Plus: My video tour of my bookshelves and why I won’t indulge editors. Three times in the last few days I’ve said no to them.
One can conceive of Ministers seeking an all-party public front, and Labour objecting to responsibility with no power.
One of the most dangerous sequences in politics goes like this. “Something must be done. Here’s something. Let’s do it.”
The implications of the crisis are such that Johnson and Sunak need not so much to think outside the box as to trample it to tatters altogether.
It may be necessary, given the Coronavirus, and could even work. But Britain has a long, long record of state spending failing to turbo-charge growth.
We lost Putney, but gained loads of poorer seats in the north and midlands. That’s highlighted the tensions.
There were plenty of Yes Minister routines and scripts to live through then as now. Much of the system did not like the privatisation programme.
Eustice should start by creating an ‘Office for Natural Statistics’, to sit within DEFRA and co-ordinate data collection in a way never done before.
How the Conservatives are winning and Labour losing the working class – a pattern that the latter’s leadership candidates are set to repeat.
It is a reversion to the old tribal idea: this people good, that people bad. It challenges the notion that we are all individuals, responsible for our own behaviour.
If Britain joined in a moment of self-doubt, it voted out as a confident, self-assured, optimistic, outward-looking and independent nation state.
The second piece in our mini-series on the road to Brexit explores the challenges which the anti-EU movement overcame to survive and then thrive.
As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I am uneasy about the bail-out of Flybe. Every time a private business is bailed out by the taxpayer, the pressure grows.
The principle behind any settlement for the Sussexes should be simple: one can’t be half in and half out.
No guilt attaches to Boris Johnson, unless by betraying the industry a second time he chooses to endorse and embrace that earlier guilt.