‘Mia san mia’ – we are who we are – is the unofficial motto of Germany’s most successful football club, Bayern Munich. It has come to symbolise the Bavarian team’s ability to win through no matter what, a self-congratulatory creed that emphasises the club’s credentials as one of the world’s biggest. While to opponents ‘mia …

It’s hard to imagine now, but when the Queen last stood before parliament, it seemed all too easy to imagine that the Coalition would cast Labour into perpetual opposition; that David Cameron and Nick Clegg had succeeded where Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown had failed, that British politics had been realigned: and that Labour was …

Be honest: you love Rupert Murdoch. You love Sky Sports, the fifth season of Mad Men, the Sky News iPad app, The Times’ Philip Collins, Caitlin Moran on last night’s television and Erica Wagner on next week’s read. You love books from HarperCollins, Manchester United in three dimensions, and the Sunday Times uncovering the unprecedented …

Tony Blair may be the only man to win a parliamentary majority in the United Kingdom for the last two decades and one of just two prime ministers who can unquestionably be called ‘great’, but he was a sub-par party reformer. Samuel Coleridge wrote of George Canning that he ‘flashed such a light around the …

It haunts us still, Banquo’s ghost at Labour’s table, putting us off our supper two decades and four elections after the April morning when John Major defeated Neil Kinnock in one of democratic politics’ most shocking turnarounds. While bored journalists and depressed activists might try and persuade themselves otherwise, the outcome of all but a …

While siren voices from both Labour’s revanchist left and atavistic right might seek to find a ‘message’ in the heavy defeat inflicted by George Galloway last week, his victory was an old, familiar and depressing tale with very little to teach the Left about anything. In 2007, the world experienced the greatest financial crisis since …

Two thoughts sprang immediately to mind when I sat down to write this week’s column. The first was that, if dinner with David Cameron is worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, lunch with me must be worth at least a fiver. The second, more importantly, was that the issue of party funding must surely …

‘History is the lies of the victors,’ asserts Tony Webster, the main character of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. ‘Well,’ sighs his exasperated teacher, ‘as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.’ And so it is with the budget. The lies of the …

It is a truth universally ignored that this is a far better government for the presence of the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives can’t say it, the Liberal Democrats don’t quite believe it, and Labour doesn’t want to. But if there’s one lesson we can take from the Liberal Democrat conference, it’s that it’s time for …

Steve Hilton’s exit from No 10 confirms that this government has lost all of its reforming instincts.  That is both an opportunity and a cautionary tale for Labour. While he will largely be remembered as a series of anecdotes about bare-footed platitudes and blue skies thinking, the Conservatives have been at their most dangerous when …