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Can the discipline hold until and beyond 2015? It’s now over six years since David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Assuming he’s still around to address the Tory conference this autumn, he’ll then be the third-longest serving leader of his party since Churchill. What’s particularly notable about this feat is how easy a ride he’s had in that time. His leadership has never seriously been threatened from within. The only ‘on principle’ resignation he’s suffered from his…

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Is he denying Santorum frontrunner status? For all the time, money and energy spent in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, not all that much has been decided in the first two months. The states that have voted so far account for only about three hundred delegates, and the final allocation of some of them isn’t settled. March is an entirely different prospect. After Washington today (43 delegates), Super Tuesday sees states worth well over 400 delegates go to…

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Do this year’s double local elections provide a return route? If the bookies are right, Boris Johnson is well-placed for a second term as London’s Mayor. If the pollsters most recent results are right, it’s too close to call. Those two things aren’t necessarily contradictory – the polls reflect people’s intentions now whereas the bookies are taking bets on what they expect to happen in May. It may be that Johnson will campaign more effectively than Livingston, or that the…

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…. What is his least worst option and will he pick it? The Conservatives entered the 2010 election campaign with ambitious plans to make significant reforms to the NHS, education provision and welfare and benefits – three of the biggest spending departments of government – on top of tackling the deficit and re-establishing economic stability after the biggest boom and bust since the War. It would have been an ambitious agenda for a single-party government with a majority. In retrospect,…

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How crucial are next week’s figures? The provisional growth figures for the last quarter of 2011 will be published next Wednesday and will be keenly anticipated and picked over by media and politicians alike because of the prediction by the ITEM club report[1] this week that the UK was probably already in a recession. Recessions require at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth and as yet, we’ve not had one, never mind two. Even so, if the ONS publish…

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What’ll be the impact in the UK, France and beyond? Politics is a relative game. The good lose out to the best; the mediocre beat the poor. Whether a government is seen as doing a good job depends partly on whether people feel good about their lives and confident in their future, but more on whether they think someone else could do better internally, and whether others are doing better overseas. As such, the decision of Standard & Poors to…

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David Herdson dusts off his crystal ball for the year ahead For all that 2011 was a big year for politics domestically – the first nationwide referendum since the 1970s, in which AV was voted down, the formation of a majority SNP government at Holyrood, cracks appearing in both the coalition and Ed Miliband’s leadership – the biggest stories came from abroad. At the start of the year, predicting mounting trouble for the Eurozone, where problems in Greece, Ireland and…

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