Politics

If Michael Howard were a football manager, he would be entitled to some very bitter post-match expletives. Tony Blair’s respectable-sounding majority of 67 cannot cover for the brutal geometry of the election result. Labour, with a mere 36 per cent of the popular vote, lower than any previously commanded by a British government, secured 356 seats; the Tories, with 32.3 per cent of the vote, a mere 197 seats. As if that were not reason enough to cry ‘We wuz robbed!’, 41 of Labour’s seats are in Scotland; the result being that Tony Blair will now be wholly reliant on Scottish MPs to rubber-stamp English legislation which will have no

The election has brought out the tension between Scotland and England (see last week’s Notes). The Conservatives won more votes than Labour in England and, as before, managed only one seat in Scotland. Labour has 41 seats in Scotland, without which it would lack an overall majority. England heavily subsidises Scotland, allowing, for instance, state-funded long-term care of the elderly north of the border which cannot be afforded south of it. Scottish MPs can and do vote on English matters (the ban on hunting, top-up fees for English students) whereas, because of devolution, neither they nor English MPs can vote on similar Scottish matters. And there is the likelihood that

Another week of this, and I think I would have ended up voting Labour. Ann Toward, the widow of Guardsman Anthony Wakefield, who was killed near Amarah, southern Iraq, on Monday, said that Tony Blair was to blame for her husband’s death. Although it is obviously true that if there had been no war in Iraq, Guardsman Wakefield would not have died there, it is unfair to blame a British prime minister for the death of a volunteer professional soldier. Ms Toward herself has said that her husband wanted to go to Iraq, against her pleading: ‘He said it was his job to go to Iraq.’ There is no suggestion

He was always Maggie’s favourite. She loved him. He adored her. But as in most hot romances, there was a cooling. And finally the embers died. Essex Man had found another. In slightly less than a decade a Tory majority of 17,000 in Braintree had turned, incredibly, into a 358 majority for Labour. Braintree, with an electorate of 82,000, is now the second most marginal majority in England and may well hold a clue to how the rest of the South votes. Mrs Thatcher had a special place in Essex Man’s heart. She had given him a chance to buy his own council house plus the confidence and tax breaks

I sometimes wonder if the British media know anything at all about the Catholic Church, except that it disapproves of condoms. Every discussion of the late Pope’s reputation and of his successor, Cardinal Ratzinger, is brought back to this question. Obviously it is an important issue, but why does it dominate to the exclusion of everything else (such as Jesus, for example, the nature of redemption, and other questions that have excited the interest of billions for 2,000 years)? One answer is that the condom ban tells lots of modern people that they mustn’t do what they like doing, but this is true of a great deal of religious teaching

This is the first general election campaign since 1983 in which I have not been the editor of a publication (or, in 1992, the deputy editor). And in all previous campaigns since my birth I was vicariously involved because my father was always a Liberal candidate. My new detachment gives me the possibly illusory feeling that I at last understand what elections are really like. Among journalists (and, of course, candidates), elections are times of frenetic activity. Huge effort is put into covering them truly, madly, deeply. Politicians and proprietors worry tremendously what the papers say. For almost everyone else in Britain, though, elections are a quiet period, one in