Just after 10pm last Thursday, the BBC was allowed to broadcast the results of the exit poll it had been conducting outside voting stations during election day. Its conclusion that there would be a clear Conservative majority stunned studio guests and media observers alike, all of whom had been ...
Today, after a campaign many of us had begun to feel would never end, British voters elect the MPs who will rule or misrule them for the next five years. Polls going back two years or more indicate that Labour and the Conservatives are within a couple of percentage points of each other, the Liberal ...
I was standing in Stamford, Lincolnshire on Saturday, admiring as always the architecture so splendidly Georgian it is used for filming Jane Austen adaptations. But that day the Palladian proportions were backdrop to something infinitely older in sense and sensibility. Morris dancers stomped the ...
Another week, another mass drowning of miserable people, another ostentatious lamentation from politicians and pontificators, all the way up to The Pontiff himself. As the author of a novel about sad beachings and European ethnic angst, which involved struggling through millions of real-life ...
Guardian journalist Zoe Williams is worried. "Is the left in Britain still alive and well?" she asks. Apparently, "no one quite knows where it has gone, or what it looks like." There is, she fears, a cosmic imbalance - "Just when the right reaches its climax, where is its ...
Britain's new multi-party politics has pundits and bookies salivating at the prospect of minority governments, hung parliaments, awkward alliances, and kingmakers after the May 7th general election. What most of them do not seem to realise is that this sudden plethora of parties masks old ...
The Speaker of the House of Commons is the most powerful commoner in the United Kingdom. On the 26th of March, an attempt to change the rules for electing the Speaker of the House of Commons was defeated by 228 votes to 202. The present Speaker, Conservative MP John Bercow, was thereby excused from ...
As May 7th bulks ever bigger on the political horizon, the UKIP omnibus has developed serious rattles. As the campaign pounds punishingly on, the insurgents" inexperience is starting to show, and it will take daring driving to stay on the road. And they have come a long way already. UKIP was ...
Multiculturalism is dead - long live multiculturalism? Another year, another denunciation of multiculturalism, another denunciation of that denunciation, another continuation of multiculturalism. It is a dead idea that doesn"t die, even when once fervent friends turn against it, finally ...
When Mohammed Emwazi went out from west London to Syria literally to carve out a new career as "Jihadi John", masked avenger of non-wrongs, England lost an "extremely kind, extremely gentle" idealist. That is, according to a group called CAGE, whose director Asim Qureshi was moved ...
