The newly crowned president of Egypt recently took time out of his busy schedule posing in sunglasses to address the nation’s General Assembly. “In the long history that goes back thousands of years, our homeland did not witness democratic transfer of power. Now, for the first time, the President-elect shakes hands with the outgoing President, […]
Archives for June 2014
Actually, Cameron has a point about The European Commission Presidency
I’ll start off by saying that I quite like Jean-Claude Juncker, the former longstanding prime minister of Luxembourg and current candidate to become president of the European Commission. He’s level headed, intelligent and like me, pro-European. But as a pro-European, I have to concede that now is not the time to have someone like Mr […]
The Turner Prize, the Queen’s speech, and football’s main event
Art is a hard thing to define. Technically, anything can be counted as art. Frank Zappa once said it was all about framing. If a guy is standing around drinking carrot juice, that’s not art. But if he announces his act of carrot drinking as a piece of art, and others proceed to buy into […]
It’s all about Margaret: why Thatcher remains an electoral millstone around the Tory neck
The cliché about Margaret Thatcher is that she is like marmite, and that Thatcherism is an intrinsically love it or hate it concept. I’m an odd one out on this one. There are things about Thatcher that I liked, admired even, but a great deal I intensely disliked about her policies and her style of […]
Should the Lib Dems remain in government until May 2015 – or pull out early?
In the wake of the recent Oakeshott inspired madness, an argument lays unresolved, both within the Liberal Democrats and in the wider body politic. Should the party remain in government until the end or retreat early, say six months before the election, in order to let the “differentiation strategy” breathe a little? I’ll examine both […]
Labour and Tories need to wake up to the nightmare that minority government would be
James Graham, the esteemed playwright, wrote a piece of drama that I’m sure everyone who is in any way interested in politics has at least heard of entitled “This House”. It follows the travails of the Labour Party under a razor thin majority in the mid-1970’s. Having said this, I wonder how many Labour and […]