Harry Shukman, Author at The Spectator

Sunday

18 October 2020

What’s on Biden’s mind?

From our US edition

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor, congressman and twice as Delaware senator, so in late 1972, when he was seeking a third term, the race looked sewed up. But as summer turned to fall, his 28-point lead evaporated. Voters started paying attention to Boggs’s rival, a Democrat youngster with fire in his belly and a spring in his step. Anti-Boggs ads said his best days were behind him. According to his fresh-faced opponent, Boggs was a ‘helluva nice guy’ but, after decades in power, he had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’. On election day, Boggs lost by a margin of 3,000 votes. The people of Delaware sent to Washington a 30-year-old thruster named Joe Biden.

Harry Shukman

Don Jr, the Secret Service and me

From our US edition

They say the past is a foreign country where things are done differently. But if I had any choice in the matter, I would invade that country, track down my past self, and smart-bomb his phone before he could text Donald Trump Jr the dumb joke which landed me in a Secret Service interrogation room. It was November 2017 on a slow news day at babe.net, the defunct youth news site where I used to work, when I stumbled upon Don Jr's private cell phone number. It appeared to be listed on a publicly-accessible PDF uploaded to the internet by the Trump Organization. After confirming it was genuine, I did what any puerile young reporter not working the politics beat would do: I tried to prank him. It worked so well that Don Jr reported me to the Secret Service because he was that mad.

Sunday

15 August 2021

Harry Shukman

‘Bit of a pickle’ — meet the British student stuck on vacation in Kabul

From our US edition

If a friend told you he booked a vacation to ‘goof off and soak in the sun’, you would be forgiven for thinking he had opted for a week on the Costa del Sol. Miles Routledge seems to be a bit different. He’d seen news reports stating that, while the Taliban were making inexorable progress through Afghanistan, it would be months before they seized Kabul. So off he went. Late last week, he was strolling through the bazaars like a typical Brit abroad, snapping pictures of exotic dishes and posting updates on Facebook about the inferior quality of Afghan plumbing. It was just two days into his trip, after the Taliban had marched into the capital and flights out of the city had been canceled, that Routledge, 22, wrote on Facebook: ‘I’m stuck in Afghanistan. Bit of a pickle.

Friday

18 December 2020

Harry Shukman

The useful idiots of TikTok

From our US edition

Tyrants have always had useful idiots to whitewash their crimes but few have proven as useful and idiotic as those who support China in their oppression of the Uighurs. The northwestern region of Xinjiang is where China’s Muslim minority is persecuted, and according to Human Rights Watch, this means mass arbitrary detention, torture, forced political indoctrination and surveillance using the collection of biometric data. Religious freedoms are severely curtailed under the guise of counter-terrorism measures, the charity says, with restrictions on facial hair, clothing, religious education and online speech. A bleak investigation this week by the BBC found evidence that China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs to pick cotton for the fashion industry.