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I was once writing a column about leadership and those moments when you really have to be tough and probably end up upsetting people. In my head was a phrase I was sure I had heard Denis Healey use on one occasion – that while “sometimes…
Delegates to the Labour Party conference in Brighton were blinking in unseasonably hot late September sunshine yesterday afternoon. But in a way they were blinking at the emerging reality around them too. The mood outside the Grand Hotel…
As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. The parliamentary Labour party can hardly ignore the votes of 59% of those participating in the leadership election. Jeremy Corbyn had a stunning victory. And yet over 90% of Labour MPs did not…
Not long now. Just in time for elevenses on Saturday in fact. The results will be in, and there will be a newly elected leader of the Labour party. And that new leader will be...someone. Having spent most of April and early May wondering…
No, the old Clause IV should not be brought back. Its language is obscure. It does not describe life in the 21st century. Hugh Gaitskell tried to amend it and failed. Harold Wilson didn’t bother (like taking Genesis out of the Bible, he…
So this guy has lost his car keys – dropped them somewhere – and he’s standing under a streetlamp staring down at the gutter when a friend sees him. “Lost something?”, he asks. “Yes,” the first man replies, “it’s my car keys. Think they…
Can a political party attend relationship counselling? Never mind the big tent: how big would the couch have to be? Or is the Labour party now displaying signs of having irreconcilable differences? Is it time to cut the ties, and the…
Have you heard about this thing called YouTube? It really is rather extraordinary. Some stray clicking last night brought me eventually to this clip of Tony Blair from over 20 years ago. At one point in the seven minute profile he says…
We are living, it is said, in the age of Big Data. Analytics are where it is at. In a remake of The Graduate, set today, the secret to a golden future would not be “plastics”, but “data” (or, possibly, “coding”). But we have just had a…
On 12th September 1995, Tony Blair went down to Brighton to address the TUC. Although Labour was by now storming ahead in the polls, facing an already (effectively) defeated and crumbling Conservative government, there was tension in the…
Almost 31 years ago the French President, Francois Mitterrand, and the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, visited the former battlefields of Verdun in north eastern France.It was a moment of deep symbolism: here, where as many as 750,000…
The Sunday newspapers are always looking for something a bit different, and it is tempting for politicians to try and provide it. But in terms of offering a hostage to fortune the headline in the Sunday Times on the 2nd of August 1992…
