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 …
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 …
When Ken Livingstone was elected Mayor of London in 2000, 14 years after his previous power-base the Greater London Council was abolished by Margaret Thatcher, he began his acceptance speech with the words ‘…as I was saying before I was rudely interrupted’. As I return to the task of writing about politics for The QT, …
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