Ex–Trump whisperer Hope Hicks spins the Hollywood liberal establishment

By Shawn McCreesh

If you’re young, beautiful, have a power job, money to play with, and a Brentwood Zip Code, Los Angeles can be a lot of fun.

Unless you’ve got Donald Trump’s name on your résumé. The scarlet T burns bright in Hollywood. It’s why Sean Spicer can only get work dressed as a bloated fishing lure on ABC and why Debra Messing got all House Un-American Activities Committee ahead of Trump’s Beverly Hills fundraiser this week, demanding that his donors be outed by name online.

So when Hope Hicks, one of the president’s closest confidants and his former communications director, arrived last year after taking a job as Fox’s chief communications officer, READ ON

Ex–prime minister David Cameron explains how he got it all wrong

By Andrew Billen

Behind a black and shiny door in west London, but one with no number on it, there lives the man with a chequered past as a prime minister of the United Kingdom. Whatever he achieved, he will be remembered for taking the country out of the European Union, in the same way that Anthony Eden is judged on one big failure – Suez.

A week before we meet at this terraced house, I spend ten hours reading Cameron’s hugely anticipated memoir, For the Record. On every page, I hear his good-humoured, pragmatic, occasionally exasperated voice. This afternoon, it is, nevertheless, faintly surprising to see Cameron in the flesh three years on from his evaporation from public life after Britain resisted his arguments and voted out. READ ON

Avigdor Lieberman makes Netanyahu and Trump seem like milquetoasts. He could upend the Israeli elections

By Mark Horowitz

Israel goes to the polls next Tuesday in what’s surely the strangest election in that country’s history. It’s an Israeli version of Groundhog Day, where voters are being asked to replay an election that took place just months ago. The leading candidates are the same. The issues are the same. And the political crisis that got them to this peculiar pass? The same.

A bit of background: Israel doesn’t have a dominant political party anymore, only a shifting menu of lesser ones. After last April’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was unable to muster enough Knesset seats READ ON