British politics

What does the European centre-right stand for?

29 July 2023 9:00 am

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

27 August 2022 9:00 am

‘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

16 May 2020 9:00 am

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 after the defeat of the Conservatives in 1964. ‘His clothes were truly tragic,’ said Chips Channon

Rab Butler was too indecisive (and badly dressed) to be Prime Minister

21 November 2015 9:00 am

‘The best prime minister we never had’ is not an epithet exclusive to Rab Butler. Widely applied to the late…

Still life in the old slogan: Maurice Saatchi’s famous 1978 poster was adapted three decades later when the unemployment figures were announced in March 2009

Even the people who make political adverts aren’t sure they work

14 February 2015 9:00 am

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

13 July 2013 9:00 am

Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister