“End of the Brexit era? Burnham’s pivot back to Europe”, Anadolu Ajansı, 7 October 2026.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham surprised everyone – including many of his Cabinet colleagues – when, in his speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference, he unexpectedly reopened the question of the UK’s relationship with the EU.

Brexit, he declared, had “done more harm than good,” and, if we wanted to “restore a higher level of growth and prosperity,” then we needed a “clear path … into the rest of the century.” Accordingly, he continued, he would soon “take the opportunity … to lay out to the country what … the different options are” after which he would “see if we could find consensus around one which will give us clarity about our position, and the future of the continent we live in.”

In so doing, Burnham broke a taboo that has, since 2016, effectively condemned the majority of the UK’s center-left politicians to going no further than promising, just as his predecessor Keir Starmer did, to “make Brexit work” – largely out of fear of appearing to want to renege on what Leave campaigners still insist on calling the “will of the people” as expressed in the 2016 referendum.

Following the polls and the money

That Burnham’s words did not trigger a backlash amongst “the people” (or, tellingly perhaps, a detailed defense of Brexit’s benefits by its advocates) is testament to the fact that a majority of Brits have, since early in 2021, been telling pollsters that the decision the country came to 10 years ago was the wrong one. Currently, some 57% of voters, including 23% of those who voted Leave, agree, while some 55% say they want to rejoin the EU. And Burnham’s decision arguably makes even more electoral sense when one realizes that around eight out of 10 voters whose support he needs for Labour (or else to vote tactically at the next election so as to keep the Conservatives and Reform UK out of office) support rejoining the EU.

Just as importantly, his intervention makes economic sense. Indeed, it is likely that the research suggesting Brexit has done severe damage to the UK’s trade, growth and public finances is (along with this shift in public opinion and the concern that the USA is no longer such a reliable ally) one of the main reasons why Burnham has, after just 10 weeks in the job, concluded that more has to be done to reverse or at least further mitigate the colossal act of self-harm that Brexit constituted.

Under Starmer, the Labour government was pursuing a series of incremental moves to reduce the trade friction created by the UK’s departure. But no economist thinks that this strategy – much like the various trade deals the UK signed with other countries under the Conservatives – will add much more than a fraction of a percent to its GDP. In truth, the only move that will make more than a marginal difference will be joining not just the customs union (just like Türkiye) but the single market too. Yet to do that without going the whole hog and rejoining would mean the UK becoming, in the jargon, a “rule-taker” – something such a large economy with a particularly deep attachment to its sovereignty would probably find it impossible to accept both in principle and in practice.

The smart money is on Burnham inserting into Labour’s next election manifesto a commitment not to rejoin per se but to opening negotiations on a new, closer relationship with the EU, with any deal that might be arrived at being subject to a referendum.

High price of re-entry

Winning such a vote, however, is far from a racing certainty, especially if it were to involve full membership. That is because the current member states would almost certainly refuse to grant the UK most of the opt-outs and the budget rebate that it enjoyed before it formally left in 2020 – and current polling suggests that support for rejoining among the British electorate drops significantly once they are presented with that scenario.

Moreover, this assumes that every EU member state (and, under the rules, it really would have to be every member state) would welcome the UK back into the fold, and that cannot be guaranteed.

For one thing, European governments will worry about the possibility that any decision on the part of the UK to rejoin could be reversed by a future Eurosceptic government. For another, any deal would need to be negotiated with an EU whose largest members, France and Germany, might at that stage be run by two far-right parties (the French RN and the German AfD) whose affection for and affinity with Britain are, to say the least, questionable.

Against that, we should remember that Britain is still a relatively rich middle power with an outsized diplomatic and defense presence. And the positive reaction to Burnham’s opening gambit by France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, is a reminder that many European politicians and publics would, whatever the obstacles negotiations might throw up, be happy to see the UK finally admitting to itself that, in an increasingly unstable economic and geopolitical environment, being inside the EU is the safest place to be.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/opinion/end-of-the-brexit-era-burnhams-pivot-back-to-europe/4081100

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“Burnham’s proposed electoral reform could have unpredictable effects”, LSE Blog, 6 October 2026.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

Far be it from me – a supporter of proportional representation and even, I confess, compulsory voting – to throw shade on the first Prime Minister in my lifetime to commit to electoral reform. But before we get carried away, we should perhaps remind ourselves that in real-time, real-life politics there is many a slip twixt cup and lip.

When we talk about electoral reform, we are inevitably talking about a series of sometimes less-than-uplifting compromises cobbled together by historically situated actors pursuing their own best interests in conditions of greater or lesser uncertainty. As a result, anything can happen – and, as they say, probably will.

Proportional Representation – ideals vs reality

Scrapping first past the post FPTP in favour of a potentially more proportional system (PR) has been something of a pipedream for so long: the 2011 referendum doesn’t count since it was on the Alternative Vote – a non-proportional system that Nick Clegg himself had previously called “a miserable little compromise”? As a result, we have got into the habit of considering reform at a fairly lofty level of normative abstraction, revolving, for instance, around discussion of what would be the fairest way to, say, improve representation, extend participation and promote greater openness – all without sacrificing strong and stable government.

It’s therefore been easy to forget that, as soon as it becomes a serious prospect, reality and human creativity are likely to interfere with the wishes of those seeking the fulfilment of their cherished ideals. Fortunately, perhaps, it can also mess with the best laid plans of those who seek to control the process and the outcome to their own advantage.

The likeliest means by which those managing that process will try to ensure they end up as its beneficiaries (or, at the very least, not its victims) will involve, first, deciding the terms of reference and the composition of Burnham’s putative National Commission.

The fact that the Conservative Party has decided not to take part will admittedly make it harder to argue that there is some kind of consensus around whatever it recommends. But it should make it easier for those parties who do get involved to ensure its recommendations, even if they don’t do them as much good as they’d hoped, don’t actively harm them. While Reform UK seem to have gone cold on PR recently, they might therefore want to think again before they join the Tories’ boycott.

Once the process begins, parties that do agree to take part will, fairly obviously, push for whichever system that they believe will favour them, be it non-proportional (essentially AV or SV) or proportional (essentially List, MMP or STV).  Then, depending on their size, they will also start lobbying for whichever “electoral formula” (essentially, the equation used to allocate seats to parties after votes are cast) tends to advantage either smaller or larger parties.

Once the system is decided upon, however, (and assuming, if only for the sake of argument, that it is a variant of PR) the biggest battle will likely be over the threshold which Parties are required to cross in order to be awarded seats in Parliament: if you go low (as in the Netherlands) you may see even more parties represented at Westminster than is already the case; if you go high (like Germany) you’ll probably get fewer. Indeed, even the most hardened Tory opponents of PR might be reconciled to it if they could only be made to realize the extent to which proportionality can be eroded via the ‘right’ decision on a percentage of the vote required to entitle the recipient to seats.

Reformers can game the system – but they can’t guarantee the outcome

For all that the process of reform can be manipulated, however, the good news is that experience the world over suggests that whatever emerges from it is unlikely to turn out quite as those doing the manipulation had hoped.  Whatever system is adopted, reality has a nasty but nonetheless welcome habit of ensuring that electoral engineering is not an exact science – nor one that can completely take the politics out of democracy. Eastern Europe in particular is littered with the bodies of parties that, in the years that followed the coming of democracy after 1989, sought to establish and then tinker with electoral systems in order to promote their cause and hurt their opponents.

The bad news, though, is that the very process of electoral reform, because it’s often a messy, less principled and more prolonged affair than its proponents assume, doesn’t necessarily help reconnect the public with their political representatives in the way that reformers hope it will.  Indeed, it may even alienate them still further – particularly if, following a less than uplifting reform process, the party they vote for in the election that either fails to make it into the parliament because of thresholds or, if it does so, still ends up being marginalized and ignored.

Reformers then should welcome Andy Burnham’s words.  But, in the end, it’s deeds that count.

Originally published at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/burnhams-proposed-electoral-reform-could-have-unpredictable-effects/

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“The Keminaissance is a myth. The Tories are still like a weird uncle”, Bright Blue, 2 October.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

I hate to be a party pooper, but I confess talk of a Keminaissance leaves me, if not quite cold, then at the very least somewhat sceptical. So, at a recent gathering of polling and election experts, I took the opportunity to check that I was not an outlier — somehow missing something that everyone else but me could see.

Reassuringly for me — but not for the Conservative Party — it turned out I was far from alone. Indeed, I could not find a single person who thought the Tories were that much further along the road to recovery that they were when they got their butts well and truly kicked two years ago — the reasons for which (should anyone in the blue corner be some kind of glutton for punishment) are comprehensively covered in (and here I should declare an interest) The British General Election of 2024.

Yes, most of those I talked to admitted: Badenoch has got better at PMQs. And, yes, she is capable of providing some usefully clippable content for her social media team to pump out on X and similar such platforms. But, they stressed, we are yet to see if she will get the measure of Burnham in the same way she gradually got the measure of his uptight predecessor. And if, as they used to say, ‘Britain isn’t Twitter,’ it sure as hell is not the far-right sinkhole that X has become thanks to its egregious edgelord Elon Musk.

As a recent, characteristically forensic analysis by YouGov’s Dylan Difford makes clear, while Badenoch’s personal poll ratings have indeed improved, especially amongst right-leaning voters, said improvement can be overstated. More importantly, it seems to have done little or nothing for a party that, when all is said and done, voters have not yet forgiven it for the mess they believe it made of government.

Of course, some optimists will inevitably argue that a combination of Labour incompetence and the plodding passage of time will eventually see the electorate forgive and forget. And now they can point to the fact that, Reform UK — just the latest in a long line of Nigel Farage’s various vehicles — appears to have suffered, if not a blow-out, then at least a slow puncture.

But that kind of optimism ignores some fundamental weaknesses in the party’s position — weaknesses that become evident when we run through what I often think of as the four i’s: ideas, interests, institutions and individuals.

Taking those in reverse order, we have already dealt with the most obvious individual, the party leader, essentially concluding that, while she is nowhere near as terrible as some first thought, she is not particularly special. And, like any leader whose parliamentary party is a shrunken husk of what it once was, she is fishing for Shadow Cabinet colleagues in a talent pool that is — no pun intended — by definition shallow. There are few big beasts on the opposition benches, and not many small ones either.

Moreover, requiring anyone who wants to advance their parliamentary career to sign up to a version of Conservatism that insists on the renunciation of past support for Remain, the European Convention on Human Rights and Net Zero does not seem likely to increase the supply any time soon.

The institutional side of the party is not, to be fair, looking quite as ropey as it had. Given the fact that CEO (Lord) Mark McInnes used to work with Ruth Davidson — now on the naughty step for getting involved with the supposedly dripping wet, Gaukian ginger group, Prosper UK — it seems fair to conclude that he was hired for his managerial competence rather than his manifest ideological purity. As a result, and helped by the fact that donations have begun to flow again — albeit in fairly modest fashion compared to the gazillions recently gifted to Reform — CCHQ has not been hollowed out to the extent that we have seen when the Tories have lost office in times past. And, if Party Chairman, the impressively down-to-earth and normal-sounding Kevin Hollinrake, is to be believed, candidate selection, although sadly subject to purity tests already referred to, appears to be proceeding at a fairly decent lick.

The ‘interests’ dimension, however, is more problematic. Suffice to say, a party that all too often seems obsessed with protecting and promoting the rights and privileges of homeowners, motorists, famers, pensioners, the financial sector, the privately educated and the fossil fuel industry might struggle to convince the country as a whole that it is on their side.

Finally, ‘ideas’ – and this is where the party seems utterly unable to get out of the groove in which it seems to have been well and truly stuck for decades now. Putting it bluntly, it is one thing to treat a former leader who won election after election back in the 1970s and 1980s as some kind of icon. It is quite another to allow a frankly myopic and absurdly ahistorical version of the vision and the policies she pursued to become an idée fixe that prevents the party adapting to meet the economic and fiscal challenges of what, too many Tories seem to need reminding, is the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

Just as damaging is the party’s and Badenoch’s increasing tendency towards being ‘extremely online’ and even more Anglospheric than ever. This, and the desperate desire to stem the party’s losses to Reform, has led the party to paint itself into an ‘anti-woke’ corner that, to the majority of Brits who do not spend much time online, just looks a bit weird and obsessive: a bit like that uncle that nobody takes too seriously at family gatherings, especially after he has had a bit to drink.

Prediction, of course, is a mug’s game. And political oil tankers can be turned around more rapidly than we sometimes imagine. Few, for instance, gave Churchill much of a chance in 1945, or Heath in 1966, or Cameron in 2005 or, indeed, Starmer in 2020. And the UK electorate is far more volatile than it used to be. But unless the party can signal, let alone implement, significantly more change across each and every one of the four dimensions discussed above than it has managed so far, talk of a renaissance — Kemi-themed or otherwise — seems a tad premature.

Originally published at https://centrewrite.brightblue.org.uk/the-keminaissance-is-a-myth-the-tories-are-still-like-a-weird-uncle/

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“Members of right‑leaning parties prefer leaders with ‘dark triad’ personality traits” (with Paul Webb and Stavroula Chrona), The Conversation, 18 September, 2026.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

How does someone’s personality relate to their choice of political party? It’s a fascinating question, and one that has interesting implications in the changing landscape of British politics right now. Would someone joining a party, for example, want to see their own personality traits reflected back at them via the party’s leader?

The question of personality becomes even more intriguing when it comes to traits that are generally seen as malign rather than benign – the so-called “dark triad”, for example. This group is made up of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. While all three are distinct, these dark traits share features such as egotism and a willingness to lie and cheat to achieve a goal.

In our previous research we’ve covered the demography, sociology and ideology of British political party membership. But we noticed that there was little or no research on its psychology. Our most recent research aimed to fill that gap.

We wanted to uncover any links between personality and membership of the main British parties (Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform UK). We used surveys of 4,266 members of these parties to learn more about their personalities – including those traits associated with the dark triad. Then we looked at what these characteristics meant in terms of the party leaders they were most attracted to.

Of course, in psychiatry it’s considered unethical to diagnose someone with a personality disorder without meeting them – and we are most definitely not psychiatrists. So when it came to these dark traits, we borrowed the definitions from the psychologist John Rauthmann.

Narcissism is the “tendency to harbour grandiose and inflated self-views while devaluing others”. Narcissists have been shown to be extremely vain, and to seek attention and admiration. They can also exhibit feelings of superiority, authority and entitlement, as well as exhibitionism, bragging and manipulation.

Machiavellianism is described as a “tendency to cynical, misanthropic, cold, pragmatic and immoral beliefs”. It’s also characterised by the pursuit of things like power and money – as well as manipulative tactics.

Psychopathy, on the other hand, is characterised by “impulsive thrill-seeking, manipulation and antisocial behaviours”. Someone meeting the criteria for psychopathy would also be likely to demonstrate shallowness and a lack of empathy and remorse, while being superficially charming. Like those with Machiavellian traits, they can also be manipulative.

‘People who mess with me will regret it’

Our study looked at the extent to which members of each of the parties exhibited those three traits by asking them to agree or disagree with statements that tapped into them. These were things like “group activities tend to be dull without me”, “avoid direct conflict with others because they may be useful in the future”, or “people who mess with me always regret it”.

Then we looked at whether party members who exhibit dark triad traits prefer – at least in the abstract – leaders who seem to show them too. But rather than name real leaders, we asked them about the kind of leadership characteristics that they admired or disparaged. Each of these was linked to a dark triad trait – so whether, for example, they liked a leader who saw themselves as exceptional, or was happy to manipulate people to get their way, or was unconcerned if they hurt someone’s feelings.

We found that the higher members scored on the dark triad themselves, the more likely they were to favour “dark” leaders. We then went on to examine whether those leaders were more likely to find favour with members of particular political parties.

And it turns out that they do. Reform UK members and Conservative members scored higher on dark triad measures than those from Labour, the Lib Dems and Greens. And party members with stronger dark triad traits are indeed more likely to favour leaders displaying them too.

It is no surprise, perhaps, that Tory and Reform members gravitate towards populist leaders such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. In many ways they are the personification of the kind of leader they say they like − supremely self-confident and charismatic “alpha”-types who mix charm with something of a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Our research also supports the notion that there is something of a convergence – in our case a psychological and not merely ideological convergence – between, on the one hand, members of the centre-right Conservative party and the populist radical right Reform UK, and on the other, those who belong to the Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems.

This is yet another piece of evidence supporting the emerging consensus among political scientists that the UK is now characterised by two-bloc, rather than two-party, politics. This has huge implications for tactical voting at the next general election.

If there is little voter traffic between the two sides then what we should see is voters supporting whichever party in their bloc is best placed to beat the candidate put up by the other bloc. This is something that we’ve seen in several recent byelections, including the one that saw Andy Burnham triumph in Makerfield. Helped by tactical voting from those who might otherwise have voted Green or Lib Dem, the prime minister won a seat which, on paper at least, initially looked like a good prospect for Reform.

Should that bloc/anti-Reform voting be repeated at the general election, then Farage may find it difficult to convert what might turn out to be an impressive vote-share into the the kind of seat-share that would propel him into the premiership. He will hope to offset that problem by persuading Conservative voters to vote Reform in order to stop a Green, Labour or Lib Dem candidate making it to Westminster.

If we’re right, then Britain’s party members may tacitly facilitate such tactical voting. This could be by making little effort to campaign against a supposed rival from their bloc, for example, if it looks better-placed to beat the favourite on on the other side of the divide.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/members-of-right-leaning-parties-prefer-leaders-with-dark-triad-personality-traits-292011

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“A fractured Union? Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland first ministers meeting”, Anadolu Ajansı, 17 September 2026.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

Every now and then, the official designation, United Kingdom, can seem particularly inapposite. The relationship between its component parts – England (population 56.5 million), Scotland (5.5 million), Wales (3.1 million), and Northern Ireland (1.9 million) – is rarely as harmonious as that name suggests. So it was this week when the first ministers of the last three met to sign an agreement which committed each nation to determine its own future “in its own way and in its own time.”

Scotland’s John Swinney even went so far as to deliberately and provocatively describe the UK’s new head of government, Andy Burnham, as the “last prime minister of the UK.” Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s Michelle O’Neill claimed it had the right to a referendum on unification with the Republic of Ireland (population 5.4 million), arguing: “We will not accept or tolerate any prime minister telling us that right is off the table.”

Weak support for Welsh independence

Wales’s Rhun ap Iorwerth, however, was noticeably less forthright, insisting only that “Wales should have the power, the resources, the fair treatment we need as a nation to build the future our people deserve.” Dodging questions about independence, ap Iorwerth merely reminded the assembled audience that there are “flexibilities that Scotland already has right now (that) as a minimum (should) be handed to Wales.”

His hesitation is a tacit acknowledgement there is relatively scant support for independence in Wales. Indeed, the latest poll, conducted this August, suggested that (after “don’t knows” were removed) only a third of Welsh voters would currently vote to leave the UK.

True, public opinion in Scotland is markedly different. But even there the latest poll, conducted this spring, suggested that those who want to leave the UK are outnumbered by those who want to remain by a margin of 56% to 44% – mirroring almost exactly the result of the independence referendum held back in 2014. The Scottish National Party that First Minister Swinney leads might be pushing for another vote but, whatever its representatives say in public, they cannot be confident in private that they would win it. Indeed, the serious hit to GDP suffered by the UK as a result of its decision to leave the EU would probably lend even more weight to their opponents’ argument that secession would be an economic disaster.

In any case, Swinney knows – not least because it was confirmed by a decision of the UK’s Supreme Court in 2022 – that, legally and constitutionally, the only legislature that can grant Scotland a referendum is not the Scottish but the UK’s 650-seat Parliament down in London – an institution in which, incidentally, some 57 Scottish MPs sit.

Sectarian divides in Northern Ireland

The situation in Northern Ireland is different again. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that helped end decades of violent conflict there does make provision for a border poll to be held should it look “likely” that there is majority support for Irish unification on both sides of the border. At the moment it does not.

True, there is little doubt that such a majority could be found in the Republic of Ireland – at least in theory (it is noticeable, for instance, that the Irish Taoiseach – prime minister – Micheal Martin, didn’t respond to President Donald Trump’s apparent support for a united Ireland by demanding a vote anytime soon). But the latest poll found that, in contrast to the two-thirds of voters in the republic who support unification, only just over a third of those in the North feel the same way – a proportion which, if anything, has declined rather than grown over the last 10 years and one which continues to reflect deep sectarian differences between the mainly Roman Catholic “nationalist” population and the mainly Protestant “unionist” population which remains wedded to its assertively British identity.

In any case, the decision to hold an Irish border poll lies legally not with the first minister of Northern Ireland but with the UK government’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland. And even if that were not the case (which it is), despite the hierarchy implied by their official positions, Northern Ireland’s first minister has no more authority than the deputy first minister, who, as a unionist, is determined that it should remain part of the UK.

Ultimately, by meeting this week and signing an agreement, the first ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had two main aims: 1) to reassure their supporters that they remain committed to the cause of independence and 2) to put pressure on a new British prime minister. The first aim may have been realized. But the second is highly unlikely to have had much effect: as a Number Ten Downing Street spokesman told journalists in the wake of their intervention, “The UK government is focused on addressing the issues that matter most to families … rather than engaging in constitutional debates or further referendums.”

In short, misnomer or not, the United Kingdom is going to be around for a few years yet.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/opinion/a-fractured-union-scotland-wales-and-northern-ireland-first-ministers-meeting/4060293

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“Can’t you do it?”, Review of “Sunak at 10” by Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton, Literary Review, 2 September 2026.

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

Anyone who becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland knows that the proverbial ‘first draft of history’ of their time in Downing Street will be written not by journalists but by the indefatigable Anthony Seldon, along with whoever is lucky enough to be brought on board as his coauthor. Sunak at 10 is the latest in a line of books charting the ups and downs of premiers going back to Gordon Brown, the recent rapid turnover of PMs since then meaning this volume is the sixth to appear in just sixteen years.

This one comes out two years after its subject left office, having been written in what Seldon and Tom Egerton call ‘that “Goldilocks” moment when the heat and passion of the events being described have cooled, when almost everyone is free and willing to talk, and when perspective on what happened can be achieved, but before memories fade’. As such, much of it is based on interviews with the key players, be they elected politicians, advisers or officials. It focuses unashamedly on the high politics of a tumultuous period that began with Rishi Sunak, the first politician of colour ever to be appointed British prime minister, being parachuted into the role of chancellor of the exchequer by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s one-time consigliere, in February 2020 and ended with Sunak’s departure from Downing Street in July 2024, the day after he’d led the Conservative Party to its worst ever general election defeat.

Like the previous books in the series, it aims to provide the reader with an analytical narrative rather than simply a chronological account, pausing now and then to ask and answer questions, make comparisons with previous occupants of the office and tackle particular themes (Sunak’s successful handling of Northern Ireland the one they deem the most consequential) before resuming the story. The authors write with admirable economy, avoidance of cliché and even-handedness.

Overall, some will argue that their treatment of Sunak himself errs on the side of generosity, convinced as they are that, given the difficulties inevitably faced by a ‘late-stage prime minister’, he left the country (though not the Conservative Party) in better shape than he found it. Indeed, even their criticisms are prefaced with praise:

He had many of the qualities a Prime Minister needs: integrity, a powerful intellect, ferocious work ethic, attention to detail and calmness under pressure. His shortcomings became evident at the Treasury, but he’d had no opportunity to rectify them. Several were the flip sides of his strengths. His forensic mastery of detail meant he could lose sight of the big picture. His unforgiving work ethic denied him the chance for recuperative rest so he became exhausted emotionally and intellectually … His innate decency impeded his understanding of those who were venal, disloyal and manipulative … His ascetic lifestyle meant, for all his personal generosity, he could never quite shoot the breeze with MPs over a beer or a bottle of wine. In Cabinet meetings, he appeared aloof; not good at imposing his personality on his colleagues or making them feel loved, the atmosphere was often tense. His stellar career had forged his phenomenal business skills, but not at a chief executive or strategic level … like his successor as PM, Keir Starmer, if to a far lesser degree, he lacked innate political nous and judgement. 

We learn that, while he was ambitious enough to think that one day he might climb Disraeli’s greasy pole, Sunak wasn’t at all sure that, when the chance came after the implosion of Liz Truss’s premiership in October 2022, it was one he wanted to take. Indeed, according to Seldon and Egerton, he ‘knew his aides were keener on his becoming Prime Minister than he had been himself’, while Cabinet secretary Simon Case was told by Oliver Dowden (who later became Sunak’s deputy) that they ‘had to force him into becoming PM for the sake of the country and the party’, Sunak having asked them – not unreasonably – ‘Why should I be beaten up for two years and then beaten in the general election?’

Part of that ambivalence, maybe, stemmed from the fact that beyond his Thatcherite enthusiasm for lower taxes, lower inflation and lower spending, Sunak wasn’t one for what George H W Bush once called ‘the vision thing’ – so much so that when urged by his colleagues in the summer of 2022 to lay out why he wanted to be PM, he apparently replied, ‘Can’t you do it?’

And yet the ship of state really did need steadying after the extended psychodrama that had consumed the Conservative Party since the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in July 2016, and Sunak’s main aim was, first, to convince the country that calm and competent management was back in fashion. In pursuit of that aim, he attempted to run a government that embraced figures from all sides of the Tories’ dysfunctional family – even those who continued to believe (against the evidence, the authors suggest) that he had somehow stabbed Boris Johnson in the back. That meant including the egregiously ambitious and disloyal Suella Braverman, whose support Sunak’s team (possibly mistakenly) had assumed was crucial if he was to prevent Boris Johnson joining the post-Truss leadership contest.

Handing Braverman the Home Office, and doling out other Cabinet posts to all too familiar rather than fresh faces, made it practically impossible for Sunak to signal to the electorate that the party really was under new management. Worse, as the authors rightly stress, he made her promises on immigration policy – in particular on ‘stopping the boats’ – that, it turned out, he couldn’t possibly keep without repudiating a host of conventions, laws and treaties he knew it would be politically and legally unwise to break.

When Sunak at last summoned up the courage to sack Braverman in the autumn of 2023, she and Robert Jenrick (who resigned not long afterwards) were determined to undermine and, if possible, get rid of him. Others remained in his Cabinet but – egged on by inveterate stirrers like Danny Kruger, Dougie Smith and Michael Gove – toyed with challenging Sunak for the top job. They included not just Penny Mordaunt but also, most eye-openingly, his eventual successor as Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch.

Overall, then, Sunak at 10 paints a persuasive portrait of a prime minister who was more sinned against than sinning – and a picture of a Conservative Party that was every bit the nest of vipers that voters, even before Rishi Sunak assumed office, had made up their minds to get rid of.

Originally published at https://literaryreview.co.uk/cant-you-do-it

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“Hands off the constitution, Andy”, Unherd, 18 August 2026

Posted on October 12, 2026 by tpbale

For fans of British exceptionalism, the fact that the UK is only one of three of the world’s democracies without a written constitution — the other two being Israel and New Zealand — is yet another quirk to celebrate.

For critics, however, the lack of a single authoritative document detailing the rules of the game, or at the very least outlining them, has long been a sore point — a source (for some, even the source) of widespread political, social and economic dysfunction. No wonder, then, that ears pricked up when Andy Burnham indicated that his plans for greater devolution “increase the case for a constitution”.

But while their excitement is understandable, it may well be misplaced. True, Burnham has already declared his commitment to proportional representation, a voting system that would spread power across more parties, potentially favour the Left, and significantly shift the country’s current constitutional balance. But his principal interest in the constitution, at least as he recently expressed it, seems only to stretch as far as a desire to better define the occasionally overlapping and therefore contested competencies of the various levels of British government, be they local, regional, devolved, or national.

This is the sort of thing that, classically, is really only a major concern for the constitutions of federal states such as Germany, even if, as purists will insist on telling you, the Bundesrepublik formally refers to that document as its Grundgesetz — fundamental law — rather than a Verfassung — a constitution. In a unitary (or at a push, hybrid-federal) state such as the UK, those competencies could be divided up without needing to come up with a completely new constitution.

However, if Burnham really is suggesting doing the latter, then he would be kickstarting a process that would inevitably take years of agonised argument to resolve. And it is worth looking at the sheer scale of what it would involve: something which, in most countries, only happens when a war or a revolution permanently destroys the legitimacy of the existing regime, obliging it, in effect, to completely re-found and rewire the state. After 1066, this country has been fortunate enough for that to have proved unnecessary even if it has, on occasion, been obliged to adapt: namely, in response to the “English Civil War” (a contested term) of the 1640s and the “Glorious Revolution” 40 years later, as well as the union with Scotland, the loss of most of Ireland and other parts of the empire, and European accession.

The UK does, of course, have a constitution. Indeed, contrary to common wisdom, many of the rules of the game are, it turns out, written down. It is just that, unlike the overwhelming majority of other democracies, they are uncodified: that is to say, they do not appear in a single, overarching document that is easily accessible (if not necessarily always easily-understood). 

What we in the UK have instead, is a hodgepodge of laws, conventions, customs and norms. And although we have something called a “supreme” court, it is not granted the exclusive and uncontested power to pronounce on whether the actions of governments, and the legislation involved, are “constitutional”. Nor do we “entrench” certain laws and rules in the belief that they are so fundamental to how we govern ourselves that changes to them should be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. If a simple majority exists in Parliament to overturn existing practice, then it can be overturned: no Parliament can bind its successor, while only in exceptional circumstances can the judicial branch get involved.

Fans of the supremacy of parliament (and they are not all Brexiteers) are prone to conveniently forgetting that one of the sources of the UK’s uncodified constitution is the Royal Prerogative. This means that, when we are talking about the government, we are talking about “the Crown in Parliament”: a concept that, in theory and practice, affords the executive branch significantly greater power than that enjoyed by governments in many other democracies — even those that are likewise parliamentary rather than presidential. Examples include the power to make and sign international treaties with little or no involvement of the legislature, as well as the ability to decide the timing of elections.

That said, most experts would probably agree that the most important source of the UK’s uncodified constitution are now (written) statutes, some of which are, or have come to be regarded, as “constitutional”. The definition of the latter was set out in the 2002 judgment by the appropriately named Lord Justice Laws (yes, really) in the so-called “Metric Martyrs” case, when he declared: 

We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were “ordinary” statutes and “constitutional” statutes. The two categories must be distinguished on a principled basis. In my opinion a constitutional statute is one which (a) conditions the legal relationship between citizen and State in some general, overarching manner, or (b) enlarges or diminishes the scope of what we would now regard as fundamental constitutional rights. 

Should parliament want to repeal such statutes, it must do so “expressly”. It cannot, as is the case with “ordinary” statutes, do it by implication — that is, by passing another statute which conflicts with it but, because it was passed at a later date, is deemed to take precedence over it. The standout recent example of that process is probably the passing of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 in order to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972 that took the UK into the EU and effectively granted European law supremacy over national law.

Common law — the accumulated decisions of judges in cases that may well go back centuries — can matter too. It is of particular importance when it comes to the right of the courts to constrain the government and its officials, whose actions should be lawful, reasonable and fair, and compatible with the Human Rights Act (HRA). Note, however, that should a piece of legislation clash with the HRA, the courts are limited to issuing a potentially toothless “declaration of incompatibility” rather than being able (as they can in many democracies whose constitutions allow for full judicial review) to strike it down.

Other written sources such as the periodically updated Cabinet Manual and Ministerial Code also contribute to the constitution. And, like some of the constitutional statues already mentioned, they too have loomed large in recent political controversies, as have the so-called Lascelles principles. These were based (believe it or not) on a letter to The Times in May 1950, but were much discussed in the spring and summer of 2022 when Boris Johnson, then prime minister, was hoping to hold onto his job by threatening his Conservative colleagues with a dissolution of parliament.

Yet for those who would like to turn Burnham’s vague constitutional hint into a reality, it is those maddeningly unwritten conventions that most provide the impetus. Once again, some will be familiar, having played a big part in recent rows: so, for instance, the monarch appoints the person best able to command a majority in the House of Commons to serve as their Prime Minister; the House of Lords does not delay legislation promised by the governing party in its election manifesto; and Parliament, as per the Sewel Convention, doesn’t legislate in areas of devolved competence without consent.

Trying to nail down a form of words that will satisfy both supporters and critics of those conventions will be hard enough. But there are also conventions that are so contested that some experts argue they don’t yet qualify as such. The need for a referendum over major constitutional changes, for instance, will surely raise its head among supporters of first-past-the-post or Brexit should Andy Burnham attempt to undo either. Likewise, there is considerable debate over whether explicit parliamentary approval really is needed before the government takes military action. (As if to bring us full circle, this is a power deriving from, you’ve guessed it, the royal prerogative).

A document that encompassed all of the above, in a manner that could command both cross-party and popular consent, would require an immense amount of time, effort and expertise. It is hard to believe that the Conservatives or Reform would countenance a codified constitution that placed significantly greater constraints on the power of the executive. And should such a document still be put before the electorate in a referendum, the campaign could easily end up being even more acrimonious than the Brexit vote, especially if, unlike Brexit, it required the consent not just of voters across the UK as a whole, but in each of its constituent parts.

That is not to say, definitively, that it cannot or should not be attempted. It isn’t hard, after all, for critics to characterise the current arrangements as not merely muddled but deeply undemocratic (the unelected House of Lords) and unable to guarantee even those rights that have become taken for granted (an HRA that can be repealed by a simple majority). For those critics, the current constitutional settlement affords British governments arbitrary powers and undeserved latitude deriving from the monarch rather than the people.

Against this, however, many politicians and pundits across the political spectrum insist, with some justification, that not only are there more important things for British governments to be getting on with, but that a codified constitution would likely constrain rather than enhance their ability to act. Just as importantly, they will argue that current arrangements provide the UK with a capacity to update our constitution to take account of changed circumstances and preferences. In this view, our capacity to adapt in this way is the envy of those democracies in which such updates can only occur via a supermajority in parliament or a plebiscite.  

Codifying a constitution that has evolved over centuries into the messy but broadly workable compromise that exists today would surely use up much of the precious political capital Burnham has managed to build up since he moved into No. 10. So while he may be tempted in the long term to follow through on the hints he’s just dropped, in the short-term he should probably leave well alone.

Originally published at https://unherd.com/2026/08/hands-off-the-constitution-andy/

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‘Why Nigel Farage is resigning as an MP, only to stand again – expert analysis: Self-pity and self-obsession’, The Conversation, 7 July 2026.

Posted on July 8, 2026 by tpbale

In what must rank as one of the most self-pitying, self-obsessed pieces of political rhetoric we’ve heard from a politician since Boris Johnson’s myriad attempts to justify himself back in 2022, Nigel Farage surprised absolutely no-one by triggering a by-election by resigning as MP for Clacton. He is supposedly going to take on “the establishment” in this by-election by restanding and, in so doing, clear his name.

Even if Farage’s anger about media intrusion was real, his recorded video message still felt a little confected. And I’m not sure there’s much sympathy out there for a politician who’s not only telling us he’s enormously wealthy thanks to all sorts of second jobs but that he could be even more wealthy if he quit parliament. As for the nonsense about Britain being a “broken” – indeed a “communist” – country where “men can’t wear watches and women can’t wear jewellery” in the streets, that was presumably for an American audience. And the plug for his investment tips making people impressive returns was simply grifting of the highest order.

Although, there will be voters in Clacton who’ll see the whole thing for what it is (namely, an expensive sideshow which appears to be designed to distract from the allegations Farage is facing), I don’t doubt that he stands a good chance of winning this by-election. But the other main parties now seem likely not to stand candidates. Another option might have been to field a joint candidate – a 2026 version of Martin Bell, the former war correspondent who took on cash-for-questions MP Neil Hamilton in a 1997 by-election and won as an independent with the backing of Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

More importantly, none of this will help Farage wriggle out of the allegations he’s facing. As soon as he makes it back into parliament, the investigation will restart where it left off. He can run – but he can’t hide.

Originally published at https://theconversation.com/why-nigel-farage-is-resigning-as-an-mp-only-to-stand-again-expert-analysis-287017

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‘There’s one thing that could revive Farage’s fortunes’, Independent, 29 June 2026.

Posted on July 8, 2026 by tpbale

Nigel Farage has wasted no time in demanding that Andy Burnham call a general election as soon as he walks through the door of Downing Street. But given how poorly Reform UK performed in Makerfield – a third by-election loss in a row – its normally canny leader can’t really mean it.

Or can he?

It’s one thing for Farage to try turning defeat into victory by claiming that “Keir Starmer isn’t the first prime minister I’ve deposed, and he won’t be the last”. It’s also quite something to make the call having finally emerged from self-imposed purdah, following negative media coverage of a £5m gift that Farage quietly banked from cryptocurrency gazillionaire Christopher Harborne.

But it’s quite another thing to pretend that he and his party are genuinely ready to field a convincing list of quality candidates in more than 600 seats nationwide.

Or that they can rapidly put together a manifesto that doesn’t fall apart under the intense scrutiny of a general election campaign, raising the possibility that Farage, not for the first time, will end up disowning some of its key pledges. Which is easy to do when you’ve no chance of making it into No 10, but much, much harder when you are in with a shout or, indeed, once you’ve moved in.

For all the talk of Farage’s determination to professionalise his party – a commitment that has seen a significant increase in junior staffers joining Reform’s Milbank Tower HQ to cope with a huge influx of grassroots members – he knows that there is still a long way to go before it can compete, machine-wise, with the so-called legacy parties, particularly when it comes to candidate selection and ground campaigning.

Of those elected to councils after Reform’s big win in the local elections in May, far too many have already fallen by the wayside. Moreover, Makerfield was the second potentially winnable parliamentary seat, after Gorton and Denton, that Reform failed to win because Farage’s chosen candidate proved to be a dud. Even the candidate who did pull off a narrow by-election victory for Reform in Runcorn and Helsby in May 2025, Sarah Pochin, has managed to embarrass her leader on several occasions.

Farage is no fool. He knows full well that he has a serious salesforce problem, primarily because, as the recent run of by-election defeats amply demonstrates, the majority of Brits who aren’t Farage fans are increasingly willing to vote tactically to keep him out of power. It is a phenomenon that can only be offset by him winning over, not just the party’s hardcore supporters, but Reform-curious voters who might be prepared to give the party a go, as long as its candidate doesn’t look dodgy and its platform doesn’t seem too extreme.

The latter will be down to the two men who Farage has deputed to come up with policies (possibly unwisely, given their unrepresentatively hardline views on, say, abortion) – Tory defector Danny Kruger, and philosopher of religion (yes, really) James Orr.

But policy also throws up a second, equally serious question for Farage: what to do about the threat posed by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, especially when, given the bad blood between the two men, there is zero prospect of some kind of non-aggression pact?

Farage’s call for “pure, cold rage” in the wake of the tragic footage released of Henry Nowak’s dying words came across as a desperate attempt not to be outflanked on the right.

But after rioters attacked police in Southampton, it backfired badly, doing the one thing that Farage has always been incredibly careful to avoid – namely, getting himself and his party associated in the public mind with the kind of violence that turns off the vast majority of British voters.

The same, given the decline in Brits seeing national identity in explicitly ethnocentric terms, goes for Farage resorting to patently racialised language, suggesting that “Britain is a two-tier state – against white people”.

All this has reignited calls from some in the party to ditch, or at least demote, Reform’s controversial home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, who insiders accuse of encouraging Farage to adopt a harder line in order to see off Restore. Either they are genuinely convinced some red lines just should not be crossed, or because they’ve long had it in for an outspoken Muslim they don’t see as a team-player, with his less-than-subtle slap-down of Tory retread Robert Jenrick over deportation policy cited as the most recent example.

In fact, that was only the latest episode of beef between the two men – a situation that Farage (who must also be hoping Suella Braverman behaves better as a Reform MP than she did as a Tory) has to handle with care.

On the one hand, the fact that the crown princes are fighting each other, rather than trying to usurp the king, suits Farage fine. On the other, he and the lower-profile but crucial backstage staffers he relies on most – such as long-term aide, Dan Jukes, comms director Ed Sumner, operations guy Aaron Lobo and, more informally, Farage’s former chief of staff, “Posh” George Cottrell – are well aware that British voters dislike divided parties.

They are similarly well aware that they don’t much like Donald Trump either, or his Iran adventure – which is why Farage isn’t as upset as he might once have been about the cooling of his supposed friendship with the US president.

But if Reform’s leader looks a little rattled right now, don’t write him off.

After all, he has come back from far bigger defeats than the one that his party suffered in Makerfield. And anyway, that wasn’t the by-election that may have worried him most. The Conservatives’ win in Aberdeen South was a reminder that this party isn’t yet dead and buried.

Farage believes Andy Burnham is beatable. But what really scares him right now is the prospect, unlikely though it may seem, of a Tory revival. Which is one reason why his demand for an early election might be more genuine than it first appears.

Originally published at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-farage-reform-makerfield-election-burnham-b3003724.html

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‘Migration, Brexit, and Starmer’s exit: Inside Britain’s political meltdown’, Anadolu Agency, 23 June 2026

Posted on July 8, 2026 by tpbale

British politics – and I say this as someone who’s had a lifelong fascination with it – used to be a fairly predictable affair, even, some would say, a little dull. Brexit, however, has helped to change all that – and probably for good.

Until 2016, the center-left Labour Party and the center-right Conservatives alternated in power, while voting for other parties was seen as pretty much a waste of time. Now, however, we’ve entered an era of five- or six-party politics and – even more incredibly, perhaps – we’re about to see our seventh prime minister in 10 years.

Starmer’s resignation

After transforming Labour’s fortunes as opposition leader, Keir Starmer found governing the country far more difficult. A series of early missteps and his failure to effectively communicate an inspiring sense of direction saw his government lose votes to both its right and its left, causing Starmer’s personal ratings to fall below even those of his party. It was a situation that his colleagues could only put up with for so long. The dam finally broke after his longtime rival, Andy Burnham, returned to parliament this week and triggered Starmer’s resignation.

Brexit, of course, isn’t the only reason for Britain’s shift from comfortable to chaotic politics. The British party system has been fraying at the edges since the early 1970s when the Liberal Party began to attract more support and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales began to win seats at Westminster. The electorate has become steadily more volatile and less deferential. As a result, parties that used to be able to count on people’s votes now have to earn them – something that has simultaneously become increasingly difficult as fiscal constraints, slower economic growth, and the increased demand on public services imposed by a rapidly ageing population have made it much harder to deliver the often unrealistic pledges that British politicians, running scared of the electorate, still insist on making.

From comfortable to chaotic

One way they chose to try to square the circle was through mass migration – importing cheaper labor to keep the cost of social care and healthcare down, to fill skill shortages, while attracting plenty of overseas students in order to boost the finances of the UK’s burgeoning university sector.

That policy – not least because it was never advocated openly and honestly – triggered a backlash that helped bring about Brexit in the first place and has bedeviled British politics ever since.

Public concern about immigration rose steeply as people began pouring in from the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 – an influx that, together with the migration crisis that hit Europe in 2015, was partly responsible for the Leave vote in 2016.

The second stage of that backlash followed the decision to liberalize the post-Brexit immigration regime by a Conservative government that had promised voters to “take back control” of the country’s borders. This was mainly in the wake of fears that the closure of the labor market during the Covid crisis would do severe short-term damage to the economy.

The third stage has centered on irregular (now labelled “illegal”) migrants, mainly from South Asia and the Near and Middle East, coming across the English Channel in small boats and claiming asylum, obliging the government to spend untold millions of pounds keeping them housed in hotels while their applications are decided.

The immigration backlash

The backlash has led to violent street protests in some places but has mainly led those voters uncomfortable with migration – primarily white, older, less educated voters living in small towns, nearly all of whom voted Leave in 2016 – to move away from both main parties (but in particular the Conservatives) and towards the populist radical right in the shape of Reform UK, the rebranded Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage.

Conversely, many “progressive” voters (the vast majority of whom voted Remain in 2016) quickly grew disillusioned and disappointed with Labour after it came to power in 2024 and, in a misguided attempt to win back voters lost to Reform, talked in performatively tough terms about immigration. Labour showed little initial sympathy with the plight of Gazans, showed little sign of wanting to significantly reverse Brexit, and insisted on sticking to ‘fiscal rules’ that have made it difficult to finance the degree of change that its voters were hoping for. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was turning the UK’s so-called ‘special relationship’ with the United States into a cruel joke.

Somewhat ironically, then, Brexit has made politics in Britain and the country’s ability to project its power internationally look much more, well, European than was the case before the country voted to leave the EU 10 years ago today. And yet there is no chance in the short term of a return to the bloc. True, opinion polls suggest a majority of Brits now regard Brexit as a mistake and claim they would now vote to rejoin. But they also suggest relatively few people have, in fact, changed their minds, as well as pointing to a marked reluctance to reopen such a painful and polarizing debate.

All of this leaves Britain in a profoundly unstable, even dysfunctional state – unable to come to terms with the fact that it has ambitions and pretensions way beyond both its means and the capacity of its politicians to match them in the real world. The biggest favor Andy Burnham, our next prime minister, could do the country would be to admit that this is the case. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be holding my breath.

Originally published at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/opinion/migration-brexit-and-starmers-exit-inside-britains-political-meltdown/3975718

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