Politics

 New York The great ceremonial game of poll dancing is gearing up for its quadrennial orgy. Headlines across the fruited plain bark out numbers and percentages in mystic confabulation. Votaries sway back and forth as the modern magi of the press repeat the results of this contemporary incarnation of taking the auspices. Was any medieval or ancient devotee of numerology more besotted by the task of squeezing significance out of numbers than our pollsters and their marks, or clients, are today? I doubt it. During the First Punic War at the naval battle of Drepana in 249 bc, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher grew impatient when the sacred chickens failed

There’s a palpable urge elsewhere in the media to see Sir Philip Green come to grief, whether as a result of allegations, denied by him, that he ‘spanked and groped a Pilates trainer’ in Tucson, Arizona, or through the collapse of his Arcadia retail empire, which includes Topshop and Burton, even if that were to involve thousands of job losses and hundreds of empty shops. So there were mixed reactions to the news that Arcadia has succeeded, after months of hardball negotiation, in signing a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) with a required majority of its creditors, including its major commercial landlords, that will cut its cost base by securing rent

It was when Matt Hancock went over to Boris Johnson that something snapped. ‘Every time a child says “I don’t believe in fairies,”’ said Peter Pan, ‘there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.’ When Matt Hancock said this week that he did believe in Boris Johnson, something in me died. I remember Matt practising with a few of us for his speech to Conservative candidate selection meetings. He needed more work on the fluency — he still does — but was outstandingly bright, quick, endearingly ambitious, full of bounce and, most important, he seemed to me a good person. Of course all of us are a mixture of

Boris Johnson’s warning that the televised Tory leadership hustings would be a ‘cacophony’ was proved correct this evening when the five candidates spent an hour talking over one another. Any private fears the former Foreign Secretary may have had about his own performance were largely unjustified, though, as he stayed reasonable and quiet throughout the debate. His worst performance came when he answered a question on Islamophobia. Johnson appeared not to have prepared an answer for this, even though his column on the burqa and his handling of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe have come up repeatedly throughout this contest. He initially argued that others had lifted and exaggerated his words ‘as

I’m not sure we learned terribly much this from the rather noisy BBC debate this evening. Each Tory candidate had rehearsed the answers so well that they sounded like pull-string dolls at times.  If you watched Ch4’s debate on Sunday – conducted along the lines of its old Fifteen-to-One gameshow – you’ll have heard many of these lines before. Michael Gove strong on his own reforming record and Corbyn-baiting, not so strong on the economy. Sajid Javid a bit more willing to use his biography as strategy, at one point having his rival candidates agree to an inquiry into Islamophobia in the Tory party (although I’m not sure how far

Tonight’s BBC debate was a chaotic affair, with the candidates regularly talking over each other. There was no defining moment. Boris Johnson avoided slipping on any banana skins while the other candidates made a concerted – and fairly effective – effort to check Rory Stewart’s progress. Before the debate, there had been much talk about Rory Stewart taking on Boris Johnson. But in the end, Stewart ended up taking on all the other candidates. He accused them of promising things that can’t be delivered. While this made him distinctive, I suspect it is an approach that won’t have gone down well with the Tory MPs he needs to persuade to