In July 2016, Theresa May won the Tory party leadership contest, and thus became the U.K.’s prime minister, for one simple reason. There was no one else. It was less than a month after the Brexit referendum had upended Britain’s political order. The only thing her predecessor, David Cameron, was…
When British Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap general election back in April (the vote will be held this Thursday) the governing Conservatives were seen as a shoo-in. They were roughly 20 points ahead in the polls, May was liked and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—seen as dangerous,…
Special advisers to political leaders need to get out more. Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to sneak what was quickly labeled a "dementia tax" into the Conservative party's general election manifesto (the British general election will be held on June 8) was reportedly heavily influenced by…
Anton Vaino’s appointment in August as Vladimir Putin's new chief of staff intrigued Kremlinologists, Estonians (he is the grandson of one of Soviet Estonia's later quislings), and fans of the weird. Some years ago, Vaino (or someone acting on his behalf) penned a bizarre, densely written article…
It was the mayhem that made Theresa May. Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the EU crushed financial markets and plunged some Remainers into angry, unhinged, and tellingly snobbish mourning: It was, one author explained, "the revenge of the Brownshirts, a dictatorship of the illiterate and the…
I don't know whether Gideon Gono, former governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, is still dreaming big dreams. But if he is, news reports from America must, if only briefly, have offered him hope that his talents would once again be in demand.
Complacency, laziness, or a simple failure to keep up can reduce foreign policy to a habit, unexamined and out of date. The United States traditionally smiled on the idea of tighter European integration. Binding the nations of Western Europe more closely together would bolster them against Soviet…
Voters in the United Kingdom will be choosing — in a referendum to be held by the end of next year, and perhaps as early as June — whether or not to stay in the European Union. Barack Obama wants the U.K. to stay put and is reportedly planning "a big, public reach-out" to persuade Brits to stick…
In The Courage to Act, former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reveals, a little unexpectedly, that he can tell a taut tale well, and in a manner accessible to someone who wouldn’t know a CDO from an Alt-A mortgage. After a likable autobiographical beginning, the book is centered on the Fed's…
"Cameron moved so far to the left," a journalist told me in London, "that he pushed Labour into the sea. Then it reemerged as a monster." That's not really why David Cameron's Conservatives won the May general election, but the vivid description of what happened next illustrates how bleak the…
Not long after Russia's financial crisis, in 1998, I attended a conference on Eastern European stock markets. The keynote speaker was Richard Pipes, veteran historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. His talk included an examination of how property rights had evolved—or, rather, failed to evolve—in…
Tallinn
I first visited Estonia—or more specifically, its capital, Tallinn—in August 1993, two years after the small Baltic state regained its independence after nearly half-a-century of Soviet occupation. Tallinn was in the process of uneasy, edgy transformation. The Soviet past was not yet cleanly past.…
"I don’t think it’s 1940,” the woman in Riga told me in June, referring to the year the Soviets brought their own variety of hell to Latvia. “But then, I wouldn’t have expected 1940 in 1940 either.” And then she laughed, nervously. With Russia’s ambitions spilling across the borders that the…
A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.
In the curious pantomime that is the EU parliament, the French politician Joseph Daul is a star. He’s the president of the European People’s party (the principal center-right bloc in the parliament), an apparatchik with impeccable EU establishment credentials. He has euro-federalist beliefs, a…
For decades, the notebooks of Gareth Jones (1905-35), a brilliant young Welshman murdered in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, were stashed away in his family’s house in South Wales, only to be retrieved by his niece, Siriol Colley, in the early 1990s. By that time, Jones, once a highly promising…
Riga, Latvia
Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form…
David Cameron leaves things late. Leadership by essay crisis, it has been called, a nod to procrastination by generations of students. But his belated response to the mounting political turmoil over Britain’s membership in the EU—a speech proposing an in/out referendum—won’t save him from…
When everything changes, what should be done?
He won more votes than any other candidate in Finland’s 2011 parliamentary election, and the maverick party he leads is a profound embarrassment to the current eurozone regime, but there’s something refreshingly down-to-earth about Timo Soini, the leader of the euroskeptic Perussuomalaiset (PS),…
That the eurozone has been reduced to a financial and economic shambles was predictable. How little that has changed the continent’s politics was not. To be sure, there have been massive protests in Greece and elsewhere, but the widespread disorder feared by many (including me) in the wake of the…
A phony peace is unlikely to end much better than a phony war. When the European Central Bank (ECB) poured a total of $1.3 trillion in cheap three-year funding into the continent’s financial institutions, that’s what it got. Sure, it beat the alternative. Lehman part deux was staved off yet again.…
Purity has no place in a crisis. The 2008 TARP bailout was a clumsy, ugly, and rather shameful creation, but by signaling that Uncle Sam was in the room (with his printing press not far behind), it headed off the final descent into a panic that would have brought the banks, and, with them, the…
Anglophobes or egalitarians still looking for confirmation that the English aristocracy is no longer what it was may find Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor the most satisfying read since whatever it was that Sarah Ferguson last wrote.
There are good days and bad days, but even on the good days the abyss is never too far away. The eurozone’s dangerously original mix of innovation, incoherence, and unaccountability makes it difficult to identify a single event that could finally push it over the edge. But, with confidence already…
A doctor ignored by a smoker won’t celebrate if lung cancer strikes. Britain’s euroskeptics are generally too worried about the consequences of the Eurozone’s thoroughly predictable crisis to submit to the temptations of I told you so. Well, most of them are. The United Kingdom may be outside the…
Billion by billion by billion, showdown by argument by ultimatum, Greece’s latest bailout is being put together by those who run the eurozone. The country’s finances are so bad, and its prospects so poor, that even the new $159 billion rescue package announced on Thursday will (assuming it comes…
The Firm
When America’s flimsier corporate colossi threaten to collapse, they tend to follow a wearyingly familiar script. Quarterly reports “disappoint,” the media begin to stir, and questionable financial dealings come to light. The CEO then emerges from his bunker to announce that all would be well but…
Tatlin’s Tower
It would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh. Wheeled out earlier this month for celebrations to mark his 80th birthday, a rickety Helmut Kohl announced that the fate of the EU’s floundering single currency was a matter of life and death: “European unification is a question of war and peace…
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive--at least if you were Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing. The one-term president of France was awarded the job in 2002 of chairing the convention responsible for designing a constitution for the European Union. He compared his fellow delegates--a…
Riga, Latvia
Lord Berners
France is a famously volatile place. Talk of cake can trigger a revolution. The British are made of more phlegmatic stuff. Pastry alone would never do the trick. What it takes, it turns out, are a tea caddy, jellied eels, vitamin supplements, a sandwich cage (I have no idea), Scotch eggs (don't…
With the economy floundering, Wall Street in disgrace, and American capitalism facing its most serious ideological challenge in one, two, or three generations (you can take your pick), it's a good moment to remember Lenin. While the bearded Bolshevik's grasp of economics was never the best and his…
Sometimes truth just has to speak to powerlessness. Addressing the EU's sham parliament in mid-February, the Czech Republic's refreshingly tactless and refreshingly Thatcherite president, Václav Klaus, raised the awkward topic of what the EU euphemistically refers to as its "democratic deficit" and…
As the worldwide slump deepens so must worries that the economic crisis will spill out onto the streets. In December, France's president Nicolas Sarkozy warned that les évènements of May 1968 could repeat themselves, and not only in the land of the torched auto. That same month IMF chief Dominique…
Campaigning for President