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the national culture has moved in a very different direction – because of earlier things the Tories did.

First, Brexit. A Right-wing victory that will benefit the Left in the long-run. Why? Because it taps into collectivist themes of sovereignty, identity and community. Because promises were made to spend more and defend workers from migrant competition. And because the Tories won a landslide off it that included parts of Britain that traditionally vote Labour, compelling Boris to adopt a populist programme for government out of the Disraeli playbook

Then Covid hit. The Tories could have taken a mighty risk and told us to wash our hands and go about our business, but instead they adopted a kind of war communism and ran the country from Whitehall

When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.

A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.

military historian Antony Beevor suggests that it could be as many as 12 million people. Other estimates range higher still

The Whites unleashed their own terror. “We were forbidden to shoot prisoners,” wrote one White soldier. “They were to be killed with a sabre or the bayonet. Ammunition was too precious and had to be kept for combat.” Some captured Reds were burned alive, while Cossacks would whip Reds to death “with metal ramrods, bury them in the ground up to their neck and then cut off the head with their sabre, or castrate them, and hang them on trees in their dozens.

White forces sometimes paused their pursuit of the Reds to carry out pogroms; during the civil war, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Jews were murdered. About such things my beloved uncle Boris did not speak (nor did I, more than 50 years ago, know what to ask him), except to acknowledge, in his memoirs, that in fighting the Communists his fellow Whites “tended not to take prisoners.”

For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers

Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.

Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position. It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance.

Even before the vote on Monday, the condemnation of Mr. Johnson by his Tory colleagues on the privileges committee was striking. Not only was it a stinging rebuke of a popular, if factually challenged, politician, but it was also a clarion call for the restoration of truth as the bedrock principle in a democracy.

“The outcome is much worse than expected,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, who noted that the committee had been expected to recommend at most a 30-day suspension. “Its severity suggests the committee had a broader purpose in their decision: that of reaffirming the fundamental importance of truth in British politics.”

“It’s the first time where he has finally been caught out,” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in the Brussels bureau of The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s and wrote a critical biography of him. “If he hadn’t been caught out today, that would have been pretty much a mortal blow to British democracy.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the progression of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline following Moscow’s actions in eastern Ukraine. The pipeline, which would have increased European reliance on energy from Russia, has been a major source of contention in Europe and the United States for years. Without undergoing the certification or approval process, the pipeline cannot start running. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled the "first tranche" of British sanctions on Russia, condemning Vladimir Putin's Ukraine aggression.

The European Commission proposed sanctions to EU members states and placed a particular emphasis that would mirror sanctions taken in Crimea after the 2014 annexation by Moscow.

We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain.

But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers.

When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards — and punishments.

A Ukrainian skeleton athlete flashed a small sign that read “ No War in Ukraine ” to the cameras as he finished a run at the Beijing Olympics on Friday night.

he gesture came as Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine, stoking fears in the West that Moscow is planning an invasion. Russia insists it has no such designs but doesn’t want Ukraine and other former Soviet countries to be allowed to join the western NATO alliance.

Shortly after the race, the International Olympic Committee said there would be no repercussions for the athlete. There had been a question of whether the body might consider Heraskevych’s act a violation of Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter. That rule, in part, states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”

If you look back at their arrival in London, the first thing you notice is their ruthless efficiency. They knew what houses to buy, what lawyers to hire, what editors to butter up, what fabric to place in their yachts

Who helped them? People like me. The first port of call for anyone wanting to launder their reputation was the magazine where I worked, Tatler.

For two decades now the accepted narrative on the men who simply bought up London is that they were not really that dangerous, not if you were English. If they had worked closely with President Putin, so what? By the time they arrived here, nothing mattered.

After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.

In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”

With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.

Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.

“Nobody knows how or whether this will last,” Mr. Pistorius said of the current war, arguing for a rapid buildup in the size of the German military and a restocking of its arsenal.