Who is on for douze points? Hello and welcome once again to this European extravaganza; this celebration of all that is best and brightest about this continent; this joyous coming together of nations near and far. Oh all right, who am I kidding? The big question of course is will Britain triumph for the first time since Terry Wogan was in short trousers – and I don’t mean the lederhosen he sported that time in … apparently I’m not allowed…
It’s not the falling that kills you; it’s the landing Bafflement and incomprehension are unlikely to be in short supply for Scottish Labour. Each time they hit a new low, the belief is that things can now only get better. With rare exceptions, the belief has continually been wrong. So again this week. For the fourth election in a row, Scottish Labour lost seats. The progression of their seat totals since the first election to Holyrood, in 1999, now reads:…
But Corbyn may well be safe until 2020 The British electorate rarely fail to surprise. It shouldn’t be possible to produce elections where all are losers and most are simultaneously winners and yet that’s precisely what happened. Taking the British results party by party (I’m excluding Northern Ireland, which is a different game and for which counting is still ongoing). Labour Sadiq won. That was the minimum requirement and was comfortably met. Labour now has the politician with the biggest…
Two heartland seats: two more Oldhams? There are two parliamentary by-elections tomorrow. Normally, this would be cause for a good deal of media interest: it’s rare for two or more by-elections to take place on the same day (only the tenth occasion since 1997). However, the sheer quantity of other contests occurring has relegated what ought to be routine holds for Labour in Ogmore and in Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough so far down the pecking order as to be near-invisible….
Confronting the ex-mayor means confronting what it means to be Labour You know you have a PR problem when your party’s second most successful politician this century* is publicly debating at what point in the 1930s Hitler lost the plot. Labour’s problem runs a great deal deeper than bad publicity though. To be clear, Labour is unlikely to be the only party with members, activists or elected representatives who’ve said or written something stupid or worse but it is likely…
The question is whether Brexit is needed to kick-start it Remember the government’s EU renegotiation? It was a big deal back in February when it was agreed after a marathon European Council summit and has been little heard of since. True, the five points do briefly appear in the government’s referendum leaflet but hardly any of the campaigning for or against membership has bothered to reference them. They are now essentially an irrelevance. To the extent that they are brought…
Trump’s amateur approach is costing him the election Back in October, I tipped Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination as a trading bet. As always with such bets, the trick is trading out at the right time. So with Cruz now at less than 2/1 across the board, when is that time? The simple answer is ‘not yet’. In a normal year, a candidate in Trump’s position would have the nomination near-enough sown up. Although he’ll probably fall short of…
Hillary should finally start to gather momentum after Bernie’s last boost It’s a measure of how weak a candidate Hillary Clinton is that not only has she failed to swat away Bernie Sanders’ challenge for the nomination but three-fifths of the way through she’s still conceding ground to the septuagenarian socialist. Normally, by this stage in the race, one candidate is dominant and the money and coverage will have dried up for the rest. Instead, Sanders has won seven of…