Interview: Charles Moore describes how Thatcher was driven mad by her own side

Thatcher’s biographer captures the extreme precariousness of her position even as she confounded the Left and scored some of her greatest triumphs.

Andrew Gimson’s Conference Diary: Prince Henry’s cap fits

Plus: maintaining a sense of decorum and how a conference pass crisis was averted.

Andrew Gimson’s Conference Diary: Let’s treasure Corbyn

Plus: the problems with talking about Boris, and the benefits of drinking Guinness.

This Burke is the ideal present for anyone interested in politics

The new Everyman edition of Edmund Burke’s writings, edited by Jesse Norman MP, will delight everyone except “sophisters, economists and calculators”.

Profile: Manchester – venue of next week’s Conservative conference, and city of the Northern Powerhouse, which could transform it

George Osborne’s project, though mocked by some, is already changing the politics of the North, by recruiting influential Labour politicians.

Volkswagen warns us against the sanctimonious pretence that business people are saintly

Conservatives should not be surprised that manufacturers try to get round onerous regulations. It is human nature to be tempted to make life easier for oneself.

It’s about time Piers Gaveston stopped causing trouble

Boris Johnson and David Cameron are among those who have suffered by association with the most offensive favourite in English royal history.

In defence of Corbyn

The new Labour leader is easily mocked. But he has done us the service of expressing, in Parliament, a widespread mood of febrile dissatisfaction.

The Eagle twins show why Labour has become so limited

Maria and Angela Eagle have many admirable qualities, but their political generation is so unknown to the wider public that it left the vacuum now filled by Jeremy Corbyn.

Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Corbyn dared to be serious, sincere, worthy, wordy, puritanical and dull

The new Leader of the Opposition adopted a highly defensive strategy, and avoided asking about the economy.

Profile: Tom Watson, the man who might yet save the Labour Party

The West Bromwich MP, who condemned Blair for leading Labour into the desert of pragmatism, may deliver the party from Corbyn.

How Queen Margaret destroyed the British monarchy by accident

Commentators who think Elizabeth II has not done much to preserve the monarchy tend not to have imagined what another monarch might have been like.

Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: the Commons becomes almost excessively dignified

After tributes to the Queen, Cameron added one to Harman, and displayed a positively Blairite command of the moral high ground.

Interview: Andrew Mitchell – “I have always believed that the absolute bar on having anything to do with Assad is wrong”.

The former Development Secretary says that the answer to the refugee crisis is not to recreate Syria in Europe. It is to recreate Syria – beginning with safe havens.

If Britain is to be more generous to refugees, that has to be a British decision

There is no grand, overarching solution to the acute refugee crisis now afflicting Europe. Politicians in each country will have to carry their voters with them.