One of Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite aphorisms was, apparently, “I have to be seen to be believed”. Yesterday, after the pomp, circumstances and flummery of her state funeral at Westminster, and later, her final committal at Windsor, her grandson Prince William, the Prince of Wales, tweeted “5.1 billon people watched the queen’s funeral, 63% of [...]
For the least populated area in America, the Mountain West state of Wyoming has received outsize attention across the world in recent days. That’s because it was the site of the landslide defeat in a primary election of US congresswoman Liz Cheney, a three-term US Representative. Cheney is the daughter of a Republican dynasty headed by [...]
Having placed three bets on a Joe Biden presidential win, I was greatly relieved when the US networks called his election last week, even if the votes are still being counted and recounted, and Donald Trump refuses to concede and proclaims he was cheated out of victory. Six bottles of France’s finest bubbles have already [...]
US President Donald Trump’s conniptions and conspiracy theorising over last week’s presidential election defeat recall the “we wuz robbed” ringside shout-outs of late Johannesburg boxing supremo Alan Toweel. They also find a slight echo here in the tactics and strategy of the EFF. The party on these southern shores has unavailingly and with more violence, [...]
In 2014, two years before the last US presidential election, Lord Robin Renwick, former British ambassador to SA and the US, published a book. Time has not smiled kindly on the slim work Ready for Hillary?, and even less so on its subtitle: Portrait of a President in Waiting. Of course, only with “the lordly perspective of retrospective [...]
For the first time in 40 years, on Tuesday night a US presidential debate was televised from Cleveland, Ohio. Since this debate is scheduled for just after the deadline for this column, it is impossible to know if the result of it will move the dial on the outcome of the election on November 3. [...]
Back in the early 1930s, SA, perhaps in echo of those times, had a Hitler-admiring, German-speaking minister of justice. History does not remember kindly, or perhaps at all, the name of Oswald Pirow. Still, in the momentous drama of events in the US following the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last weekend, [...]
At the Republican national convention, the keynote speaker on its first night delivered a thunderous address. He declared: "This election is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical [...]
On the issue of the widening and constriction of our sovereign borders, the propulsive fuel for populists far and wide, the virus is a global crisis, though infection rates and governmental responses differ widely. US President Donald Trump’s cry of “America First” and Boris Johnson’s “take back control” Brexit had winning voter appeal. Writing in [...]
It is both uniquely national, even intensely parochial on any given day, and yet it really matters hugely to the world, even here, beset though we are with our own problems. I refer to the current spectacle of the US presidential election, which still has nearly eight months to go until voting day on November [...]
