British politics
Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?
His kiss-and-tell memoir implies that the past five Tory prime ministers all feared him. But the longtime Chair of the 1922 Committee was in reality no ‘kingmaker’
Politics as Ripping Yarns: the breathless brio of Boris Johnson’s memoir
Like a cross between Aeneas and Biggles, our intrepid hero travels the world, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city
Unless the Treasury is tamed, there’s no solution to Britain’s problems
Two left-wing political analysts seek to bury the whole economic approach taken by the Conservatives since 2010 – or perhaps even 1979
One damned thing after another: Britain’s crisis-ridden century so far
The Iraq war, the financial crisis, Brexit and Covid have seen many prime ministers blown off course. Will Keir Starmer be any luckier than his predecessors?
What does the European centre-right stand for?
Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), dropped the bomb last weekend. In a TV interview, Merz…
The visionary genius of Harold Wilson
‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…
The delicate balance between God and Caesar in modern Britain
At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden…
Rab Butler was too indecisive (and badly dressed) to be Prime Minister
‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late…
Even the people who make political adverts aren’t sure they work
It is a common prejudice about modern politics that it is all focus groups and spin, all public relations and…
Disraeli, by Douglas Hurd; The Great Rivalry, by Dick Leonard - review
Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister
