A secret: politicians don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t mean that we are all stupid, or lazy (I can sense my father’s arched eye-brows, as I make that claim). But I mean that it is impossible for politicians to know enough. The most successful ones, of course, are brilliant at concealing this: they […]
Transcript The greatest damage to our nation over the past 10 years has not been done by the enemy: it has been done by ourselves. And it has not been done, contrary to what we often believe, by what we have not done. It is not the result of the money we failed to raise, […]
Last Monday was the first revolt I have seen in Parliament. It broke almost without warning. Things had seemed calm until then: three and a half years to the election, the conference tranquil, the Prime Minister popular, Gaddafi dead, the Foreign Secretary on his way to the Commonwealth meeting in Australia. Then the back-bench business […]
The last time David Cameron came to Penrith and the Border, it was 48 hours before the 2010 election. Just before eleven o’clock, I was outside the Border Cod in Longtown. And then, in an instant, young special advisers were spilling from hire cars; plain-clothes policeman materialised behind bus-stops, ear-pieces crackling; and a giant purple […]