Politics

Never has there been a politician to have fallen so foul of the Eric Morecambe mistake of playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, as William Hague. The former Conservative leader spent the first years of this century as a hardline EU-sceptic and telling voters that lax immigration policies were turning swathes of the country into ‘a foreign land’. The electorate at the time proved largely impervious to these arguments, perhaps because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to be delivering better living standards and most of the country had not yet experienced the community-shredding delights of hyper-migration. But following a terrible beating by Blair

When we used to think of Tory marriages, we mostly thought of when they went horribly wrong – when the Honourable Member was caught with his trousers down, as when, in 1992, David Mellor was found ‘in flagrante’ with a resting ‘actress’ who saw fit to sell her story to a tabloid newspaper. The ghastly Mellor made not just his poor wife and children, but his poor wife’s poor parents all line up grinning like chimps by a five-bar gate to prove how solid his marriage was. (‘A five-bar-gate moment’ is still press slang for displays of fake domestic bliss by shameless politicians, while the ceaseless self-serving confessions of the

If you think Donald Trump’s victory is hard enough on Kamala Harris’s campaign staff, spare a thought for the world’s climate activists and their assorted luvvie hangers-on. Just Stop Oil lost no time in spraying the US embassy in Battersea, claiming that democracy has been ‘hijacked by corporate interests and billionaires’. Billy Porter, an actor presenting the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot Prize, said he had been ‘crying all day’ over the result. The activists and lobbyists heading for the Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku over the next few days shouldn’t worry too much – contrary to popular imagination, US carbon emissions per capita continued to fall over the