Browsed by
Author: David Herdson

Lib Dems can do it on a drizzly Thursday in February – but what about on 3 May?

Lib Dems can do it on a drizzly Thursday in February – but what about on 3 May?

Comments 0 Comment

By-election gains may well be yet another false dawn Up until last year, Sunderland had carved out for itself one, and only one, niche in British political life: it counted its votes at general elections faster than anywhere else. For six successive elections from 1992 to 2015, the southern Sunderland seat was the first to declare in the country. Other than that, the city was politically unremarkable: it’s returned two Labour MPs ever since the 1960s and the Red team…

Read More Read More

If not May, then who?

If not May, then who?

Comments 0 Comment

Assessing the runners and riders of the next Tory leadership contest Correctly identifying the next Conservative leader is a notoriously tricky task. While the golden rule is to lay the favourite – something which can accumulate good profits over a prolonged period – it’s still quite a cautious strategy. The more ambitious, but much more difficult, one is to try to back the winner. That’s not to say that it’s impossible and now that the latest bout of speculation over…

Read More Read More

Not only will there not be an EURef2, there can’t be

Not only will there not be an EURef2, there can’t be

Comments 0 Comment

Both the timetable and the politics make it all but impossible It’s the Remainer dream that won’t go away. Indeed, it’s as if they’ve never woken up to the strong coffee the electorate served on the fateful night in June 2016. They want to believe that the fight is still on and continue to make the case that they should have made better before EURef1. It isn’t still on and the dream is just that: an hallucination in the dark….

Read More Read More

Now isn’t the time to push May, whatever the temptation

Now isn’t the time to push May, whatever the temptation

Comments 0 Comment

But there’s a good chance Con MPs will do it anyway Only one of the three traditional British parties currently has a leader – and that one by happenstance. To lead is by definition a dynamic thing. It is to set oneself at the head of something and take it somewhere in such a way that others follow. It is not a quality granted simply by virtue of holding a given office. On those terms, Vince Cable is not a…

Read More Read More

UKIP: circling the plughole

UKIP: circling the plughole

Comments 0 Comment

The problem is the leader – but could anyone else do better? Revolutions devouring their own creators is hardly a novelty but UKIP are giving a fascinating new take on an old theme. They were never the most disciplined of parties and perhaps that was, for some, part of their attraction. Even so, since their crowning glory with their success in the referendum, they’ve not been so much undisciplined but ungovernable. After Nigel Farage stepped down in September 2016, they’ve…

Read More Read More

Putin on a show: finding value in March’s Russian election

Putin on a show: finding value in March’s Russian election

Comments 0 Comment

The question is not whether Vlad will win but by how much Vladimir Putin has now run Russia for longer than anyone since Stalin.* It’s all but certain that he will continue to do so after this March’s presidential election. Ladbrokes are offering odds of 1/50 that he wins a fourth full term, which are nonetheless value: probably the shortest-ever odds tipped as such on this site. Looked at another way, it might only be a 2% return in about…

Read More Read More

Why TMay should wait to reshuffle her cabinet

Why TMay should wait to reshuffle her cabinet

Comments 0 Comment

There is a good reason why PMs do not reshuffle only 6 months after a GE One of the easier predictions I thought I’d made in a twitter string earlier this week was that Theresa May wouldn’t engage in a voluntary major reshuffle of her cabinet this year. Within two hours of me doing so, the political twittersphere was alive with speculation and supposedly informed comment that just such a reshuffle was imminent – talk that Number Ten did little…

Read More Read More

Defining Britain: who wins that battle will likely win GE2022

Defining Britain: who wins that battle will likely win GE2022

Comments 0 Comment

The UK’s self-image must change post-Brexit – but to what? By rights, the Conservative Party should have disappeared a long time ago. On the wrong side of the Reform debate before 1832, their opponents dominated the middle of the nineteenth century. That was in no small part down to divisions within the Tories but was also because the Liberals had a better vision to sell to a rapidly industrialising and urbanising Britain and to its newly enfranchised electorate. As the…

Read More Read More