Politics

There are a number of peculiar aspects of the political moment through which we are living: the fact that the Prime Minister has no mandate from the country or his own party, the collapse of the economy, the meltdown at Westminster. But never before have we had a political moment where junior ministers will be praying not to be promoted and Cabinet ministers will be relieved to be leaving the government. When they are reshuffled, Jacqui Smith and Alistair Darling will be delighted to join the backbenches (although in Darling’s case the torture may continue if he gets the Home Secretary job). Who in their right mind would want to work

As Yglesias notes, it’s uncanny how too many conservative pundits continue to believe that every problem is a nail and the only tool the United States possesses is a hammer. Now, like everyone else, I have no idea how we should deal with North Korea. And even that assumes that there is some kind of a deal that can be made. One thing I would ask, however, is that since NK seems to rather enjoy its pariah status – in as much as any paranoid regime can be said to enjoy anything – one wonders if increasing or tightening sanctions on NK is the most sensible tactic. In some sense,

Next Thursday, voters in the UK’s 12 European constituencies, 27 shire counties and seven unitary authorities will go to the polls in the most extraordinary circumstances. There is, as Martin Vander Weyer argues on page 25, no shortage of local issues to exercise us in the county council elections, just as the unratified Lisbon Treaty ought, in theory, to loom large in the European elections on 4 June. In practice, of course, this so-called ‘Super Thursday’ will be something altogether different: the first true snapshot of public fury at the MPs’ expenses scandal, and a measure of how deep that crisis really is. Labour is bracing itself for a punishment

This is one of the Big Questions. Nate Silver was one of the biggest winners in last year’s election and one is wary of suggesting that he’s got this question wrong. Nevertheless, I rather suspect that he may have. He suggests that, in 2012 at least, the GOP could, perhaps should, consider giving up on the hispanic vote. The argument is that Republican weakness amongst latino voters didn’t actually hurt the GOP all that much. That is, hispanic votes only make the difference in states that are trending Democratic anyway. Furthermore, there remains a path to 270 electoral college votes even if the Republicans concede Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Nadine Dorries is at the end of her tether: Does the DT [Daily Telegraph] have an agenda other than the desire to perform a public service? Why would they expose this fiasco at the start of an election campaign if the priority was not to destabilise the main political parties and to drive votes towards the minority parties? Really, this presumes that newspapers are vastly more cunning than tends to be the case. The Telegraph is motivated by something rather quaintly old-fashioned: a story. Like anything else in the paper this is designed to serve two ideas: make money and b) inform the public. Just occasionally (oh, happy day!), it’s