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All the latest analysis of the day's news

Steerpike
Steerpike

Defeated Labour councillor: ‘The voters have let us down’

With dozens of Labour councillors defeated across the country, the recriminations and inquests have already begun. Various reasons have been suggested for Tory gains across the Red Wall including the vaccine rollout and Boris Johnson’s own personal popularity, with Labour’s leadership using the occasion to (attempt) a reshuffle of its top team. One defeated Labour councillor in Amber Valley though has now offered up his own explanation for his defeat and that of 200 other colleagues across the country.

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Alex Massie
Alex Massie

Scots, not Boris Johnson, are blocking IndyRef2

Scots, not Boris Johnson, are blocking IndyRef2

So what does it all mean? The first thing to bear in mind is that more than one thing may be true at the same time. This is, then, both a historic and thumping victory for Nicola Sturgeon and a mild disappointment. Historic because, after 14 years in power, Scottish voters have handed the SNP a fourth consecutive term in office; a modest disappointment because the SNP made little progress on their 2016 performance. Five years ago, Sturgeon lost the majority - albeit this was an accidental majority - she inherited from Alex Salmond and she failed to regain it this week. Doing so would have required everything to fall into place for the nationalists. They would have needed to pick up seats such as Dumbarton, Edinburgh Southern, and Aberdeenshire West to have a real crack at a majority.

Alex Massie

Scots, not Boris Johnson, are blocking IndyRef2

Scots, not Boris Johnson, are blocking IndyRef2

So what does it all mean? The first thing to bear in mind is that more than one thing may be true at the same time. This is, then, both a historic and thumping victory for Nicola Sturgeon and a mild disappointment. Historic because, after 14 years in power, Scottish voters have handed the SNP a fourth consecutive term in office; a modest disappointment because the SNP made little progress on their 2016 performance. Five years ago, Sturgeon lost the majority - albeit this was an accidental majority - she inherited from Alex Salmond and she failed to regain it this week. Doing so would have required everything to fall into place for the nationalists. They would have needed to pick up seats such as Dumbarton, Edinburgh Southern, and Aberdeenshire West to have a real crack at a majority.

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news

Steerpike
Steerpike

Defeated Labour councillor: ‘The voters have let us down’

With dozens of Labour councillors defeated across the country, the recriminations and inquests have already begun. Various reasons have been suggested for Tory gains across the Red Wall including the vaccine rollout and Boris Johnson’s own personal popularity, with Labour’s leadership using the occasion to (attempt) a reshuffle of its top team. One defeated Labour councillor in Amber Valley though has now offered up his own explanation for his defeat and that of 200 other colleagues across the country.

More from Coffee House
Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news

Steerpike
Steerpike

Defeated Labour councillor: ‘The voters have let us down’

With dozens of Labour councillors defeated across the country, the recriminations and inquests have already begun. Various reasons have been suggested for Tory gains across the Red Wall including the vaccine rollout and Boris Johnson’s own personal popularity, with Labour’s leadership using the occasion to (attempt) a reshuffle of its top team. One defeated Labour councillor in Amber Valley though has now offered up his own explanation for his defeat and that of 200 other colleagues across the country.

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Writers

Scotland

Andrew Willshire

How Boris can beat the SNP at their own game

The re-election of a pro-independence majority to the Scottish Parliament shows that the next five years will be dominated by the quest for a second independence referendum. Conventional wisdom is that the Scottish Parliament will pass a Bill legislating for that referendum, daring Westminster to strike it down, making the separatist position more powerful, like a constitutional Obi-Wan Kenobi. This may be how things play out. Another option, of course, is that any interested party could refer the legislation to the courts as being ultra vires. However, it would still present a risk that permission to hold such a referendum would be given, putting Westminster on the back foot once again. But there is a third way: start the independence negotiations.

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Magazine

This week's magazine

The China model

Why is the West imitating Beijing?

Fiona Mountford

The insidious creep of corporate friendliness

Have you noticed it? The slide towards faux-friendliness and fake sincerity from the companies with whom we used to have an impersonal and transactional relationship. The deal used to be simple: we paid them, they did things or provided stuff, thank you and goodbye. If something went awry, we told them and, with luck, they fixed it. Feelings, other than occasional frustration, did not come into it. But in recent years, presumably inspired by American corporate culture, companies are no longer content with worming their way into our wallets. Now they want to commandeer the emotional part of our brains as well. They’ve done their research into behavioural science and the psychology of retail. They have started to emote, to empathise, to understand and to ‘chat’.

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The Critics

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

David Crane

Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener

From the magazine

On 1 January 1806, a little over one year after his coronation, the Emperor Napoleon ordered the abolition of France’s new republican calendar and a return to the old Gregorian model. Over the past seven years republicans had grown used to ‘empire creep’, but even for those who had been forced to watch the principles of the revolution dismantled one by one and a republican general metamorphose into Emperor of the French, this last insult carried a peculiarly symbolic charge. For all its engaging dottiness — each new year, coinciding with the autumnal equinox, would begin on a different date — the short-lived republican calendar had embodied some of the most attractive and fragile dreams of the revolution. Instituted in 1793 and backdated to the founding of the republic, it represented not just a break with a calendar ‘soiled on every page with the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church’, but a recognition and celebration of man’s place in the natural world.

Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener

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An intelligent mix of culture, food, style and money, plus where to go and what to see.