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The Importance of Leeds One favourite piece of lazy journalism is to assert that “the Conservatives have no MPs/Councillors in the main Northern cities” and that, without these, they cannot win a Parliamentary majority. In fact, there are hundreds of Conservative councillors in the urban North, and the main Northern cities usually cited, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield are irrelevant to the Conservatives’ Parliamentary chances. The Conservatives could win an overall majority of 100, without coming close to winning a…

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What’s this going to mean politically? Extraordinarily this story from the Financial Times is not covered on the main news page of BBC online. Yet the size of the intervention – an injection of 95 million billion euros into the money markets – sounds too huge to be confined to the business pages. I’m no expert on financial markets but this does look worrying and could have a big political impact. To my mind it makes an early election looks…

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A guest article by Peter the Punter Mediums are utterly useless. They have yet to give me a single winning tip I couldn’t have worked out for myself. Messages from the other side of the betting counter can however be helpful. Although they are unlikely to reveal the winner of the next race at Kempton, they may nevertheless contain something every bit as useful to punters. I recently had dinner with an odds compiler from a major firm and although…

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Could optimism and praise help him take back the initiative? We are going through an extraordinary period and Labour supporters are, no doubt, pinching themselves to confirm that Gordon’s first weeks are not a dream. By all accounts the public response to the way he’s handled his first three big crises has been enormously positive and if this wasn’t the poll-free holiday period Labour would surely have been consolidating the initial big leads. So what does Cameron do? Each step…

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Does the Guardian have no sense of history? I think that the invasion and fall of France in May 1940 followed by Dunkirk, and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force that Churchill had to face probably rank some way ahead of the flooding, Glasgow airport and foot and mouth. While not quite on that scale Harold Wilson’s first month of his 1974 government was pretty horrendous with the aftermath of the miners’ strike, the oil crisis and Northern Ireland….

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