CON MPs will replace their leader if they feel Johnson’s shine has gone For the moment, Boris Johnson walks on water in terms of popularity. He enjoys positive approval ratings, his party sits on opinion poll leads of around 20% and is hoovering up about half the vote. All of which is likely to count for very little in a year’s time, never mind three. It goes without saying that these are abnormal times and that we should therefore treat…
VE Day was just the end of the beginning We’ll meet again – although probably only the once in that sense. The World War II generation are now very elderly and while some will survive to the eightieth anniversary in 2025, they’ll be few: the youngest in their late-nineties, most past a hundred. Thereafter, the direct link will be broken. In terms of the global political leadership, that link was long since severed. The last British PM to have experienced…
Biden in particular is great odds against ludicrously short Dem alternatives Unusual things happen. Fringe scenarios occur and outsiders find ways to win races they aren’t even in. Even so, for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden to be odds against to win the 2020 US presidential election when both are their party’s nominee-elect is pretty extraordinary. True, Trump is only just odds-against on the Betfair exchange, at 2.08 to back but Biden is right out at 2.42 at the…
The Coalition’s constitutional legacy could last a little longer yet The classic interpretation is wrong. Britain’s constitution is not unusual because it is uncodified (or unwritten, to use the inaccurate but more frequently-used description). It is, of course, uncodified – it cannot be found in a single source – and it is, in some important aspects of convention, unwritten; and while the former is unusual, to focus there misses the crucial point and places the stress on the wrong thing….
By international standards, the British response has been poor If we’d been told a year ago that Boris Johnson would be prime minister, we could have accepted that as plausible. Theresa May’s authority was hopelessly undermined and Boris was well-placed to succeed her. Had we been told that he would now be sitting on an 80-seat majority, we might have been a little more taken aback but Johnson does have a record as an effective campaigner and Corbyn was suffering…
Britain needs to formalise the role of an Acting PM To talk of death lightly in current circumstances might well seem not only morbid but tasteless. In the midst of a pandemic – one hitting Britain almost as hard as anywhere – leaving many thousands of people bereaved, we obviously need to be sensitive to those considerations. And yet in terms of government, deaths among its own members are in truth a lot easier to handle than serious illness. There…
How to reconcile his stumbles with his success I have not covered myself with glory during the 2020 US presidential election so far. To date, I have tipped, successively, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden for victory – and I’m not exactly convinced at the moment that it’ll be any of them. To be fair, I don’t think my reasoning has been a million miles out. At the start of the year, I assumed that impeachment would leave Trump…
The economic damage from Covid-19 will likely be worse than the 2008 Financial Crisis This is Year Zero. We are at the cusp of the Before and the After. Covid-19, and the policy responses to it, are changing the world in a way that will affect it for decades and to put it bluntly, it doesn’t look good. Economies are delicate things. Analysts and commentators get excited about changes in growth figures or unemployment rates of 0.1% – one part…