In January 2023, the electoral prospects for the Conservative government were not great. Their election supremo, Isaac Levido, informed the cabinet that the result of the next general election was “not a foregone conclusion” but the government needed “focus, discipline and delivery” and that “everything has to go right”. It would be something of an understatement to say that the subsequent 17 months have not been defined by focus, discipline and delivery from the Tories. As for everything going right, the chaotic launch of the election campaign, the half-baked policy announcements, the return of Nigel Farage, the D-Day fiasco and the resignation of the leader of the Scottish Conservatives all suggest that this test has not been met. And that is ...

Things you don’t expect to see on your telly on a Tuesday night? Douglas Ross of the Scottish Conservatives being applauded by a Glasgow audience for criticising the Scottish National Party’s obsession with independence; John Swinney (of the SNP) relying on an increasingly obstreperous Lorna Slater (of the Green Party) to stand up for said independence; and Alex Cole Hamilton, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, quietly emerging as the most impressive performer in the latest Scottish leaders’ debate. It would be hard to argue that BBC Scotland’s five-way barney, held amid the 19th-century grandeur of Glasgow University, set pulses racing. There is something secondary about this general election campaign north of the border, when so many of the issues ...

While the US newsroom has been in steady decline for decades, the past year has been particularly rough. In January, 528 journalists were sacked; more than 100 employees were let go from the Los Angeles Times alone. Less than one year after its launch, the Messenger shut down in January “effective immediately”. Vice stopped publishing after a very messy, drawn-out downfall. BuzzFeed closed. The Washington Post lost $77m in one calendar year, which is more than $200,000 a day, capping a period in which half the readership has reportedly fallen away since 2020. Meanwhile, in the UK the news media still sees something virtually unheard of in the US outside of the New York Times and certain television networks: profitability. ...

One must be careful with location metaphors in an election campaign. So far, Rishi Sunak has already given us a botched chat with the punters in a brewery and a press conference on the pier from which the Titanic set sail – to say nothing of his flight from the D-Day beaches last week. Silverstone Formula 1 race track was the setting chosen for the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto today. It was symbolic, the Prime Minister said, of the fact that the UK economy had “turned a corner”. But an equally apt analogy is that the wheels have come off. The vast conference space, where a particularly dire episode of The Apprentice had been shot shortly before Sunak took the reins ...

The gathering storm that has loomed over Europe for years broke dramatically on Monday morning, with gains for hard-right parties across several of the EU’s core nations. Mirroring that, left and green parties have suffered severe setbacks, particularly in Germany, as well as Austria, France and Greece. How did this decline come about? And how will it ever end? A "snowball effect" is emerging – a phenomenon recently articulated by the political sociologist Matthijs Rooduijn in the context of right-wing politics. The influence of the European hard right has been growing steadily over the past decade, resulting in many centre-right parties adopting and imitating some of their practises. From anti-migration and human rights to culture wars, centre-right parties believed they would ...

It’s deja vu time, as the Tories once again descend into an internal debate over whether Nigel Farage is an existential risk to their party – or its potential saviour. The threat of Reform has increased significantly since Farage unexpectedly announced last week that he was standing as a candidate in Clacton-on-Sea and resuming his leadership of the party he founded. One Redfield and Wilton poll now shows Reform leading among over-55s – the target demographic for the Conservative’s “core vote” strategy; another has the insurgent right-wing party ahead of the Tories in 40 key “Red Wall” seats. It is now only a matter of time before Reform, currently on 13 per cent on the BBC’s poll tracker, achieves “crossover” with the ...

The European Union was created, in large part, to prevent another war between France and Germany; and its development soon became entrusted to these two former enemies. France took the lead on political issues and Germany, as it grew richer, provided the money. They formed an alliance, through which all important EU business had to pass and be approved, before it was then embedded – in ways most citizens who pay for it don’t understand – in national legislation. The Franco-German motor has run the Union in this way ever since – jerkily in the last couple of years, because President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz got on badly and only recently (and unconvincingly) pledged new initiatives. But they still personified ...

During Labour’s troubled 1983 general election campaign, the party’s general secretary Jim Mortimer announced without warning at a daily press conference: “The unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party and speaks for the party.” This farcical scene – unrivalled for 41 years – has now been matched. History will record last weekend as the moment that cabinet ministers were forced to deny that Rishi Sunak would resign ahead of an election that he called. “Absolutely, there should be no question of anything other than that,” replied Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, when asked whether Sunak would still be leading the Conservative Party on 4 July. Journalists only got the chance ...