Culture Taki Among the Royals The stupidity and sleaze of the British great and good are breaking into the open. Let’s change the subject from what Bibi wants and what the Donald gets for him, while hoping some interim government in Iran stops the bloodshed. Here’s some old news: With the exception of the frightful weather, the hypocrisy that masquerades for good manners, and their Ancient Roman–style dentistry practices, what I find exasperating about many Brits is their propensity for royal bootlicking. Men and women who otherwise should know better seem to go weak at the knees when some mini-brained royal appears. The British monarchy, needless to say, consists of a dysfunctional and until recently a physically unattractive family, yet down on their knees they go—grown men and women like peasants of yore, Uriah Heaps all, with no shame—as if they’re witnessing the second coming.   Having spent more than 40 years in merrie olde England—and having made many of my truly close friends there—I’ve met most of the royal clan. Hence I speak with some knowledge, but certainly no expertise. The family’s greed is astounding. Charles pockets truly disgusting sums from huge properties covering industrial as well as agricultural lands. The royals own dozens of grand estates paid for by the state. Everything is privately controlled yet paid for with public money.  I became a friend of Diana, had her at home for dinner many times, and attended some of her bashes at KP, (the acronym for Kensington Palace among snobby insiders). Diana was a nice person, in over her head, and treated abominably by her husband. (He trampled on the first commandment of adultery: You treat the betrayed wife with great kindness and respect.) I had the bad luck to meet Princess Margaret, described by her own hubby Tony Snowden as looking like “a Jewish manicurist.” I’d say a bit shorter than the average Jewish manicurist, but then I’m no expert in that particular field. Margaret pulled rank non-stop and was a rude, demanding, bitter and unhappy woman. Her sister the queen was dignified, cold, and kept up appearances to the last. Her husband Philip was humorous, intelligent, and the only respectable male of the bunch.  The now disgraced Andrew I met a couple of times, and he was, well, a pompous bore, uninteresting and full of himself, and without the handle up front you’d probably hand him your stub at the movie entrance. Has the vilification by the media gone too far? Absolutely. Andrew’s excuse, as far as I’m concerned, is his extreme stupidity. Being as dumb as he is, he allowed his greed to go unchecked, with the satanic Epstein and La Maxwell egging him on. The only person I know who is dumber than Andrew is his ex-wife Fergie, whom pious prigs of the gutter press used to praise to the skies, but the once ghastly suck-ups now crucify every chance they get.  Fergie and I met under strange circumstances. A now-dead Chinese tycoon, David Tang, invited me for lunch at Harry’s Bar, back then owned by a friend and the best eatery in London. Upon arrival, I noticed a couple of dukes, some society ladies, and a beaming Tang, who placed me on his right. Everything was hunky-dory until dessert time, when a flushed and apologetic Sarah, still back then Duchess of York, arrived rather flustered. I stood up, thanked Tang and made my excuses to leave.  “But the whole purpose of the lunch was for Sarah to meet you,” spluttered Tang.  “She sure took her time about it,” answered yours truly. At the time I was Atticus on the London Sunday Times, and Fergie had been caught having her toes sucked by John Brian, an American who had already taken me to the cleaners and was “advising” Sarah on her investments. I had lots of fun writing about it. Hence a rather very expensive lunch, paid for by Tang on his way to be knighted for services to broken-down royals.  The meeting was short. I told Fergie that it was nothing personal and I would try and lay off her outrageous behavior, only to justify Tang’s expensive lunch. I kept my word, and she continued to be caught non-stop in dishonest money schemes and embarrassing sexual triangles. The Epstein e-mails, however, seem to have sunk the unsinkable Fergie for good. Snobbery is far stronger in Britain as a behavior altering classification than any drug. Members of Parliament who used to grovel, bow, and scrape now are demanding Andrew’s head. Charles III is leading the mob; he has half a dozen palaces and untold billions all paid for by the state to protect. The whole place stinks, starting from the top. It took a blackmailing American pimp to bring down part of the Windsor mystique, but then Epstein also managed to ruin a naïve-about-women Larry Summers and that fool Bill Gates. I say “fool” because he keeps apologizing. What for? So he got cozy with a couple of mature Russians—so what? Is that now a no-no? (And am I the only one to have written that Epstein was a pimp and a blackmailer before he got caught?) The media that never knows anything until after the fact now paints the pimp’s life as an elitist group’s excesses. This is totally false. There was nothing elitist about Epstein and his crowd, just non-stop sleaze. The girls were underage, naïve, poor, and needy, not pretty, but quite desperate. Epstein’s houses were badly decorated with cheap furniture and very ugly and bad paintings. There was not a single beautiful object, including the females, anywhere near him. Hogarth painted very ugly people in very ugly situations. Epstein’s crowd would have been a perfect setting for good old Hogarth. The post Taki Among the Royals appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage The ‘Colonization’ of Britain Comes for Soccer Comments from a Manchester United owner exposed social fault lines in the immigration-swamped UK. UK Special Coverage Last month, one of Britain’s most successful businessmen, petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, ignited a political storm over immigration. Ratcliffe, one of the owners of Manchester United soccer club as well as the boss of chemicals giant Ineos, complained about the state of the economy in an interview with Sky News. During the interview, he referred to how Britain had been “colonized by immigrants,” the population had boomed because of immigration, and millions of people were out of work.  This provoked an immediate political debate, particularly over his use of the word “colonized.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer demanded Ratcliffe apologize and mounted a defence of immigration and diversity on X. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and the de facto leader of the opposition in Britain, took to the airwaves to defend him, sidelining concerns about his phrasing.  Ratcliffe’s intervention matters—even though he subsequently clarified, but did not recant, his remarks—because it is the latest sign of how figures in British public life are linking high levels of immigration with public discontent and a poor economy. While Ratcliffe has strident political views, he is not a political actor, and his comments served to push the debate around immigration further and caused political pain for the government.  Ratcliffe’s status as co-owner of a soccer club—and one of the world’s most famous, at that—makes his remarks more important. Soccer has been used by the modern British state as the safest form of patriotism, national identity, and unifying culture in a multicultural country which didn’t really want to become multicultural. The state has spent decades trying to rid soccer of right-wing sentiment, heavily policing fans for their political views and statements, not just violence or overt racism on the terraces. The owner of a soccer club criticizing immigration in such frank terms breaks the soccer-as-multiculturalism structure that the British government, the Football Association, and a range of NGOs have tried to cultivate, best summed up by the politically correct management of England under Sir Gareth Southgate, who sadly failed to win any trophies during his tenure.  Ratcliffe’s comments caused such a stir because they reflect decades of public frustration with immigration policy. While the eruption of immigration into Britain since the pandemic has attracted global infamy and political turbulence, mass immigration and multiculturalism long predate the Boriswave of 2021–2023. Indeed, while the Boriswave was the largest single influx of immigration to Britain—over 2 million people in two years—it was arguably a chaotic accident, a consequence of poor economic forecasting of the fiscal benefits of immigration, a university sector desperate for fees from foreign students, and the panicked introduction of a health and care visa designed to plug pandemic-driven labor shortages in the health service. While, of course, the government could have changed course before belated visa restrictions were introduced in 2024, the poor quality of data collection and reporting within the Home Office meant that ministers were flying blind until it was too late to stop the wave from coming. Or so they say.  In some respects, chaotic accidents typify British immigration policy. After the Second World War, migrants from the Caribbean and Britain’s colonies in the Indian subcontinent traveled to Britain looking for work, benefiting from free movement to the motherland as imperial subjects. Britain, as an ancient island nation with an historically stable and homogeneous population, had not legally defined citizenship or implemented much of an immigration policy by this time, as it didn’t really need to. Immigration was limited by the cost and availability of travel, and until the late 1940s, that was a very high bar.  Between the 1940s and 1970s, immigration to Britain came in fits and starts. Usually a group of young men would come seeking work in Britain’s declining industries—steelworks and textile mills in particular—and they would eventually be followed by their dependents. Some areas absorbed many more immigrants than others, and the huge numbers in the West Midlands—one of England’s industrial heartlands—provoked public backlash, culminating in Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech in which he said that by embarking on a policy of mass immigration, Britain was a nation building up its own funeral pyre.  Although Powell’s speech provoked political denunciation, a majority of the public agreed with his sentiments, and the government subsequently legislated to restrict immigration in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. The 1971 Immigration Act implemented strong powers to restrict the awarding of visas, and these powers are still in use today. The 1981 Immigration Act ended birthright citizenship in Britain and established the concept of citizenship that is still in force. Though it is fashionable to say that Powell poisoned the cause of immigration restriction with his speech, in reality the British government responded to Powell by functionally closing the borders, and immigration was very low—often net-negative—in the 1980s. This stands in contrast to the liberalization of immigration policy in the United States at the time, where the borders were opened wide by JFK in 1965 after four decades of deliberately restrictive and selective migration policy.  At the start of the 1990s, the British population was 94 percent white, and the population of London was just under 80 percent white, an indication of how historically homogeneous the country was. Yet there had already been instances of Pakistani grooming gang activity as early as the 1950s. There were also cases of large-scale radicalization of the British Muslim population in the 1980s, such as the Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses affair, and the hounding to retirement of Ray Honeyford, a teacher who warned about growing extremism among Muslims in schools in the Yorkshire city of Bradford. One wonders now about the paths not taken in response to these episodes. After Labour returned to office in 1997, British immigration policy changed. Tony Blair’s government introduced policies deliberately intended to increase immigration. The Primary Purpose Rule—which aimed to restrict sham marriages for immigration purposes—was abolished and this led to a rapid increase in migration, especially, and crucially, from countries like India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Family reunification routes became a huge driver of migration in the 1990s and 2000s.  By 2001, the white British population of London had fallen to under 60 percent, and by 2011 it was under 45 percent. At a national level, the white British population declined to 87.5 percent in 2001 and 80.5 percent in 2011. For much of this period, the largest influxes came from Africa and South Asia, with migrants arriving on a mixture of routes, some as refugees, others as family dependents, and some as skilled workers. Some parts of the country were transformed. In 2016, the BBC ran a documentary called Last Whites of the East End, which explored demographic change in the London Borough of Newham, which had the lowest percentage of white British residents at the time.  The 2000s also saw the arrival of migrants from Eastern Europe en masse, thanks to the accession of countries such as Poland to the European Union. Britain and Sweden were the only EU countries that did not introduce any kind of transitional controls on migration from the so-called A8 countries, eight Eastern European and Baltic states which had been part of the Soviet Union. Government modeling at the time claimed that only 10,000 people would come to the UK. In reality, over 1 million arrived.  While some people look back nostalgically at the arrival of migrants from Eastern Europe fondly, especially compared to the low-skilled, low-paid, culturally distant Boriswave, the unexpected influx of migrants from post-Communist countries caused huge anger and dislocation in the 2000s. Towns and cities in the east of England, in particular, were transformed, with places like Boston in Lincolnshire and Peterborough in Cambridgeshire experiencing huge and unexpected increases in migration.  Recently, many of these migrants have started to return to their home countries, as the economy in Poland has improved, having saved enough money from working in Britain to secure a high standard of living back home. This should come as no surprise to anyone who actually spoke to a Polish builder about his plans over the last 20 years. The east of England was one of the most Brexit-voting parts of the country, with huge support for UKIP in the 2010s and its successor Reform UK today. The defeat of the Conservatives in 2024 and the establishment of Reform UK as the leading party of the British right since then are the crystallisation of years of frustration against immigration by the British public.  Today, Britain is a multicultural country by accident, or at least one against the will of the voting public. The effects of this are spread unevenly around the country, with some areas—especially in the rural west of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—looking and feeling much as they did 30 years ago, while places like Leicester, London, Birmingham, or Luton are an unhappy mixture of being both highly diverse and highly segregated.  Multicultural Britain is not a cohesive or coherent place; it is more like an empire squashed onto an island, with rival groups awkwardly overseen by a state which tries to balance their interests and maintain its legitimacy at once, pleasing no one. Until recently, all the state could offer as a uniting theme was an ersatz vision of sport as the great unifier: the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and a stage-managed England soccer team. Today, democracy appears ever more like a census, with voting taking place on sectarian lines and serving merely to indicate how much our demography has changed since the last election. As Jim Ratcliffe’s comments suggest, not even soccer can paper over the cracks anymore. The post The ‘Colonization’ of Britain Comes for Soccer appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Iran and the ‘Phil Leotardo Doctrine’ Decapitating and moving on is sometimes easier said than done. All successful political movements build coalitions, so in 2008 and 2012, when the Republican Party was still dominated by views associated with regime change and nation-building, the Ron Paul campaign pitched its antiwar message from several angles.  For the bleeding hearts, the Texas congressman and his surrogates could pitch you on the suffering caused by the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the Obama administration’s drone strikes. If you were interested in the strategic aspect, they could pitch 9/11 as blowback for earlier operations, including Clinton administration-era strikes. And lastly, if you were concerned about American debt levels and potential fiscal insolvency, they could take the “blood and treasure” pitch and describe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the ultimate wastes of American resources.  By the 2020 presidential election it was clear which pitch has resonated with Donald Trump’s supporters. His administration had stepped up the pace of bombings even compared to President Barack Obama’s, had ordered strikes in Syria, had threatened a nuclear-armed power in Northeast Asia with complete annihilation, and had eliminated the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with a targeted attack. Yet he still positioned himself as the peace candidate, largely because he had not invested U.S. resources in any more long-term quixotic attempts to remake other countries in America’s image, especially in the Islamic world. This pitch was trotted out again for the 2024 campaign, with quotes about Trump’s unwillingness to commit Americans to foreign wars trotted out by future fixtures of his second-term government, including Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard.  Those quotes have been circulating with a note of irony since this weekend, as Trump 2.0 now seems to have abandoned the idea of non-interventionism for an entirely different approach. The capture of Nicolas Maduro in January 2025 and elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Iran in theory might have sounded like relatively low-cost endeavors to eliminate pesky U.S. adversaries and Chinese/Russian partners from the Western hemisphere and from the Middle East. By eliminating the person at the top, the theory probably went, the U.S. could deal a decisive blow without having to commit to nation building afterward.  Fans of The Sopranos might call it the Phil Leotardo Doctrine, after Tony Soprano’s final antagonist during the show’s run—the boss of the New York crime family who ordered the death of not only Tony, as boss of the New Jersey family, but also his underboss and consigliere. “We decapitate, and we do business with whatever’s left,” Leotardo notoriously declared in the penultimate episode.  In practice, it meant that the U.S. arrested Maduro while leaving his vice president in charge to curse U.S. actions and continue crackdowns on dissent. In Iran, it meant eliminating an 86-year-old ayatollah who was not long for this world to begin with and for whom succession plans appeared to already be in place. It has also meant Iranian retribution against U.S., Israeli, and partner country assets.  Which makes sense: Iran responded only performatively to previous attacks by the US and Israel to avoid a spiral into additional conflict. That approach appears to have invited further such actions, which it is now in Iran’s interests to deter. One thing we can expect is that the IRGC will remain powerful, the next supreme leader will remain a committed foe of the U.S., and Iranian families who lost loved ones will not welcome further American strikes as coming from liberators.  Had this mission gone off without prompting a major retaliation, similar actions would have followed. Trump and his surrogates have already spoken about seizing Greenland and “a friendly takeover” of Cuba. Without resistance, one wonders if they would have again turned their attention to North Korea, thinking (as Douglas MacArthur did in 1950) that decisive action would limit the likelihood of a counterattack. Such tactics might have encouraged similar thinking from China and Russia—the latter of whom attempted a similar decapitation strategy against Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2022.  In 2022 I warned that the emergence of like-minded “right-populist” coalitions in East and South Asia threatened Trump’s America First agenda, as such movements might seek to encourage greater American intervention in their disputes. Looking back, the concern was well-founded, if not the region: Since coming to power in November 2022, Israel’s right-learning cabinet has displayed certain similarities to Trump’s, clashing with the judiciary and the press, seeking decisive action to limit checks on its ability to act, and seeking to limit opposition within its home hemisphere.  But the Iran mission and its fallout shows that having similar inclinations is not the same as having the same interests. The bravado of unprecedented action is not the same as having a strategy.  And disregard for human life in other countries is not America First.  Phil Leotardo’s move to “decapitate” Tony Soprano’s crew illustrates as much: Fans of The Sopranos will recall that when the New York family’s initial mission failed, a protracted conflict inflicted heavy costs on both sides, ultimately resulting in the collapse of Leotardo’s support base and his betrayal.  If Trump wants to save America First and preserve American interests in an era of great-power competition, he needs to not only rethink his strategy, but rethink the members of his coalition who acceded to the “decapitate and move on” strategy.  The post Iran and the ‘Phil Leotardo Doctrine’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

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