The City of London – Britain’s beating heart – is in a state of flux
- 7 Nov 2022
I have worked in the City of London for nearly a quarter of a century and if you walk round the Square Mile on any day of the working week you will find it teeming with life and bustling with activity. Office workers and traders, builders and merchants, stall holders and shop ...
Review: The Yeoman of the Guard at The Coliseum
- 7 Nov 2022
The Yeoman of the Guard, Gilbert & Sullivan, English National Opera, The Coliseum There is nothing better on a cold west winter’s weekend afternoon than going to a matinee. Whether it’s the cinema, theatre or in this case the English National Opera’s new production of G...
Sunak: Seventeen days to save Britain
- 31 Oct 2022
Rishi Sunak has been Prime Minister for six days, not even one full week, and already it seems an eternity. He inherited a political shambles and an economic disaster. Under both his immediate predecessors the government had been careering around like a dodgem car with no-one ...
Will Rishi Sunak want to appoint the Bishops?
- 26 Oct 2022
Rishi Sunak’s arrival in Downing Street as the new Prime Minister brings new hope as well as fresh opportunity. His thinking on who should form his Cabinet and serve in his government has been tightly held information. Indeed the absence of informed speculation is remarkable a...
And the winner is Jeremy Hunt …..
- 24 Oct 2022
“Businesses calls for political stability as outlook worsens” ran a headline in the Financial Times on 21 October, the day after Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister. Two days later, former Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said when asked about the Conservative P...
Business is taking a closer look at Labour and this should worry Conservatives
- 17 Oct 2022
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, has one chance and one chance only to reset government policy and re-establish confidence in the governments economic policy. It is a an enormous responsibility. The Prime Minister and the rest of the Cabinet are merely bystanders ...
The Chancellor must do the honourable thing and resign
- 13 Oct 2022
Politics, it is often said, is a cruel old business. You work hard for years to climb up Disraeli’s greasy pole. You toil away – voting for things you don’t agree with, supporting policies you think are wrong, being friendly to colleagues you can’t stand, being lampooned by jo...
Truss’s ability to win votes in the Commons is about to be tested
- 10 Oct 2022
Forget all the opinion polls, frothy newspaper headlines, hyper-ventilating radio chat, portentous columnising and the general spume of current political debate; there is only one real test of any government’s ability to govern and that is its ability to win votes in the House...
A reflection on the end of the party conference season
- 6 Oct 2022
So there we are. Finally the end of the 2022 conference season. I have been attending party conferences for over thirty years and in that time they have changed dramatically. From annual gatherings of friends and fellow activists, debating the big issues, listening to the grea...
For Keir Starmer and Labour it’s now or never
- 28 Sep 2022
Keir Starmer walked to the podium at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday with a stonking seventeen point polling lead in his back pocket, banks withdrawing new mortgage deals because of a lack of confidence in the government, and a rolling Sterling crisis. Not since 1979 ha...