Rafael Behr

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Rafael Behr

In the playbook of election strategies, there are two canonical campaigns. Incumbents say things are going in the right direction; don’t let the opposition screw it up! Challengers say everything is screwed up already; it’s time for change!There is a less orthodox, third option, innovated by the Conservatives in competition with whichever party Nigel Farage happens to be leading: our opponent is right; don’t vote for him.

3 weeks ago | msn.com | Rafael Behr

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3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Rafael Behr

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”? The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism.

4 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Rafael Behr

Compared with many countries around the world, the US is still a great democracy, but a much lesser one than it was four months ago. The constitution has not been rewritten. Checks and balances have not been dissolved. The difference is a president who ignores those constraints, and the impotence of the institutions that should enforce them. Which is the true US, the one enshrined in law or the one that smirks in contempt of law? If the latter, should Britain welcome its embrace as a kindred nation?

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Rafael Behr

Augusto Pinochet expected London to be a hospitable city when he arrived there in October 1998. The 82-year-old former Chilean dictator had backed Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands war and, while the Conservatives were no longer in power, a former prime minister counted as a friend in high places.British police were not interested in kidnap, murder and torture in South America under a junta that had seized power in a coup in 1973. Besides, a former head of state had diplomatic immunity.