Politics

With Alex Salmond currently engaged in a war of words with Nick Robinson over the BBC’s ‘disgraceful’ coverage of the Scottish referendum, there is one former Beeb employee he can turn to in his time of need. Step forward Paul Mason. Mason — who worked as Newsnight‘s economics editor before defecting to Channel 4 — joined Salmond on stage at the Edinburgh book festival to plant a few blows in the direction of his ex-employer. Despite pleas from Nicola Sturgeon for the BBC to enhance its presence in Scotland with a BBC Scotland TV channel, the PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future author said the BBC’s unionist values were part and parcel of

Another disclosure from Anthony Seldon’s upcoming biography of David Cameron: he reveals that George Osborne tried to stop the referendum European Union membership. The below is from the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of Seldon’s book: Both men are profoundly irritated by their Eurosceptic MPs, but Osborne is even more pragmatic than Cameron. The Chancellor’s view is that it is simply not sensible to talk about disengaging from major international institutions in the 21st century – not worth considering it. Can this be true? Look at this non-denial denial from the Treasury: “This is nonsense. The Chancellor believes that the British people should be given the chance to decide whether or not we stay in a reformed

In my business, there’s a lot of fretting about the idea of representativeness. Pollsters put questions to, say, a thousand people – and take them as a sample of the country. How to be sure that you have the right sample? You need the right number of men, women, northerners, middle class, Lib Dem voters etc – but that’s the easy part. Your method of selection matters hugely, and it can skew the sample in other, less tangible ways. Every pollster is vulnerable to this so-called ‘selection bias’ . If you survey people on high streets, for example, you’ll get people tend to be out-and-about – rather than at home. If you survey

In this week’s Spectator, I profile the 2015 intake of Tory MPs: a bright, pragmatic bunch who don’t like to call themselves Thatcherite. Ministers who have sat in the Commons Chamber and heard maiden speeches from this new bunch have been seriously impressed, with some remarking that they’ve wondered what they’ve done with their own lives after hearing the extraordinary experiences that the new intake have brought with them into the Chamber. Those extraordinary experiences include working as postmen, teachers, doctors, rural auctioneers, and nurses. There are very few political animals who’ve slaved as special advisers before becoming MPs, or whose families are political dynasties. But the bulk of these