Belfast
Just as Tolstoy observed that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, so it is with dysfunctional governments. Each is dysfunctional in its own way, though there are certain family resemblances between them — a certain shared …
Civil disobedience is coming
Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war broke out, are policymakers realising the potentially catastrophic implications of their gung-ho approach towards …
The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark
It has seemed in recent months as though the Conservative Party’s energy has been directed not into governing, but into the public staging of a series of thinly-conceived morality tales about the comeuppance awaiting naughty parliamentarians — stories about the …
How populist is Liz Truss?
The contest to decide who enters Downing Street and then goes on to win the next election will be decided by a candidate who can reach both populist and fiscal conservatives. This is because the Conservative Party’s voter base is …
Who would be a young Tory?
Aspiration is a word forgotten by the Conservative Party. It’s certainly not a word that’s forgotten by me. In only one generation, my family went from being born in council housing and needing to muck out the pigs before heading …
Why the Tories love a clown show
It was the summer of 1995. The Tory leadership struggle was in full swing, and after days of intense excitement Britain’s next Prime Minister — or so he hoped — was poised to emerge into the national spotlight.
The challenger …
The Tories need to get over Thatcher
Like so many political rivals, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are divided by a common ambition. Both want to cast themselves as the heir to Margaret Thatcher. To do that, they are erecting radically different accounts of Thatcher’s time in …
The leadership contest the Tories deserve
Of the 15 British Prime Ministers since the end of the Second World War, only two — Attlee and Heath — both initially entered and finally exited Downing Street at a general election. The coronation of Sunak or Truss will …
Kemi Badenoch has saved the Tories
With Kemi Badenoch’s elimination from the race, the Conservative party lost its chance to win a future. After all, the simplest, if least inspiring case to make for Kemi Badenoch was always that of urging the wavering Tory party to …
How Right is Kemi Badenoch?
The deposal of King Boris was just the first act of the Tory leadership saga. Politicos and hacks are now dabbling in their amateur clairvoyance, trying to predict whether the new prime minister will move the party further to the …
Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher
It is easy — and just — to mock Angela Merkel for her years of reckless misgovernance; thanks to her, Germany is now beginning to ration street lighting and heating, and rushing to install “warmth hubs” so her once-adoring voters …
Why would the young vote Tory?
Harry, a 32-year-old Good Middle Class Graduate from a Good Middle Class Family looks up from his phone. His eyes move across the cramped rental flat to Fiona, his girlfriend of five years. He’s been thinking about starting a family …
How Boris destroyed Boris
We are in the summer of 2032, and once again Boris Johnson is fighting for his life. Above Downing Street the carrion crows circle, as they have so often in the last 13 years. Once again a senior minister has …
The nightmare haunting the Tories
In a vast, bleak industrial hangar, endless coffins are laid out, as far as the eye can see. So begins a scene in Dennis Kelly’s conspiracy drama, Utopia, set amid the turmoil of the Winter of Discontent. In February 1979, …
This is not a class war
Headlines scream about a looming “class war“; reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the …