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The Paul Richards colum I am close to deadline for my new book, which you can pre-order from Amazon here. I don't suppose it will sell as well as The Third Man, Peter Mandelson's memoir, and certainly not as well as The Journey by Tony…
Today's Guardian provides an extract from Alastair Campbell's uncut diaries, said to be "frank, open [and] revealing". The extract is set against the backdrop of former Labour leader John Smith's death, and the leadership struggle that…
by Carl Rowlands The leadership election, with competitors currently limping to the start line, is not currently poised to address the existential issues that face the Labour Party. How can we reconcile Labour's historic commitment to…
by Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848 We have had a couple of weeks now to sit back and reflect. We know that it is hard to defend a third term government and the scale of the loss could, in all honesty, have been worse. We know that Gordon Brown…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 As Gordon Brown's former Parliamentary Private Secretary, John Trickett has good insight into where the party leadership has operated well and less well in recent years. In the Guardian yesterday evening…
By Jason McCrossan Today is a difficult day for anyone who has been a member of Labour or, at the very least, shared the same progressive and caring values that those of us on the left unite behind. There are two tragedies. First, on…
By Paul Richards The scores of new Labour MPs arriving in Westminster this week will be getting advice from all manner of sources: some of it well-meaning, some of it malicious. I always remind parliamentarians that most of the House of…
By Matt Wallace After 13 years, our time in office may be coming to an end. With the end of the campaign upon us, a judgment is about to be passed. But if a measure of a man is in how he reacts to adversity, the measure of a party is surely…
By Emma Burnell In 1992 the Labour Party lost an election we had expected to win. This was over half my lifetime ago, and the repercussions are still being felt even now. "New Labour" can be an amorphous phrase, and everyone who uses it…
The Paul Richards column One of the joys of spring-cleaning is the discovery of long-forgotten Labour ephemera. In amongst the back-issues of Marxism Today, Annual Conference reports from the 1950s and Fabian pamphlets I have unearthed a…
By Peter Barnard In 1954, Lonnie Donegan sang "Diggin' my Potatoes" at the National Jazz Festival at the Royal Festival Hall. Take a listen - it's brilliant! The song was subsequently recorded and released (Decca? 1956?) and immediately…
By Keith Moran / @SocialSchism At the end of March 1990, twenty years ago next week, Poll Tax resistance reached its peak, with mass demonstrations and riots in Trafalgar Square. Margaret Thatcher was proving as divisive a figure at the end…
