Politics

I don’t know if ‘Leave’ supporters will win. With the young abstaining and the old voting in a low-turnout referendum, it is just about possible that they could. But it is already dismally clear how they will react if they lose: they won’t accept the result. Nigel Farage was proud to admit that he would be a bad loser. ‘In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way,’ he told the Mirror. ‘If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.’ The old-fashioned among you might have thought that in any electoral contest the side with the most votes wins. How out of touch

Just over a year ago, Ed Miliband had the world at his feet. The MP for Doncaster North was one of the most powerful men in the country — hoping to lead Labour to victory in the General Election. One lost election later and a lot has changed for Red Ed. Now a backbencher, Miliband doesn’t appear to hold much sway anymore — even in his constituency. Miliband has dropped from number four to number 40 in the Doncaster ‘Power List‘ which lists the 50 most influential movers and shakers in the area. At number 40, Miliband can at least take heart that he has been deemed more influential than Radio Sheffield’s

Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’ Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the

In normal times, the government clears the decks ahead of the Queen’s Speech. It wants to ensure maximum publicity for its legislative agenda. But these are not normal times: there’s an EU referendum campaign raging. Number 10 are being quite clear, as I write in The Sun today, that with less than six weeks to go to polling day, there won’t be a campaign ceasefire this week. ‘It is too close now’ one senior source tells me. So, why is the Queen’s Speech taking place at all? One IN supporting Minister complains that it is ‘moronic’ to be having it now, as it means that the measures announced it are

A while ago, I promised to write about my response to allegations by Andrew Neather that the government had covered up immigration. I got waylaid a bit, but in my Daily Telegraph column today I explain why I’m not convinced by it. To believe that mass immigration was a deliberate policy to screw up the Tories would imply that someone in power had a clue what was going on. No one did. It was a massive accident: the arrival of four million more people over 15 years. But here’s the thing: have the shops run out of food? Has M&S run out of underwear to sell? Has Ryanair started to