Use the filters below to refine your search
It was the gulp wot won it. That gulp you took when you heard or read this: “There is not a cemetery in Europe that does not have Scots, English, Welsh, and Irish lying side-by-side. And when young men were injured in these wars, they…
In Scotland the nationalists have already won. That is not a prediction for Thursday’s referendum. Unless the No vote climbs back to the 60% level on the big day – the score that it reached in opinion polls through the summer – then…
Democracy is a good thing, and self-determination is right. These principles lie at the heart of the Northern Irish peace process. So those of us not taking part in next week’s Scottish referendum should hesitate to criticise the result…
I committed one of those Twitter no-nos last week when the news about Douglas Carswell quitting the Tories to join Ukip broke. Digging up a piece I’d written here on the day of the Cameron EU speech at Bloomberg in January 2013 , I reminded…
Alec Shelbrooke, the Conservative member of parliament for the West Yorkshire seat of Elmet and Rothwell – majority over Labour 4,521 – was on characteristically blunt form yesterday. “I think within a week ‘Who was Lady Warsi?’ will be the…
Do you know what’s going to happen? I don’t, and nor, in truth, does anybody else. That’s why the next nine months are going to be fraught, tense and quite possibly unpleasant. If ever a general election were “too close to call” it is this…
Of course Ed Miliband isn’t really like Wallace from Wallace and Gromit. If he was he’d have been eating a Wensleydale sandwich instead of a bacon one, and none of this fuss would ever have happened. OK, maybe not. The leader of the…
When in doubt, go for a curry. That’s what Ken Clarke did in 1996 when the Daily Mirror got hold of a copy of his budget speech and no-one at the Treasury quite knew what to do about it. As he explained to Andrew Rawnsley in yesterday’s…
Civil servants: they’re really rubbish, aren’t they? Always getting in the way, blocking things, dragging their feet, ignoring the will of the electorate. It’s almost as if they had never spent a moment at a think tank or written a column…
When in doubt, favour the cock-up theory over the conspiracy. People can be clever and well organised, but rarely that clever and well organised. In a busy and occasionally frenetic world it is difficult to pull off grand deceptions in…
I’ve got nothing against buskers – if they are good I usually give them some money – but I don’t think the office of Prime Minister should be filled by one. The job is more important than that. The shambolic implosion of the UK’s position…
We, the inhabitants of the Westminster Bubble, have an announcement. We have decided that the 2015 general election should be cancelled. We don’t need it. We know what should happen. David Cameron should and must be returned to office. That…
