It’s becoming hard to write this blog without being repetitious and, in being repetitious, introducing a distasteful ‘I told you so’ tone. But distasteful as it may be, the deepening chaos of the fortnight since I last posted, which saw Kwasi Kwarteng sacked, the government’s economic policy abandoned, Suella Braverman resign, and culminated in the … Read more
The events of the last week are an almost textbook illustration of the point I made a couple of posts ago that “governments are constrained in ways that thinktanks aren’t, and even the most ardently ideological libertarian SpAD quickly finds that political reality is very different to the world of position papers and whiteboards”. If … Read more
The political ambitions of the libertarian wing of the Brexit Ultras have always been ambivalent. On the one hand, they have largely preferred to complain of betrayal from the sidelines rather than take any responsibility or, if accepting ministerial office, to quickly resign rather than engage with the pragmatic realities of Brexit. On the other … Read more
What a fortnight to have been on holiday from blogging! That Liz Truss would become Prime Minister was, of course, expected; that the Queen would die two days later was not. One consequence of this conjuncture was to virtually suspend normal politics until this week thus muffling Truss’s early decisions. But perhaps we will not … Read more
In a couple of weeks we will have a new Prime Minister, bringing an end to the strangest political summer of my lifetime. It has been a summer marked by excessive heat and drought which are themselves emblematic of perhaps the most important global political issue – if there are exceptions, they would be those … Read more
Against the backdrop of a serious, growing, and multi-faceted economic crisis, the Tory leadership contest grinds on. The two contenders have little to say that matches the scale of this crisis and even less about Brexit, which is not only one of its components but the one most obviously unique to the UK. Nor do … Read more
In some ways these are golden weeks for Labour. The Johnson government is collapsing amid scandal, and the leadership contest has revealed how limited the talent within the Tory Party is and how riven it is by political divisions and personal animosities. Once the new Prime Minister is in place, that will pose new challenges … Read more
In recent years, my pattern has been to post on this blog once a week. But occasionally, if an issue of particular importance comes up, I write an extra one, as today. I’m also doing so out of sheer frustration. The issue is that of the delays and queues at Dover and Folkestone. The frustration … Read more
An air of sticky and suffocating unreality has pervaded British politics this week, quite as much as it has the weather. The ongoing contest to replace Boris Johnson seems completely detached from the realities of a country enduring a sharp lesson in the what climate change is going to mean, still gripped by a pandemic … Read more
As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some … Read more