Month: October 2014

For some time, people have spoken about Labour’s “southern discomfort”: its seeming difficulty in making any headway in the critical marginals of the South-East. As the dust settled after the by-elections two weeks ago, it became clear that the net results were as bad, if not worse, for Labour as they were for the Tories,… Continue reading Labour now has a northern discomfort to add to its southern discomfort

The other day my friend John Rentoul helpfully pointed out an Australian counter-example to my last piece on leadership challenges: that Bob Hawke had won on the back of a usurpation (and, I now realise, was later usurped himself by Paul Keating), and it hadn’t done him any harm, in fact he went on to win four elections. In… Continue reading Leadership challenges: a coda

It is always a little unwise to make predictions, as us bloggers occasionally find some time later, to our shame and embarrassment. But perhaps we can venture one now. If there is a silly season within conference season, it is surely within Lib Dem conference. And this year, a few MPs and journalists have used… Continue reading Leadership challenge? You can’t be serious

While it seems Labour are busy doing all we can to leave the centre ground to the Tories, as the FT’s Janan Ganesh pointed out yesterday, they seem to be doing the same to us, in a bizarre “after you, Claude, no, after you, Cecil” stylee. This is nothing that new (in fact, I wrote about… Continue reading Human rights? Nah. I’ve got a party to placate.