The hopes of those who want Britain to stay in the EU have been dashed by this election. There has been no Brexit backlash. The party that wanted to overturn the result, the Liberal Democrats, have had a minimal impact on the campaign. By the time Britain next goes to the polls in a general
I divide my time between two constituencies, the first a rock-solid Conservative seat in the south-east of England, the other a Labour-held marginal (which the Tories expected to take) in the north-east of England. And the thing I have not seen in either place is a nice blue placard or poster saying ‘Conservative’. Not one
Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my niece appeared at the door, pale and serious. ‘There’s been another terrorist attack in London,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’ The veins of the men in my husband’s family run with a sort of event-activated coolant.
There’s an expression used in football to describe an approach to the game that discounts the virtues of elegance, style, beauty, originality and daring, and — concentrates on blocking, frustrating and grinding down. It’s called ‘winning ugly’. While degrading the game, it often works. But having won a match, a football team does not have
By the time you read this, the campaign will have drawn fractiously to its close, so here is a strong overall impression drawn from it, which stands whatever the result. Watching a large number of debates and question and answer sessions with party leaders and the public, I noticed, even more insistent than in the
The last limp gambit of the Tory campaign was a promise to revive the Board of Trade. As a way of grabbing attention and diverting the ‘Corbyn’s not such a bad bloke’ tendency, you’d have to say it lacked oomph. But was it a good idea? First formally constituted in 1696, the Board itself ceased
