There exists a dangerous tendency on the left which believes that government is a place where everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts. This week has been a reminder that government is frequently a place where nothing is beautiful and everything hurts. The 2012 case for intervention in Syria gets stronger and stronger every day, the …

Success has many fathers, particularly if you are a member of Labour’s hard-left and you are discussing elections. The triumphs of 1997, 2001, or 2005 have any number of antecedents: Black Wednesday, John Major, John Redwood, John Smith, Neil Kinnock, Michael Howard, William Hague, anyone really, as long as it isn’t Tony Blair. But curiously, …

First, let’s talk about what yesterday’s speech by Ed Balls was not: it was not a hammer blow to the welfare state. I still believe that the universal principle is an essential pillar of the welfare state, but it’s more than a little bit overwrought to claim that a policy that’s younger than I am …

There’s a column I want to write, and it goes like this: Beneath all the froth about motivations, beneath the wild statements about heresy and depravity and rampant immigration, the English Defence League and the jihadists aren’t so very different: they are overwhelmingly socially and sexually frustrated men who, having made a mess of their …

Ed Miliband is wrong: it’s time for a referendum on Europe. While we’re at it, I’ve never been consulted about the abandonment of the gold standard, so let’s throw that one in there, too. Ed Balls is a controversial figure: let’s have a referendum on whether or he should be chancellor of the exchequer. In …

I used to think that coalition was the way forward: any hue that wasn’t blue would do me just fine. I thought that British politics was a disastrous night out: a nation determined to go for a pub crawl forced into Starbucks by three determined coffee-drinkers. But I realise now that coalition politics isn’t the …

In 2004 the Liberal Democrats gained a 123 seats. Labour kept calm, carried on, and duly won a third general election. In 2013 the United Kingdom Independence party won 139 seats, and now the whole coalition agreement is up for sale. That puts a Conservative majority firmly in the realms of science fiction rather than …

If you want an insight into how the 2015 election might play out, don’t look at the results of the local elections. Look at the new five-pound note. When Winston Churchill replaces Elizabeth Fry on the back of the fiver, notes in England and Wales will celebrate a statesman, an inventor, a scientist and a …

The past is a foreign country; you remember the lovely meals, the better weather and the prettier locals. You forget the screaming row on the first night, the broken shower-rail and the closed museum. This year, there’s a sense that we no longer as a nation really know what what ‘Englishness’ really is, beyond Downton …

‘Death is not the end,’ a poet writes, ‘Death is the credits rolling. The movie was over a while ago.’ The Thatcher era wasn’t brought to a close with the death of Margaret Thatcher. The end came with the election of Tony Blair. Yes, there were hangovers. The social scars of Thatcherism were so deep …