The Hated and the Dead

Robert Muldoon served as prime minister of New Zealand from 1975 to 1984. His direct, bullying style of leadership, which he claimed represented “government of the ordinary bloke”, made waves across the world, and is reminiscent of the tactics of modern demagogues like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Muldoon also represented a New Zealand still intertwined with Britain, its former imperial master...

Pablo Iglesias was the Second Deputy Prime Minister of Spain from 2020 until 2021. For the first time, my guest and I take a look at a figure from Europe’s modern left: Iglesias was the leader and co-founder of anti-austerity party Podemos- "we can" in Spanish. Although Podemos and Iglesias did not topple the Socialist Party and sweep to power as Syriza did in Greece, they have entered g...

Francisco Macías Nguema was the 1st President of Equatorial Guinea from 1968 until his execution in 1979. His wooden public appearances, punctuated by rambling and spasmodic outbursts, often explained away as kookiness, were in fact suggestions of something else: that Macías was completely mad.  Suffering from hallucinations and paranoia, Macías’ fear of assassination led him to murder perhaps as...

Rafael Trujillo was Generalissimo of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The violence deployed by his regime was extraordinary, with Trujillo’s men murdering an estimated 30,000 Haitians in a matter of weeks in 1937, not to mention thousands of Dominicans across three decades, in what my guest today describes as the violence of the Trujillo plantation. Trujillo’s stor...

Helmut Kohl served as Chancellor of West Germany between 1982 and 1990, and as Chancellor of Germany between 1990 and 1998. The story of German reunification, which Kohl presided over, is the focus of today's episode. In thirty years, Kohl’s West Germany, divided and incomplete, has become the powerhouse of Europe, rebuilding Eastern Europe after the Fall of Communism and becoming master of t...

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, referred to hereafter as AMLO, has been President of Mexico since 2018. AMLO's redistributive, pro-development populism has proven highly attractive in a country which seems perennially stuck between the rich world and the poor one, with the President promising to instigate the Fourth Great Transformation in Mexican history. How has that gone? Underwhelmingly migh...

20 years on from the Iraq War, we look at Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq from 1979 until 2003.  The 2003 Invasion, and the lead up to it, represents how poorly figures at the top of government can understand their counterparts and the countries they lead. The US did not understand Iraq well at all; but an important second part to that statement that is often glossed over is that Saddam really d...

Andrej Babiš is the Czech Republic's richest man, and served as prime minister from 2017 until 2021. He was also the losing candidate in this year's presidential election, which to some extent ended up being one of those contests known for the person who lost it, rather than who won.  Babiš’s premiership, far from the runaway modernising success he promised, was dominated by scandals foc...

Rupert Murdoch is the most famous media mogul of the last fifty years. Australian by birth but American by citizenship, he owns The Sun, the now defunct News of the World, the New York Post, Twentieth Century Fox and the Wall Street Journal. Amid the rise of social media, the vice-like grip that he once had over celebrity gossip and media through print seems to have diminished. His reputation in t...

Edward VIII reigned as King of the United Kingdom for 325 days in 1936. He is the only British monarch to voluntarily renounce the throne, a decision which eventually led to the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The reason why 1936 was a year of three Kings was Edward’s infatuation with American socialite Wallis Simpson. Among royal observers, Edward VIII has become a shorthand for a monarchy...

There is little about the Western Balkans that its inhabitants agree on. Land, language, religion and belonging are all contested between Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and Albanians, who live beside one another, next to borders they don’t always recognise. One such group is the Kosovo Serbs; a largely Orthodox Christian group who live in Kosovo but identify with and are loyal to Serbia, often putting...

Anwar Sadat was the President of Egypt between 1970 and his assassination in 1981. Sadat changed Egypt utterly during his time in power, recognising Israel and aligning with the US following the anti-colonial rule of Nasser. The about-turns made by Sadat during his 11-year presidency make him one of the post-1945 World’s most controversial figures, and he ultimately paid for his cosying up to Isra...

Charles Haughey served as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland three times between 1979 and 1992.  His career, saddled by accusations of helping the IRA, extraordinary financial irregularities and infidelity would make Donald Trump flush an even darker orange. Like Boris Johnson, Haughey is a demonstration that charm, wit and immense intelligence count for little in politics without strong moral...

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the leader of Pakistan from 1971 until 1977. Zulfikar took power in Pakistan at one of the lowest points in its history; the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, now Bangladesh, had called into question the basic concept on which Pakistan had been founded that the Muslim peoples of South Asia should live in one country.  Bhutto, a Western educated leftist, sought to reinvigo...

Nursultan Nazarbayev served as President of Kazakhstan from 1991 until 2019. He remained a backseat driver until last year, when Kazakhstan’s biggest protests in decades finally put an end to Nazarbayev’s 35-year rule. Nazarbayev oversaw his country’s transition to independence and capitalism, and established strong relations with the United States and China. Temporarily at least, he established s...

Kim Campbell served as prime minister of Canada for just 132 days in 1993, when she led her Progressive Conservative Party to catastrophic defeat in an election; the governing party won just two seats at the 1993 election.  Campbell's premiership bears some superficial resemblances with that of Liz Truss time in charge of the UK, and the British Conservatives seem set for a terrible election...

Thaksin Shinawatra served as prime minister of Thailand from 2001 until 2006. For a while, Thaksin looked to be the future of Thai politics during the final years of the ageing King Rama IX. However, the military, seeing Thaksin as a threat to the future of the monarchy, instigated a coup against Thaksin’s government in September 2006. Whilst Thailand’s civilian government is technically able to g...

Juan Perón served as the President of Argentina between 1946 and 1955, and again for nine months just before his death in 1974. Despite dying nearly half a century ago, he still largely defines Argentine political discourse, and even many policy debates still revolve around whether single policies are sufficiently "peronist". This bizarre state of affairs is made stranger still by Perón&...

In an end-of-year special, I invited back three of my guests from 2022 to discuss new developments in their areas of interest: the COVID protests in China (Aaron Friedberg), the Scholz chancellorship in Germany (Oliver Moody), and the new ceasefire in Ethiopia (Martin Plaut). Out of these discussions emerges a common thread that the World is in a state of real flux heading into the New Year. The p...

Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1953 until 1964. Unexpectedly coming to power after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev inherited a country victorious in World War II and possibly on the road to world domination, but which had also been ripped apart by decades of terror and purges. Khrushchev, in an act of immense political courage, derided Stalinism and...

Zviad Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian nationalist leader who served as his country's first independent President from 1991 until 1992. Under him, Georgia became a hellish place, ripped apart by civil war, organised crime and militia violence. Sadly, Gamsakhurdia cannot be acquitted in all of this as a placeholder- his commitment to an ethnically homogenous Georgia, in a part of the world anything...

Paul Kagame has been President of Rwanda since 2000. He can be blamed more than any other person for the unsatisfactory way in which the 1994 Rwandan Genocide has been remembered, both inside Rwanda and across the World.  Kagame has centralised power around himself, painting himself as the man who stopped the terrible events of 1994 in their tracks, and telling Rwandans that only he can bring stab...

George Orwell is perhaps the most important journalist and writer of political fiction of the twentieth century. Though he only lived to 47, dying of tuberculosis in 1950, he did more in half a century than most would in three of four lifetimes. Reluctantly signing up, and then ceasing to be, an imperial officer in Burma, voluntarily entering destitution in Paris, and fighting for the Republicans...

Leonard Leo is an American legal activist who has done more than any other person to shift the United States Supreme Court to the political right. Pivotal in the selection and confirmation of all six conservative judges currently sitting on the Court, Leo could be seen as ground zero for the Court's recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has jeopardised abortion rights in the US.  The...

Sepp Blatter served President of FIFA, football's international governing body, between 1998 and 2015. To mark the beginning of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, my guest and I take a look at his time in charge of the world's most popular sport.  The irony of the Qatar decision is that Blatter didn’t actually want the World Cup to go there; instead, he lost control of the corruption that had...