Articles tagged politics:
Election campaigns tend to be scrappy affairs. How could it be anything other as people try to push and shove their policies and values into our consciousness, seek to persuade us to vote for them and fight for political power? At their best, election campaigns can see the bat...
In a bold move on the afternoon of Wednesday 22 May 2024 the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, walked through the front door of Number 10 into Downing Street in the middle of a summer downpour to announce that he had asked the King to dissolve Parliament and that an election for a ...
Written a chapter on the 1900 General Election
“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Vice Admiral David Beatty as his ships exploded around him at the height of the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. We are not yet at the stage where banks are going down like dominoes but there is enough spume f...
The Budget came and went last week almost quietly. This is what the Prime Minister and the Chancellor wanted, indeed needed. It has come to something when a Conservative government’s chief ambition for a budget is not to cause a stock-market crash, but that is what it has come...
In the space of a week predictions about the number of seats the Conservative Party will win at the next General Election have moved from 84 to 69. Such projections at this stage have to be taken with a very considerable degree of caution, but nevertheless should serve to focu...
British politics over the last 13 years has been a rollercoaster of change to accepted wisdom and settled opinion. A coalition government, five successive Conservative prime ministers, Brexit, the collapse of market confidence forcing a change in prime minister and chancellor,...
Over Christmas and the New Year I was writing a chapter on King Edward III for the broadcaster and publisher Iain Dale’s upcoming book on the Kings and Queens of England. Edward had to seize control of the throne from the grasp of his mother and her lover who had led the succe...
Britain now has seven living former prime ministers. Two of them still Members of Parliament. Since Mrs Thatcher took the traditional peerage, none of her successors have become members of the House of Lords. Winston Churchill famously remained in the Commons turning down the ...
Donald Trump attacking the validity of the United States constitution is as grisly as it is inevitable. Trump has never accepted he was voted out of the Presidency and facing the fact that he is unlikely to be re-elected is now resorting to trying to destroy the fundamentals o...