And they’re off: Royal Ascot racegoers put on a patriotic show as iconic horse racing meet gets underway
Coronavirus: The Chinese Communist Party should not be forgiven April 20, 2020 From a complacent pre-virus fairy tale, we are now very much in the midst of a nightmare. But there is a definite intellectual upside to crises, for they clarify reality wonderfully. In this column in January, I baldly and rightly forecasted that the coming year would see the emergence of a Sino-American Cold War as [...]
Coronavirus: Politicians should reclaim their authority from the medics April 13, 2020 “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” –Benjamin Franklin In my latest book, To Dare More Boldly: The Audacious Story of Political Risk, I make a startling but—I hope—entirely defensible claim. The pythia of Delphi, the priestesses that were the mouthpieces for Apollo, the Greek [...]
China is using the coronavirus crisis to its advantage March 30, 2020 It is easy to lose your bearings while in self-isolation. Trust me, as I’m into the fourth week of quarantine here in Milan, I entirely understand. But baseline realities matter even more in a genuine crisis. One such truism was put best by John Stuart Mill: all it takes for evil to triumph in the [...]
Muppets with knives: Donald Trump and Christine Lagarde have turned the coronavirus crisis into an economic disaster March 16, 2020 “It is hard to soar with Eagles when you work with turkeys.” — Sam the American Eagle, Muppet. As everyone remotely connected with business and government knows, there is a great danger in advancing obviously overmatched people not up to the job. Promoting “muppets” (which, with apologies to Kermit the Frog, is the nickname we used [...]
With Bernie Sanders, the Democrats must chart a course between Scylla and Charybdis March 5, 2020 For my sins, I spent most of my early adulthood in some sort of library. Of all the topics I have had the pleasure of really studying, one stands out: Classics. Paradoxically, an understanding of Classics tells you more about how westerners behave and are today than any other discipline. The ancient Greeks seem to [...]
Will France soon find a German dance partner for EU reform? March 2, 2020 Spare a thought for the President of France, the supremely confident Emmanuel Macron, in his uphill attempt to reform a floundering Europe. Following the great recession of 2008, the lion’s share of European leaders failed to fix the economic roof while the sun shone, eschewing the difficulties of structural economic reform in favour of the [...]
The Democrats’ Bernie Sanders problem will lead to the re-election of Donald Trump February 17, 2020 The perpetual problem of the American left is that it wants to feel good, rather than do good. This tendency to suicidal virtue-signalling — damn the consequences — is glaringly apparent in the Democratic party’s full-blown Bernie Sanders problem, made real by his tie for first in Iowa, and his outright victory in last week’s [...]
Boris Johnson’s disastrous Huawei decision is an act of national self-harm February 3, 2020 Powerful US Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas put it best. Letting the state-sponsored Chinese technology firm Huawei build even a portion of Britain’s 5G network — as the Prime Minister nonsensically decided to do last week — is quite a bit like letting the KGB construct the British phone systems in the 1980s. At [...]
In the impeachment saga, Trump Derangement Syndrome is destroying the Democrats January 20, 2020 In politics, as in life, hatred can get in the way. And the base of the Democratic party, even more than its leadership, hates Donald Trump beyond reason. Over the impeachment saga, hatred is killing them. There are, of course, myriad reasons — some of which I share — to despise the President. Trump’s ugly braggadocio, [...]
America and Iran are sleepwalking towards disaster January 9, 2020 I well remember that I kept putting my hands to my head as I read, terror-stricken, Christopher Clark’s provocative The Sleepwalkers, which boldly posited that World War I was not part of anyone’s grand strategic design. Instead, Armageddon came about through a number of countries and statesmen making lesser errors, which compounded somehow produced the [...]
