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Rafael BehrThe Guardian |
“Look, if people don’t like the mug, they don’t have to get the mug,” Ed Miliband said, exasperated. We were on a train to Manchester for a...
It would be charitable to ignore Liz Truss. Attention is her addiction and any dose, even laced with scorn, sustains the toxic belief that she has...
Rishi Sunak is not a deep-cover agent of the Labour party, but politics might not look very different if the prime minister were on a secret mission...
Here is a simple maths problem: together a bat and ball cost £1.10. The bat costs one pound more than the ball. How much is the ball? It doesn’t...
When Thomas Mair was arrested for the murder of Jo Cox MP in 2016, he told police he was a “political activist”. Asked to identify himself in...
It is one of the standard nightmares. An unseen predator is bearing down on you but your legs won’t move. Terror surges up from your lungs but you...
People who don’t join political parties imagine that membership is an expression of opinions held in common. It starts that way, but over time,...
A reliable test of a party’s campaign readiness is the pub justification question. Imagine friends having a drink on the eve of polling. Like most...
Nine months is a long time to hold your breath. The identity of the next US president won’t be known until 6 November, but already the prospect of...
The sky was reliably clear over May Day parades in the Soviet Union, not because it never rains in Moscow but because the Kremlin would order the...
Nicotine is a brilliantly malevolent molecule. It stimulates reward receptors in the brain that light up with satisfaction at a job well done. The...
British prime ministers do not, as a matter of protocol, express preferred outcomes in US elections. But there is no convention limiting the number of...
A quiz question for politics nerds: what connects Eastleigh, Salisbury, Bexhill and Battle, South Thanet, Bromley and Chislehurst, Buckingham and –...
Britain is a country that tends to elect Conservative governments, while trending towards Labour. There is a tension in that condition, making the...
This year, countries with a combined population of about 4 billion – half of all the people in the world – will hold elections. That would be...
There is an ingenious remedy to the deepening crisis engulfing Rishi Sunak. The prime minister could pass an act of parliament declaring that the...
If there had never been a referendum on EU membership, Britain would still be divided between “remainers” and “leavers”. They would just be...
Rishi Sunak will not “stop the boats” carrying asylum seekers across the Channel. He still promotes that general ambition, but with synthetic...
Another week, another front opens in the Conservative party’s multipronged campaign against facts. In Wednesday’s autumn statement, Jeremy Hunt...
Rishi Sunak’s decision to bring David Cameron back into government is a bold act of surrender. It is an admission that the only way out of the mess...
Among the many silly splendours in the state opening of parliament, one detail conveys the weirdness of British democracy more precisely than the...
Who is the more trustworthy custodian of machines capable of diverting the course of human civilisation: Elon Musk or the Chinese Communist party?...
There is not enough argument in British politics, although there is no shortage of dispute. Maybe the distinction is pedantic. The two words can be...
C ombine confidence of success with dread of disappointment, and you get the nervous excitement at Labour’s annual conference this week. On paper,...
T he Conservatives have embraced the spirit of opposition with the arrogance of a party that is used to being in government. Their conference in...
R ishi Sunak has been an MP since 2015 and has never known the indignity of opposition, or even the frustration of a slow track to ministerial office....
A perverse consensus is emerging in British politics that simultaneously accepts and denies that Brexit has failed. The prime minister and the leader...
P rime minister might not be the hardest job in Britain, but it combines the highest level of responsibility with the lowest barrier to entry for...