The Maggie, Tony and Iain show
Why didn’t the Tories invite Pete Waterman to speak at their conference? The guru behind Kylie Minogue who has become a familiar television face as a judge on ITV’s Pop Idol certainly wouldn’t have...
View ArticleIt’s still the ‘nasty party’
A melancholy anniversary recently passed virtually unnoticed: it is now more than a decade since the Conservative party fell behind in the polls. Never has a major opposition party been so unpopular,...
View ArticleTerminal depression
In all its long history, the parliamentary Tory party has never been so depressed. If a doctor were to observe its current behaviour, he would put the patient on suicide watch. When I spoke to...
View ArticlePower to the people
As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I’ve had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are the...
View ArticleLabour’s heavies make the Sopranos look like the Vienna Boys’ Choir
Watching Labour’s 2005 election campaign unfold, I’m afraid words fail me. The great Democrat governor of New York Mario Cuomo once remarked that ‘we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose’. And...
View ArticleMichael Gove
No job quite prepares you for life as a parliamentary candidate. But I suspect that a period as a monk would equip you pretty well. We are not actually obliged to take vows of poverty, chastity and...
View ArticleAnglo- German attitudes
One of the most dangerous tastes any British politician can admit to is a tendresse for the Teutonic. During the first world war the Liberal cabinet minister Haldane was compelled to resign because of...
View ArticleNot what Europe wants to hear
Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once observed, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Between the demographic disaster and the collapse of Western...
View ArticleWinning the Cold War
John O’Sullivan has done much more with this book than provide three potted biographies; he has laid out a compelling account of how the Cold War was won, furnished us with a manual of political...
View ArticleAn act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS
Seldom can a New Year have dawned so bleakly as 2008 and rarely can a news story have spoken of evil so starkly as the New Year’s Day report from Kenya of children being deliberately burnt alive inside...
View ArticleI admired Tony Blair. I knew Tony Blair. Prime Minister, you are no Tony Blair
There are few feuds as destructive as the squabble over a legacy. In Bleak House, the case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce provides Charles Dickens with one of fiction’s most debilitating contests — a battle...
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We must break down the Berlin Wall in schools
He who controls the past, George Orwell argued, controls the future. Orwell’s warning resonates all the more powerfully as the government considers the erasure of history from the primary curriculum....
View ArticleLet’s set schools free
Our dismal education system means that too often poverty is a life sentence, says Michael Gove. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Schools can be freed from stifling state control I owe Peter...
View ArticleIn defence of Christianity
Jeremy Paxman was on great form last week, reminding us that when it comes to being rude to prime ministers he has no peers. Jeremy’s rudeness is, of course, magnificently bipartisan. However elegant...
View ArticleThe Maggie, Tony and Iain show
Why didn’t the Tories invite Pete Waterman to speak at their conference? The guru behind Kylie Minogue who has become a familiar television face as a judge on ITV’s Pop Idol certainly wouldn’t have...
View ArticleIt’s still the ‘nasty party’
A melancholy anniversary recently passed virtually unnoticed: it is now more than a decade since the Conservative party fell behind in the polls. Never has a major opposition party been so unpopular,...
View ArticleTerminal depression
In all its long history, the parliamentary Tory party has never been so depressed. If a doctor were to observe its current behaviour, he would put the patient on suicide watch. When I spoke to...
View ArticlePower to the people
As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I’ve had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are...
View ArticleLabour’s heavies make the Sopranos look like the Vienna Boys’ Choir
Watching Labour’s 2005 election campaign unfold, I’m afraid words fail me. The great Democrat governor of New York Mario Cuomo once remarked that ‘we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose’. And...
View ArticleDiary
No job quite prepares you for life as a parliamentary candidate. But I suspect that a period as a monk would equip you pretty well. We are not actually obliged to take vows of poverty, chastity and...
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