At the end of my last column, I predicted that a terrible reckoning was coming for the Conservative Party as voters prepare to cast their verdict on its 14 years in power a week from today. Given that the past two weeks have shown that the Tories themselves now seem resigned to a catastrophic defeat, …
So…three weeks down, three still to go. If this is a ‘snap’ general election — an overused phrase if ever there was one — I’d like to see what a normal-length one looks like! Rishi Sunak’s rain-drenched announcement outside Number 10 already feels like a long time ago, even if it did rather set the …
There are broadly speaking two ways of looking at the Labour Party’s last period in government under first Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown between 1997 and 2010. The first view brings to mind Monty Python’s ‘what did the Romans ever do for us?’ sketch, later wonderfully parodied by the BBC in a promotional advert …
In terms of their impact on national politics, local elections are often about which party is better at playing the ‘expectations game’ The trick is to set a target number of seats which you then comfortably overshoot, or alternatively, if you are the incumbent government, a maximum number of seats you expect to lose which …
With expectations of a Labour election landslide growing by the day, thoughts inevitably turn to the question of who might be in the next government, and specifically for our region, which North East MPs might make the cut. The one obvious shoo-in for Cabinet rank is of course Bridget Phillipson, MP for Houghton and Sunderland …
Having observed the rise and fall of several governments over the course of my career, it seems to me that there always comes a point in the lifetime of an administration where all events conspire to the one end of inevitable electoral defeat. I witnessed it with the long, slow demise of John Major’s Government …
Back in the days when I covered Westminster for The Journal, Budget Day was by far the most challenging event in the political calendar, requiring me and the rest of the team to put together a front page splash, an inside double-page spread and a 16-page pullout within a few hours of the Chancellor sitting …
In my last column, I wrote that if anything has come to define the relative failure of the Government’s attempts to address the North-South divide over the past 14 years, it is surely the fiasco of HS2. A project that was supposed to link London with the North at a total cost of £37.5bn is …
Ministers have been accused of shortchanging the North East after it emerged that the region is to receive just £73m out of a new £4.7bn funding allocation. In a series of government announcements on Monday, reallocating funds from the axed HS2 rail scheme, the North West received £1.5m, Yorkshire and Humberside £950m, and the Midlands …
The old French proverb ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ can be applied to many things, particularly in the world of politics — but seldom does it ring more true than in the case of the North-South divide. Over the course of the last 30 years, governments of various persuasions have …
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