Politics

And once more the polls have got it wrong. For months French pollsters confidently predicted that the first round of voting to find the centre-right candidate to represent Les Républicains in next year’s presidential election was a straight shootout between Nicolas Sarkozy and Alain Juppé. The other five contenders? There to make up the numbers in the three televised debates. One or two whispers began to emerge a few weeks ago that François Fillon was gaining ground but few believed that the man who served as Sarkozy’s Prime Minister nearly a decade ago would romp to victory with 44.1 per cent of the vote. Juppé was a distant second, with

There were two items on BBC radio this morning which rather summed up the Corporation thinking about the State of the World. One was a brief but telling discussion on the Broadcasting House programme as to whether our political discussion now is getting to the point where we can’t actually air differences at all;  that, after Brexit and the Trump election, we are so utterly divided ideologically that common ground is impossible to find. It was an interesting conversation between Catherine Mayer, the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, and Iain Martin, who, while a Brexiteer, is also opposed to Trump. Fine, except that it was preceded by the secular

Michael Gove makes a semi-persuasive case for patriotism in The Times this week. Brexit and Trumpism are largely just assertions of the basic, healthy human impulse to love one’s homeland, and to defy the international structures, and liberal sneering, that denigrate this impulse. The reality is that the moral status of patriotism depends on which nation you belong to. It depends whether your nation espouses liberal values. If it does, then your patriotism is linked to a wider-than-national creed. If it does, then your allegiance is also to an international cause: you respect and love your country as a particular expression of this creed. After fascism, the idea of national allegiance

Labour tasted victory today in the Commons. MPs voted 253 to 37 in favour of Pat Glass’s private member’s bill to stop the government reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 600, as part of the boundary change review. The bill will now face a second vote, where the Tories are confident they can thwart it. Figures in the party put Labour’s success down to many Tory MPs having returned to their constituencies, as well as a successful whipping operation from Nick Brown While Glass has said she has no personal agenda — given that she is stepping down as an MP at the next election — a u-turn on the plans would certainly

Nobody knows anything. William Goldman’s famous first law of the movie business — that no one can say before the fact what’s going to be a hit or a flop — is our new rule of political punditry. Pollsters, experts, markets tell us with scientific certainty what’s going to happen. Then the voters come along and ruin everything. Brexit. Trump. Ed Balls and Strictly Come Dancing. Who knew? As last Tuesday dawned in New York, the US election was deemed a formality. Newsrooms had lovingly compiled their historic ‘First Woman President’ editions. The final polls pointed to a clear Hillary win. And then the actual votes rolled in, uncannily like