Seth Ferris

The dish is back. Justin Trudeau can continue his unspoken campaign to be recognised as the best-looking world leader since Ireland’s Mary Robinson, as he has been re-elected to a third term as Prime Minister of Canada. In many respects this 20th September contest was a non-entity of an election. Trudeau was hoping for a majority, which would mean 170 or more seats, but his…

One of the truisms of modern life is that some aspects of the past are beyond nostalgia. Keynesian economics have gone forever, so has the Soviet Union, even if people still hanker for certain things it provided. So when a major country starts getting nostalgic for things which it should have binned long ago, the rest of the world should start taking notice. When that country…

So they’ve finally woken up! The media who have told us for decades that the Middle East is full of Arabs in striped headscarves riding camels through the desert are beginning to realise that there might be a water crisis in the Middle East! This is the latest revelation from the people who took ten years to discover that if you take everyone’s crops…

Now the story in Afghanistan is shifting away from the actual Taliban takeover, and the Kabul Airport blast, towards the evacuation and fallout. Or rather, it is shifting to the screams of Western governments and NGOs that “We have another flood of refugees coming, Oh No, what can we do?” These are the same Western governments…

Do you know how pigs live in your local government district? You deserve a prize if you do. But if you are in the UK, and you tell anybody how many there are, you can be prosecuted for breaching the Official Secrets Act. The reasoning behind this is that an enemy of the UK could use this information to attack the country, by disrupting…

When the Soviet Union was invented, the one thing its supporters and opponents agreed on was that it was a grand experiment. No such state had ever existed. Indeed it was a feature of Communist states that they tried to cut everyone off from the past – Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge displaced most of the Cambodian population, destroyed their towns and villages and moved them…

As many previous colleagues have discovered, writing about Israel is a thankless task best avoided, especially by a self-hating Jew. Before people even read a given article, they have made up their own minds about Israel and cross-checked their views against others they hold to see if they are ideologically sound…

So what went on with this British warship in Crimea? Nothing, according to London. A great deal, according to those who were there, on both sides of the argument—and for you to be the judge. HMS Defender was sailing from Odessa (the smuggling port which Mikheil Saakashvili was made governor of after being granted instant Ukrainian citizenship by the government…

To the monumental disinterest of the outside world, the people of Northern Ireland woke on June 18th to discover that Edwin Poots, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, had resigned. He had been in the job three weeks. As far as we know, he was not forced out through a vote of no confidence but because he himself understood that the MLAs (members of the Northern…

Who wants to be protected by an army which runs away? Even worse, by one which runs in several different directions before a shot is even fired? Such armies have existed in history. One reason Hungary went Communist was because its army ran away from the Germans in 1943, leaving a void of authority. The US insists on making the Iraq conflict more important…

When the Brexit Referendum (remember that? – it was five years ago, and seems like half a lifetimeDahJTkfw was won by the Leave campaign there was much talk about which other countries might follow the UK’s lead and try and leave the EU. Italy and France, with their successful populist movements, were suggested alongside newer and poorer members such as Slovakia…

The death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, after a long and fulfilling life as consort to Queen Elizabeth II, provoked the usual debates about whether the British monarchy should continue, and what it actually does. Then just when everyone was getting involved in these debates they were given a sharp reminder of why the monarchy continues…