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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Beware starting from a conclusion and working backwards “This time next year, we’ll be running the country”, as Jeremy Corbyn didn’t quite say a few days ago in his interview with Grazia. It’s a near-repetition of his prediction at Glastonbury this June – except that there he was talking about Christmas 2017 rather than 2018 – and for those not favourably inclined towards him, might bear a passing resemblance to the unsubstantiated optimism of another Christmas staple. Admittedly, Del Boy…