Wikipedia International leaders to keep an eye on as the year unfolds 3. LK Advani (BJP, India) The US may claim to be the world’s greatest democracy, but India has no rivals as the world’s biggest. This massive country will hold the world’s longest general election this spring, with voting taking place from 16 April to 13 May – and in terms of leaders could also be the world’s oldest matchup, with current PM Manmohan Singh of Congress, 76, facing…
Mail on Sunday Would she be better for Brown inside or outside the tent? There’s a piece in the Mail on Sunday today raising the possibility that the Prime Minister may be considering sacking Harriet Harman. According to the paper, “…his anger boiled over at a private meeting in No10, shouting: ‘Who the hell does that woman think she is?’ Sources say Mr Brown swore more than once during heated exchanges with aides on how to silence Labour’s Deputy Leader….
Today, I will be joining around 1,000 participants nationwide at the Convention on Modern Liberty – a conference of speakers and activists from across the political spectrum who share a concern about the direction with respect to our basic rights and liberties. Although not an automatic adherent, I acknowledge that we now live in a society that is becoming ever more scary from this particular perspective, and am interested to see what some of the great thinkers of the age…
When the music stops, will it be Likud and the Right? So, President Peres has asked Benjamin Netanyahu to try to form a government (he is now a formateur in Dutch / Belgian parlance), despite the fact that Likud finished second at the election – he has 42 days to do so. The immediate post-election posturing and positioning is over, Lieberman has returned from his holiday in Belarus and recommended Bibi for PM, and the real business of government formation…
Sunday Telegraph “…This is Slumdog Labour Leader” There’s an excellent piece by Matthew D’Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph today in which he looks at the nascent contest to succeed Brown and argues that it is “ferocious, precisely because the outcome matters so little”. After rolling off the stream of recent leadership pretenders, he goes on: “….This, I confidently predict, is only the beginning. Many more names will be suggested in this “potential leader speed dating”, some even more ridiculous than…
Is Brown relying on Wales losing? I’m not going to lie to you – this might be one of my more tangential threads, and it’s not as though directness of purpose has characterised my Saturday morning slots for some time now. Let me take you on a mental journey, into the musing mind of a pair of Catholic Welshmen, pondering rugby, religion and politics over a pint of bitter. One couldn’t help but notice that our Prime Minister this week…
Kadima win the election but look set to lose the battle for PM So, in the end, the oft-derided Israeli exit polls were right, with Kadima having a very narrow seat lead, beating Likud 28-27, but for the opinion pollsters this proved to be a “1992”, with Likud leading virtually all the polls and some by wide margins. Unlike in previous elections, the counting of the double envelope votes from the military, diplomats etc didn’t improve the showing of Likud…
Is Alan Johnson really Labour’s last chance? …and could Paul Moore bring down the PM? Under the title “Only Johnson can hold back the Tories” (I initially wondered if he was referring to Boris), the Independent’s commentator argues that Alan Johnson could be the man to save Labour from its impending electoral doom. I suspect that Labour has one last chance to avoid a crushing loss at the next election, which is why it is interesting that Alan Johnson, the…