Five years ago, one hot spring night in the Canaries, my partner and I stared at our phones in a hotel restaurant and awaited the result of Meaningful Vote 2. We were talking about what we were watching, and occasionally read out particularly funny tweets to each other. Nonetheless, we chose to give up a night of our holiday to watch events in Westminster, 1,800 miles away, just in case the government fell. I can’t remember at this distance what the point of Meaningful Vote 2 actually was, but I do know it’s not consequential enough to make it worth bothering to check. The government did not, on that occasion, fall. The last few years have been full of nights like that ...

Western politics is trapped in a vicious cycle of technocratic rule and populist backlash. We seem fated to endlessly oscillate between the forces of establishment and insurgency, leaving our politics and everyday life ever more debased and degraded in the process. Neither technocrats nor populists offer a transformative political economy that can arrest decline, let alone bring about national renewal. American politics has reached the latest turning point in this cycle: the newly announced Trump-Vance ticket has all the rhetoric of radical change and none of the political capacity to deliver it, unless it ditches disruption in favour of building a novel "new deal". Populism at its best provides a corrective to the errors of 21st-century governance – the contempt for ...

Steady as She Goes or Shake Things Up? These are the two camps, broadly, that voters have been coalescing around since the Financial Crisis, if not before. A desire for stability and security above all else is what sent so many mortgage-owners and those of middling affluence into Labour's arms at the 2024 election. They are the Steady as She Goes voters - they want parties that preserve their position. It’s not that life is easy for them. It’s rather that what they’ve built they want to preserve.  But those with little built, those overwhelmingly irate with the system, more apathetic than enthused about detailed policy solutions, interested in dramatic rather than incremental change, did not show up for Labour. While ...

People who want to be MPs really want to be MPs. They are willing to try and try again: in the footnotes of the careers of many now-prominent politicians, one finds unsuccessful first tilts at parliament. Often, they spend years in pursuit of elected office; Liz Truss was at it for a decade before securing in 2010 the South West Norfolk seat she just lost. Years after defeat, many candidates can’t stop themselves from returning to the fray. As this new parliament has been gradually sworn in, there’s been plenty of attention paid to the former MPs (Douglas Alexander, Emma Reynolds and Heidi Alexander, to name a few) returning to the Commons. But what about the almost-MPs of the past who ...

Vaughan Gething’s four months as Welsh first minister will be remembered for his party mismanagement, the ceaseless scandals and whiff of decadence. Every week his leadership fell further down a scandal-strewn hole, his reputation diminishing at the same rate as his authority. He failed to unite his party, assuage critics or offer a message beyond being the first black leader of a nation in Europe. He has now resigned. When Jeremy Miles, his opponent in the winter contest to succeed Mark Drakeford as party leader, refused to say he had confidence in Gething three times yesterday, it was clear that the walls were closing in. Earlier today, Miles and three other Senedd Members (MSs) resigned and called for Gething to go. ...

In spite of Sunday's loss, Gareth Southgate's reputation as one of the best managers this country has ever had is cemented. And as has been widely reported, Southgate is the only England manager in history to qualify for two major tournament finals. It's hard to overstate the magnitude of this achievement. Simply put, as the ever-laconic Harry Kane did last month: “We haven’t won anything as a nation for a long, long time.” While it is true that under Southgate, the men’s national team have come the closest of any previous iteration to win a major international trophy since 1966, and this is the first time they have reached a final on foreign soil, has anyone remembered when Sarina Wiegman and ...

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has hit the ground running. Since entering Downing Street, the new prime minister has been keen to give the impression that a new era has begun. There have been surprise ministerial appointments from outside of parliament, and a flurry of policy announcements, belying the accusation that the party is devoid of ideas. The question is whether these ideas will work: are they enough to deliver the “decade of renewal” and rebuild a dilapidated public realm in an era of fiscal constraints and high interest rates? Perhaps the party's intellectual hinterland is the same as its electoral support: broad but thinly spread, wide but shallow. Much of the likely legislative agenda will take the form of structural, legalistic ...

Government, Keir Starmer said as he stood on the steps of Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time last week, should “treat every single person with respect”. “Whether you voted Labour or not,” he went on, “especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.” This should be no big deal: it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to say when you win an election. Margaret Thatcher said something similar in her “where this is discord, may we bring harmony” speech, and it’s fair to say that neither her record as Prime Minister, nor the fact Starmer is channelling her words, are likely to convince those who feel suspicious about the new guy’s ...