Prior to this year’s Tory conference beginning, delegates were warned by none other than Lord Feldman, the chair of the Conservative Party, to hide their passes when outside the secure zones for fear of physical attack. I didn’t need anyone from the Tories to tell me that walking around Manchester with a CPC pass on […]

Looking ahead to Conservative Party conference, which begins tomorrow, I find it impossible to imagine a situation in which Cameron and his party don’t come through the whole thing with flying colours. Some Tories I know, ground down by years of this sort of stuff being fluffed, are certain that someone will defect to UKIP […]

On Monday morning, I chaired a fringe at Labour conference with Stephen Kinnock and Emran Mian on the panel, talking about the Nordic model and what bits of it could be taken up by the Left and what bits probably could not. It was entitled “Alternatives to Austerity”, so I was hardly pushing some sort […]

The crucial moment of this year’s Labour conference came not via a speech or indeed anything that happened inside of the hall. It occurred in an interview Jeremy Corbyn gave to the BBC yesterday morning. When asked, if he were prime minister would he ever use nuclear weapons, he gave a straight answer: “No”. It […]

Got back from Brighton yesterday, having experienced a Labour conference that wasn’t really all that different to ones I’d experienced in the past (as I wrote yesterday). It felt like a simple continuation of the Ed Miliband years in most respects: a feeling that the Labour Party is getting smaller each year it is out […]

First up: thanks go to Mother Nature for kindly obliging with the weather. Any conference in Brighton (and I’ve been to my share) is lovely if you’re experiencing it in the context of an Indian summer – it’s less pleasant when you’re trying to get back to your hotel room in Hove whilst rain and […]

Imagine an alternative universe in which the following two things happened in May 2010: the Tories ended up after the general election with a tiny parliamentary majority (think the one they have now) and the Lib Dems did much better than they ended up doing (think three figure number of seats, as was confidently predicted […]

Some Labour people have speculated to me that this year’s conference in Brighton could be ugly not just in terms of atmosphere, but could actually become downright violent. I think the association is with the 80’s when Labour conference actually could be physically intimidating (apparently – I’m not that old). I think they’re over-egging the […]

Speculation mounts as to who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party. Most think Osborne has it in the bag; others think (or fear) some outsider, possibly from the right of the party, could snatch it away from the chancellor. However, upon reflection, I think the person most likely to lead them into […]

As a man who has in the recent past compared the current Deputy Leader of the Labour Party to Stalin, you may have been surprised to read that headline. But with the dust settling on Corbyn’s leadership, while elements of what Watson is looking to achieve may not entirely be my cup of tea, I […]