Before I started reading this book, I really, really wanted to like it. I held a desire to say something contrary to so many of the reviews I had read of it; I wanted to absorb the politics of the novel and, even if I disagreed with them, find a better way of understanding Rand’s […]
Could Ed Davey be a secret political genius?
Last August, I wrote a piece entitled “Layla Moran will kill off the Lib Dems. But I still want her to win” in which I described how I thought that if Layla became leader of the Lib Dems, they would ooze into a progressive alliance sort of space and be killed off fairly quickly – […]
My rant about Keir Starmer and the continuing idiocy of Labour’s position on Brexit
Keir Starmer doesn’t talk about Brexit much anymore. He’s desperate to leave the issue behind; for everyone to “move on” and stop talking about a subject that has bizarrely helped further destroy the Labour party while making the Tories electorally invincible. And yet, there are days when he can’t help himself. Yesterday was one of […]
How Boris Johnson reminds me of 70s Elvis Presley
Before we go any further, in relation to the headline: no, it’s not not because they are both middle-aged men who experienced weight problems. Although it’s worth stating again an incredible fact about Boris Johnson: he is the only person I have ever come across that looks fatter in real life than on television. The […]
How Brexit got caught up in the culture war – and helped destroy Labour along the way
On last week’s Question Time on the BBC, there was an exchange between Michelle Dewberry, former Apprentice winner and Brexit party political candidate, and shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy. It is probably the most clear cut example I’ve ever witnessed of where continuity Remain went wrong somewhere around early 2018. Dewberry starts in on Nandy, […]
Why I still find it impossible to embrace Brexit as the “new reality”
There are many things about Andy Burnham I dislike but I have to credit him with one thing: the guy always finds new ways to make me like him even less than I already do. During one of his recent copious interviews in which he is in no way seeking to put himself in the […]
What the next decade of Tory government might look like
I will apologise right off the bat – none of this is going to be positive. Even if you’re a Tory, none of this is going to be positive. The reason for this is that for all of the usual hysterics surrounding the aftermath of May 6th, if anything people haven’t gone far enough in […]
Here are the three main reasons a progressive alliance won’t work
Since Brexit happened, a lot of energy that was focused on halting our exit from the European Union has gone into a new project which can be defined as the “progressive alliance”. The idea is that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens (and in some iterations, the SNP) make a pact for each party […]
Here are the two reasons why Labour lost Hartlepool and a chunk of local England
There are those who will try and spin Labour’s results from last week’s ‘Super Thursday’ elections as not all that bad. ‘Look at all those mayors!’ and ‘It’s early in Keir’s leadership still!’ will abound. But make no mistake – Labour are in the shit. The Hartlepool by-election result on its own was terrible enough, […]
Five British political scandals that ultimately went nowhere
In a week that saw Boris Johnson caught up in multiple political scandals, any one of which would have brought down a political career back in the old days when this stuff still mattered, I am taking the time to remind us all of incidents in British politics that have fizzled out into what is […]