Niall Ferguson: The historian who prescribed the chainsaw for Ayuso and sees Russia smiling at the Process

LondonThe real star of the political conference in tribute to Margaret Thatcher last Monday in the City of London was not the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who acted as keynote speaker, nor the leader of British opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, which closed the event. With speeches lacking much intellectual rigor, which would probably have been better delivered by ChatGPT or a high school student, they caused the same astonishment as Van Morrisson at his concerts: three songs and goodbye. It was the conservative Scottish historian, Niall Ferguson (Glasgow, 1964), who captured the audience's attention once Ayuso had already left the stage. The author of such stimulating texts as controversial, such as The British Empire, The triumph of money and The square and the Tower, He is a professor at the Chair of Europe at Stanford University.

In a conversation with the former Minister of Economy Tory George Osborne, Ferguson asserted that "the situation in the United Kingdom is like that of Javier Milei's Argentina, a broken country." He declared himself a staunch supporter of "Mileism" and the chainsaw. He went so far as to say that the British Isles need to implement it to "reduce the state and its corporate bureaucracy." The private sector, individualism, family, and market freedom are his tenets, in a kind of extreme "ayusism." He is horrified by Trump's tariffs, but there is no doubt that Americans have elected the better of the two candidates vying for the presidency. If Trump does not rectify the economic policies that distance him from Wall Street, he predicts a vote of punishment in the midterm elections.

But Ferguson did not spare praise for the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, whose very tough and anti-European Munich conference, where he came to say that the Old Continent was restricting freedom of expression. Now, he has also recently argued with Vance and Elon Musk on X, for having given credence to Donald Trump's claim that Volodymyr Zelensky "is a dictator"". He chimes in on any aspect of current events, including the Catalan independence movement: "I don't think the Catalans were right to expect support from Brussels. In fact, there was probably more support for their efforts from Moscow than from Brussels," he said in an appearance on the BBC on October 6, 2017. Perhaps some Spanish judges paid too much attention to him. Ayuso too!