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Rafael BehrThe Guardian |
The House of Commons is built for confrontation, with rows of benches facing each other across an aisle. When the original Victorian chamber was...
When Keir Starmer met Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Rio last month he declared that Britain should build a “pragmatic and serious relationship”...
Election defeats are to some degree self-inflicted, so the first place that opposition parties should look for someone to blame for their...
If Rishi Sunak had clung to power until the very end of the five-year term that Boris Johnson won in 2019, he would still be prime minister today....
When MPs vote this Friday on assisted dying, they will be trying to answer two questions folded into one. First comes the ethical choice. Is it...
It is hardly advanced political science to observe that governments are more popular when giving people stuff than when taking it away. Junior...
The 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was not commemorated much in Britain last weekend. It is no Poppy Day. The unravelling of the...
Donald Trump’s record of refusal to concede defeat after the last US election should have disqualified him from running in this one. His criminal...
What matters more to the British public: the health service or the European convention on human rights (ECHR)? It isn’t a trick question. The...
There is plenty of action in British politics but not a lot of movement. The government’s unsteady start in office and a Tory leadership contest...
No prime minister plans to spend the first hundred days in Downing Street learning how not to govern for the next hundred. The intensity of the job...
The Conservative party has become a weak tribute act to itself. Candidates in a leadership contest belt out classic Tory tunes to an audience that...
An unwritten law of Westminster mechanics states that power, in the absence of a countervailing force, gravitates to the Treasury. The governing...
Two summers ago, when the Conservatives had just defenestrated Boris Johnson and were rallying around Liz Truss as his successor, there was little...
The defining promise of Labour’s general election campaign – the single word “change” – was modest and ambitious at the same time; easy to...
Westminster is witnessing an outbreak of Torschlusspanik. The translation from German is “panic at the gate shutting”, commonly associated with...
The last four times the Tories chose their leader, the rest of the UK was obliged to pay attention because the winner of the process would...
Rishi Sunak didn’t choose an early July election so that defeat might spare him the hassle of hosting tomorrow’s summit of the European...