July 21st 2017
I Should've Known We'd Never Get Far
Summer is here and, for Theresa May, it couldn’t have come soon enough. The Prime Minister needs a holiday (three weeks walking in the Alps, since you ask) and so does her party. This...
June 9th 2017
Waterloo
How do you feel that they won the war? Most of the commentariat remains in shell shock. At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender. It was as much a surprise to him as it was to his...
June 2nd 2017
No Expectations
There's just under a week until Britain votes and it is fair to say that the campaign has not gone as Theresa May hoped. When she called a snap election, the Prime Minister was congratulated...
May 30th 2017
Don’t Look Back In Anger
Campaigning has been suspended for much of this week, in honour of those innocents who were massacred in Manchester. As Britain sought to understand what had happened - an impossible task - our politicians reached...
May 19th 2017
What You Want, Baby I Got It
This week, manifesto week, we benefited from a rare public glimpse into the psyches of the two main candidates for Prime Minister and their closest advisers. The manifestos themselves tell you a bit about what...
May 12th 2017
Tangled up in Blue
Politicians often tell their media interrogators that 'the only poll that counts is the one on the day' in order to deflect hypotheticals about likely outcomes. Given the recent track record of polling accuracy, this...
May 5th 2017
Homeward Bound
Theresa May is often described as a ‘cautious’ politician. She weighs her options, we are told, engaging forensically with the evidence before arriving at a decision. That is true up to a point. But, as...
April 28th 2017
What's New Pussy Cat?
The first week of the election campaign closes today, with Parliament prorogued and candidates hastily selected in almost all seats for the main parties. Theresa May used her final PMQs of the season to hammer...
April 18th 2017
The night has reached its end, we can’t pretend
We have written a fair bit, in these notes, about the idea of ‘political gravity’. Of course individuals, leaders, can make the weather now and again. They are not irrelevant. But they are also not...
March 29th 2017
Can’t Buy Me Love
Triggering Article 50 - as the Prime Minister has done today - is a necessary precondition to negotiating anything about Britain's future relationship with the EU. Since the Brexit vote, all the central pillars...
March 13th 2017
Till I can’t take it anymore
In the end, Nicola Sturgeon had to call for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Since the Brexit vote, she had been dancing precariously on the head of a pin. The result had snuck up...
March 10th 2017
We’re caught in a trap
There is a paradox at the heart of this week's budget, and in the popular reaction to it. On the one hand, the landmark changes to National Insurance for self-employed people signal the level of...
February 24th 2017
Night Changes
It's a tribute to the uniquely low electoral expectations that Jeremy Corbyn inspires that calls for his resignation today are muted and unconvincing. It is safe to say that any other major party leader who...
January 18th 2017
Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away
It was Theresa May's overwhelming armada of support in the parliamentary Conservative Party that made her Prime Minister. Had her coalition of MPs not been so broad and so deep she may have found herself...
