Society

The Tories are partying like it’s 1992. Sir John Major is being wheeled out today to reinforce what Michael Fallon and others have said: the SNP are dangerous for Britain. Labour will continue with its ‘NHS week’ by promising more money and outlining what they will do on entering government. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Major moment While Tony Blair’s standing has gone down since he left office, John Major’s has increased. He is now looked upon fondly by many Conservatives, coming from a time when the party won majorities and didn’t have to worry

I know we’re all supposed to be spitting blood over Katie Hopkins’ Sun column about African migrants. In fact, anyone who isn’t currently testing the durability of their computer keyboard by bashing out Hopkins-mauling tweets risks having their moral decency called into question. Hating Katie has become the speediest shortcut to the moral highground in this slacktivist age, when people prefer to make a virtual advert of their moral correctness than to do anything so tough as try to change the world outside their bedroom door. And if you aren’t hating Katie, if you aren’t partaking in this orgy of competitive benevolence, what is wrong with you? And yet, I find myself

You have to hand it to Justine Thornton. After her interview, where she alerted the world to Red Ed’s status as a bit of a boulevardier having secretly dated the host of a dinner party she attended, the Daily Mail warmed to the theme. It ran a front cover picturing his conquests: Alice Miles, Stephanie Flanders, and more. And an inside spread (below). But as Isabel Hardman noted at the time, it was hardly a slur. “Multiple women have found man attractive” is, on balance, not the worst headline. — Isabel Hardman (@IsabelHardman) April 9, 2015 And the relevance to the campaign? Let’s consult the guru of gender politics, Boris Johnson. A few years

From ‘Some reflections of an alien enemy: the contradiction between being and feeling an Englishman, by a Czech’, The Spectator, 17 April 1915: What I most regret having lost is my previous unawareness of there being any difference between me and Englishmen. In saying we, I used to mean we English people; somehow or other I find myself now compelled to distinguish between me, a foreigner, and you, English people. Quite proper that it should be so; yet at the same time I feel as though I had lost my birthright. The disappearance of my instinctive sense of identity with my fellow-men, qnite irrespective of their nationality, fills me with

Into each day, outrage must fall. Today Iain Duncan Smith has performed the service of upsetting everyone by telling Sky News that zero-hours contracts should be rebranded ‘flexible-hours contracts’. The Work and Pensions Secretary said: ‘I think, with respect, the media and others have got this completely wrong, the flexible-hours contracts I’m talking about which are named ‘zero-hours contracts’, they are taking by people who want that flexibility. The reality is what we’ve had from Labour is a series of scare stories about these.’ Whatever you fancy calling these contracts, they have been rising in salience as a political issue to the extent that the Tories, who did regard them as