Just after 10pm last Thursday, the BBC was allowed to broadcast the results of the exit poll it had been conducting outside voting stations during election day. Its conclusion that there would be a clear Conservative majority stunned studio guests ...
Today, after a campaign many of us had begun to feel would never end, British voters elect the MPs who will rule or misrule them for the next five years. Polls going back two years or more indicate that Labour and the Conservatives are within a ...
I was standing in Stamford, Lincolnshire on Saturday, admiring as always the architecture so splendidly Georgian it is used for filming Jane Austen adaptations. But that day the Palladian proportions were backdrop to something infinitely older in ...
Another week, another mass drowning of miserable people, another ostentatious lamentation from politicians and pontificators, all the way up to The Pontiff himself. As the author of a novel about sad beachings and European ethnic angst, which ...
Guardian journalist Zoe Williams is worried. "Is the left in Britain still alive and well?" she asks. Apparently, "no one quite knows where it has gone, or what it looks like." There is, she fears, a cosmic imbalance - "Just when ...
Britain's new multi-party politics has pundits and bookies salivating at the prospect of minority governments, hung parliaments, awkward alliances, and kingmakers after the May 7th general election. What most of them do not seem to realise is that ...
The Speaker of the House of Commons is the most powerful commoner in the United Kingdom. On the 26th of March, an attempt to change the rules for electing the Speaker of the House of Commons was defeated by 228 votes to 202. The present Speaker, ...
As May 7th bulks ever bigger on the political horizon, the UKIP omnibus has developed serious rattles. As the campaign pounds punishingly on, the insurgents" inexperience is starting to show, and it will take daring driving to stay on the road. ...
Multiculturalism is dead - long live multiculturalism? Another year, another denunciation of multiculturalism, another denunciation of that denunciation, another continuation of multiculturalism. It is a dead idea that doesn"t die, even when ...
When Mohammed Emwazi went out from west London to Syria literally to carve out a new career as "Jihadi John", masked avenger of non-wrongs, England lost an "extremely kind, extremely gentle" idealist. That is, according to a group ...
The dramatic departure from office of the Scottish Catholic Cardinal Keith O"Brien, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and gross hypocrisy, has all the ingredients of a potboiler play"lurid plot, supposed sexual shenanigans, political ...
On February 4th, the University of Leicester announced that the bones unearthed last August beneath a former parking lot in Leicester really were what had been hoped"the remains of King Richard III"and the audience of journalists burst into ...
