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Thursday April 16 is the date for the most curious event in the rather bizarre (non-)debate process. On that evening Ed Miliband will line up alongside the leaders of Ukip, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens. Neither David Cameron nor…
The long campaign is becoming a medium-sized one, ahead of the start of the short campaign at the end of March. In truth the parties have been electioneering for months. But after Saturday’s speech from Ed Miliband, which launched Labour’s…
Groupthink is dangerous. It can lead to disasters like the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, or embarrassments such as the “non-election” of October 2007. Leadership teams need to test their thinking rigorously, making sure that someone (not…
Nine minus three is six. Six is a smaller number than nine. This matters. Here are some more numbers: 64/20. That is, 64% of those who expressed a view told YouGov on Friday that they supported Labour’s proposal to cut students’ annual…
Judge people by their enemies. Who is most upset at the thought of Ed Miliband becoming prime minister after May 7? A few energy companies, perhaps, not looking forward to having their price structures scrutinised. Train operating…
At a “meet the people” event in a few days’ time Ed Miliband will, quite spontaneously, say this: “Thank you for that question, Mike. Why aren’t we doing better, you ask. Well, I would like us to be doing better, to be further ahead in the…
“If something cannot go on forever it will stop,” said the American economist Herbert Stein. That is a thought worth clinging on to during the next three months. But it’s not just the election campaign that will come to an end. The…
Hubris. Such a good word. Outrageous pride that will lead, almost inevitably, to nemesis – punishment and defeat. I would not normally quote Wikipedia entries but this sentence is a good one: “Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with…
The leader of the Labour Party showed up on Saturday and gave a good speech. It is worth reading in full. The speech was cogent, incisive, and pointed. After a difficult autumn, when questions were asked about Ed Miliband’s leadership, here…
They still won’t happen, probably. I thought so a year ago and I still think so today. But what the Conservatives may have hoped would be a 24 hour story has rumbled into the new week with added momentum. The debate about the debates…
You go bankrupt two ways, a character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises observes: “Gradually and then suddenly.” This seems to describe the last days of City Link, the defunct delivery service, pretty well. It was shocking to see thousands…
If you were young in the 1980s, at school or college, and paying even just a bit of attention, it was clear that something dramatic was happening to the country. It was an angry time, a raucous time. Every Tuesday and Thursday, when…
