Nick Macpherson

Jun 16, 2024 | thespectator.com | Monica Porter |Rana Mitter |Nick Macpherson |Marc Oestreich

You can’t miss the vast banner emblazoned on the high-rise building overlooking central Vilnius. It reads: PUTIN, THE HAGUE IS WAITING FOR YOU. Not ones to mince their words, the Lithuanians. And neither are the Latvians or Estonians. In the face of an increasingly menacing Kremlin, the Baltic states — on NATO’s front line against Russian aggression — display an in-your-face bravado, which nevertheless overlays a palpable unease about the future.

Jun 16, 2024 | thespectator.com | Rana Mitter |Nick Macpherson |Marc Oestreich |LifeJeremy Clarke

“There is only one China in the world,” Wang Wenbin, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, declared at a press conference late last month. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.” The previous day, on May 23, Beijing carried out major military exercises around the island under the title “Joint-Sword 2024A.” The Chinese Communist Party said it wanted to practice how to “seize power” in Taiwan, and to “punish” its new leader, Lai Ching-te, and his supporters in the US.

Jun 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Marc Oestreich |Nick Macpherson |Catriona Olding |LifeJeremy Clarke

Over the past weeks, a cadre of young men has spent their days marching across the quad, demanding an end to a justifiable, nay honorable, Israeli war on amoral terrorists. An overlapping segment has donned their rainbow buttons and profile-art propaganda to honor the sexual proclivities of their fellow man. They scream borrowed sentiments in all caps, tapped self-righteously into the iPhones their parents have surely furnished.

Jun 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Catriona Olding |Nick Macpherson |Marc Oestreich |LifeJeremy Clarke

The other week my eldest daughter and I were staying with friends in Richmond for the launch of Jeremy’s third collection of Low Life columns. The night before the anniversary of his death — the day of the launch — I woke at 2 am and unable to sleep was back in the cave holding Jeremy’s hand; machines clicking and beeping as his life ebbed unpeacefully away. He died at 9 am.

Jun 12, 2024 | spectator.com.au | Nick Macpherson

Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, the Failure, the Legacy Policy Press, pp.192, 19.99 Post-war British economic history is littered with failed policy panaceas.