DID A New Year ever start with such a bang? Just two days in and US President Donald Trump had executed a near-bloodless coup and the swiftest regime change in more than a century with the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the despotic hard-left President of Venezuela. If you have any doubts as to this being a good thing, read Simon Caldwell’s report here.
Trump acts; he ‘does’. He doesn’t spend his time aspiring, posturing or promising like every other politician. He doesn’t mess about. I have admired him from the start for that quality. I salute him again.
I wasn’t the only one who wished he’d repeat this coup right here and swoop down on Downing Street and arrest Starmer and his cabinet. In our dreams, I’m afraid.
But by golly, he has hit the ground running. He has blindsided quisling conservative MSM commentators, no better than, no different from their left-wing counterparts at the Guardian. Daniel Jupp brilliantly exposed the hypocrisy of those like Andrew Neil here. Though Maduro’s capture is undoubtedly a blow for Russia as well as Beijing, it’s still put Trump’s globalist, left-wing ‘allies’ in Europe into a spin, not knowing whether to condemn or praise.
Diminished economically and politically, totally dependent on the US for security, so why should Trump care what they think? He didn’t have to read Robert Tombs in the Telegraph to know that Britain and France are two nations ruined by the same ‘big state’ ideology: ‘financially and economically tottering, diplomatically subordinate, militarily impotent and governed by the weakest and most unpopular leaders of modern times’.
Likewise over Greenland (which understandably is probably now more important to Trump than Nato), and just days later over his latest brilliant coup – his withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations! Here is the full list.
As one of my regular correspondents put it: ‘So far in 2026, it has been one hammer blow after another to the globalist, rule-based order.’ He’s right.
Trump’s genius is that this isn’t ‘neocon-ery’. This is about US interests. And by logical deduction ours. It confounds the no-borders (except Ukraine’s) globalists of Europe who are neither defending the West nor their nations’ interests.
By the way, I am beginning to think that Marco ‘I don’t care what the UN thinks’ Rubio is the man we need to look to as the next US President, not the Tucker Carlson-compromised JD Vance.
All in all, despite Starmer’s promise (which he won’t be able to keep, I hope) to deploy British troops to Ukraine, a pretty good start to the New Year! Propitious was the word that came to mind as I set out to write this. Cold too. Surely the Met Office won’t be able to say the warmest January on record. Though I am not holding my breath. They and the BBC are capable of any lie.
It’s certainly given me the zip and the zing to get through my dry January – a decision made for me by the state of my head on New Year’s morning. And I will keep to it: 11 days in so far and going well! It was my first New Year’s Eve in years that I didn’t have a quiet evening in and found myself racketing around with my (much younger) family – not quite dancing the Highland Fling but certainly attempting a pas de basque and I think it was the Gay Gordons, but I can’t be sure. No one would have known, that’s for sure, except by the music. At least I didn’t fall over.
Back on the straight and narrow now for the fight ahead with the ever-sober Donald Trump as my example. I also have a new heroine to follow: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the newly appointed adviser to Advance UK’s Board.
This was the highlight of my week. It was at a drinks party Ben Habib held for the College members of Advance UK. Ayaan was a special guest. I had watched her on various occasions, most recently in her interview with Ben (that I reported yesterday). On meeting I found she is as articulate, beautiful and gentle as she is courageous.
We need her so badly. We are facing a two-pronged fight: against the big state described by Tombs that has crushed the economy, free enterprise, created total dependency and destroyed our defence; also against the big state that has allowed a migrant invasion, unfairly stretching the country’s resources, the infiltration and spread of Islamism across our country and into our institutions. This is what Ayaan says in her interview with Ben we so urgently need to wake up to.
And then there are the enemies within the so-called right – subversives like the shocking turncoat Tucker Carlson who now seems intent on destroying Trump, as though he wasn’t already beset by the Democrats’ globalist left.
What’s clear to me is that we can no longer allow Britain’s cultural tradition of toleration to be abused and exploited by virulent Islamism. It is an existential threat, as Ayaan says. This will be the focus of my speech at Advance UK’s first major London event on February 7: how ‘who we are and what we believe’ has been undermined by the creep of state socialism since the Second World War, particularly by the state’s assault on the family over the last 40 years. How this – the fragmentation of family and the concomitant growth of dependency – has made us vulnerable to any attack on our way of life, from the onslaught of Islamism as well as by the institutions that once protected us. You can buy your tickets here. I will update you on other speakers as soon as the information is made public.
The question is, are we up for the fight? The fight to restore a genuine representative (as opposed to client state) democracy to search our hearts about what our culture is and values really are and what we want them to be; then for the fight to assert it, letting Trump and his team know there is a real opposition here, just as there was in Venezuela, that we haven’t all been bowed down by Starmer’s statism. Or are we going to stay asleep and, as David Starkey said to me at the party, close our eyes and ears and doors to it, until we shuffle off?
We won’t be doing that at TCW.
