Kings” wheeze is just anxious left-wing grandstanding that is as desperate as it is ineffectual. There is no Saint George Floyd around to act as a pretext this time.I have no doubt that those protests will be lavishly covered by the Irrelevant Media Complex.

As British Ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017, and later in counterterrorism roles at the UN, I watched with growing frustration as Washington, despite its early clarity, lost the plot in Yemen – with consequences that are now rippling across the Red Sea and into Israel. In 2014, the international community got it right. UN Security Council Resolution 2140 blamed the right culprits: former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthi leadership. The Houthis, a small sectarian militia allied with Saleh, were trying to hijack Yemen’s democratic transition – and the world recognized that.

The murder last night of two young Israeli embassy staffers, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, on a street in Washington, DC was horrifying, but not surprising. The couple was gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum. A suspect then walked into the building, accepted water from those who thought he was a victim, and began chanting “Free Palestine.” He pulled a red keffiyeh from his pocket and invoked the old rallying cry: “There is only one solution. Intifada revolution.” The man now in custody, Elias Rodriguez, was once associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a hard-left political group whose slogans echo in anti-Israel demonstrations across the country. In the hours before the shooting, the group posted: “End the genocide. Israel out of Gaza now.

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

Sometimes the true power of someone new to politics is that they don't arrive in Washington with any of the preconceived notions about the possible. In a political moment that is decidedly post-norms, that's what made Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville's stance against an array of foes, including many on his own side of the aisle, so impressive. Tuberville came to Washington as a cipher. He was a Republican, certainly, and a conservative endorsed by Donald Trump by dint of the failure of Jeff Sessions's brief tenure as attorney general. But it was convenient to think of him as a former football coach who viewed being one of the hundred members of the United States Senate as a step down from the task of raising up some of the most talented athletes in the nation.

We might have finally discovered something that politicians are worse at than budgeting: regulating emotions. What is in the water in Washington, DC that is causing these adults to constantly melt down in public? First there was President Biden’s now-former chief of staff Ron Klain. The man who has been accused of being the brains behind the Biden operation is moving on from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue… well, maybe. Klain delivered a mawkish farewell address in the White House East Room, with his 80-year-old boss proudly looking on a few feet behind him. To say Ron got choked up would be an understatement. He gushed over the Biden family and the administration’s accomplishments. He even heaped praise on Joe Biden’s parenting skills.

You couldn’t miss him as you strolled down K Street. He wore a fedora and boxy suits, was not afraid to imbibe as he worked, and paced the capital’s most infamous stretch chain-smoking cigarettes. He arrived in Washington in the Nineties as a traveling salesman and would have kept right on traveling were it not for that checkout girl. For three decades, he put the road behind him and went to work erasing any trace of the street from the brogues, Oxfords and, in the final decade of his life, the slip-on monks and bit loafers ubiquitous among the graceless lobbyists of the twenty-first century. K Street may have become too busy to tie shoelaces, but its denizens were never too busy for a happy-hour stop with the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Shine.