Nigel Jones

Mexico has been rocked by massive popular protests as the Hispanic world’s largest nation seethes with a fizzing cocktail of grievances ranging from the fate of 130,000 people who have ‘disappeared’ in the country’s drug wars, to discontent over the ‘gentrification’ of Mexico City in a bid to attract tourists. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets of the country’s major cities on Saturday, many carrying portraits of loved ones who have vanished since 2007 when the then President Felipe Calderon launched a "war on drugs" to combat the narcotics cartels who increasingly dominated the nation of 130 million people.

The authoritarian left wing regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized his ruling Socialist party’s paramilitary militia in response to US President Donald Trump sending a task force of warships into Venezuelan waters as part of a US crackdown against alleged cocaine trafficking by the poverty-stricken country.Declaring that “no empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela “ Maduro sent his militia to reinforce the country’s borders with neighboring Colombia, who he has accused of collaborating with America in a pincer movement against his country.

Two terror attacks which hit Colombia on Thursday revealed a scary new level of sophistication among the country’s ever present narco-terrorists – and threatened to return the country to the violence and chaos that many had hoped it had finally escaped.The double terror strikes killed 18 people and involved a car bomb in Colombia’s third most populous city of Cali in which at least six people died, and an earlier drone downing of a police helicopter near the city of Medlllin – long notorious as Colombia’s drugs capital – in which 12 people died.

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of a former Spectator correspondent who took part in and survived more wars than any other English writer in modern history. Yet he is practically forgotten today because he fought all his life for unfashionable conservative causes. Peter Kemp, the son of a judge in the Indian Raj, was born in Bombay on 19 August 1915. Educated at Wellington, and destined for the law like his father, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, the alma mater of the notorious Communist sympathising Soviet spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Bolivia is to be treated to a nail-biting run-off this autumn between two conservatives in the race to be the next president after the spectacular collapse of the socialist movement that has dominated the landlocked state for the past twenty years. A presidential race between two right-wingers is unusual in Latin America whose countries in recent years has been largely run by democratically elected leftists after the fall of the brutal military dictatorships that ruled so many states in the 1970s and 1980s. The second round of Bolivia’s presidential race will be decided on October 19th between the veteran former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, 65, who gained 26 percent of the poll, and his center-right rival Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 57.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has posed a fascinating counter-factual question about our Prime Minister: what if Keir Starmer rather than Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister in World War Two? Huckabee’s characterisation of him as the arch appeaser may be a little harsh, but it does have the ring of truth The undiplomatic taunting of the Prime Minister by President Trump’s chosen envoy in Jerusalem is Huckabee’s response to Starmer’s decision for Britain to recognise a Palestinian state next month, and a reply to his criticism yesterday of Israel’s coming full military occupation of Gaza city, which Starmer says will only lead to more starvation and suffering for the Palestinian people.

One of the strangest German lives in the post-second world war era closed on 27 July 2025 with the death of Horst Mahler at the age of 89. Mahler’s life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics Mahler’s life epitomises the fatal German tendency for much of the 20th century to embrace extremist politics of the far-left and ultra-right, since he converted from being a hunted and jailed leader and lawyer of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to become Germany’s most notorious neo-Nazi, an outspoken anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier – activities for which he also spent time in jail in his old age.

Reform UK topping the opinion polls and winning local council elections has prompted several leading Tories to defect. But now Nigel Farage’s insurgent party is riding so high that it is getting choosy about which Conservatives it will accept into its swelling ranks. If too many Tories join Reform they will begin to look like a convenient vehicle for rats leaving the sinking Tory ship Sources in the party have told the Mail on Sunday that it would spurn any attempt to defect by former Prime Minister Liz Truss or former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, as both are so unpopular that they would ‘damage Reform’s public image’. Reform leader Nigel Farage confirmed that any approach by the two women would cause a heated debate in his party over the wisdom of admitting them.

The death of Norman Tebbit at the great age of 94 marks a real ending of an era. They simply don’t make politicians like Lord Tebbit any more: caustic, high principled, Tebbit was a fighter rather than a quitter. The modern day Conservative party would be a very different outfit if it had a man like Tebbit in charge. His death is a painful reminder of what the party he was once chairman of has lost. Tebbit revelled in the insult bestowed on him by Labour leader Michael Foot as a ‘semi-house trained polecat’ Like Nigel Farage, who in many ways is his political successor, Tebbit was an unashamed right winger. He came from a working-class milieu and had a career as an airline pilot and leader of the pilots’ Trade Union Balpa, before entering politics.

An astonishing email from Oxfam, one of Britain’s oldest and biggest humanitarian charities, dropped into my inbox this week. Dramatically titled (in blood scarlet) ‘Red Lines for Gaza’, it demanded that if I am as outraged by the ‘horrors that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza’ as Oxfam is, and I want to do something about it, I should scrawl a red line across the palm of my hand and send the image to the charity. They will then use it to make a striking design for their campaign on the Gaza issue in the coming days.