Tag Archives: Conservative Party

‘The Forgotten Cecil Parkinson’, New Statesman, 26 January 2016

When most people who were around in the 1980s think of Cecil Parkinson, they will recall only one thing – his affair with Sara Keays and his subsequent resignation.  But he actually deserves to be remembered for far more than that.  Indeed, … Continue reading →

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‘Ideology is in the eye of the beholder: How British party supporters see themselves, their parties, and their rivals’ (with Paul Webb and Monica Poletti), LSE Politics and Policy,8 January 2016

If British Election Study figures are anything to go by, those feeling close to the country’s six biggest parties – the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems, UKIP and the Greens – make up around 15 per cent of … Continue reading →

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‘Margaret Thatcher: the Authorised Biography. Volume Two: Everything She Wants’, Irish Times, 24 October 2015

Margaret Thatcher has been as lucky with her biographers as she was with her enemies. Her governments returned Britain to levels of unemployment it hadn’t seen since the 1930s and presumed it would never see again, yet she was able … Continue reading →

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Notes from the Tory fringe, where everyone is playing nicely – for now, The Conversation, 6 October 2015

Welcome to the Tory Party conference in Manchester – as ever a curious mix of the nerdy, the nutty, the nasty, and the nice and normal. The latter (apologies to anti-austerity protesters everywhere but it’s true) are in the majority. … Continue reading →

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He has a beef with David Cameron, but who is Lord Ashcroft?, The Conversation, 23 September 2015

Britain is still reeling from the allegations that surfaced about the university antics of its prime minister, David Cameron. The claims, made in a forthcoming unauthorised biography of the PM, are the work of Conservative peer Michael Ashcroft and journalist … Continue reading →

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Labour has moved outside the ‘zone of acceptability’, Prospect, 14 September 2015

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory has to be seen not only as a major advance for a Labour left that once looked entirely moribund. More worryingly for some, it also presents a huge opportunity to influence mainstream politics for much a harder, … Continue reading →

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‘The UK general election, 2015: Surprise! Or maybe not….’, Report for German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance (CPG), July 2015

One  does  not  need  to  be  a  political  scientist,  let  alone  a  rocket scientist,  to  know  why,  broadly  speaking,  the opposition  Labour  Party  lost  the election and why its rival, the Conservative Party, won a second term in office –this … Continue reading →

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‘Only 15 per cent of Conservative party members would vote to leave the EU’ (with Paul Webb) Telegraph, 15 June 2015

Europe is already impinging, if only indirectly on Labour’s leadership contest. Andy Burnham in particular has suggested the party needs to be careful it doesn’t ‘do a Scotland’ by associating itself so closely with an all-party campaign that it ruins … Continue reading →

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‘What should Cameron do next’, Conservative Home, 17 May 2015

‘The problems of victory’, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in November 1942, ‘are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.’ As a pragmatist and a realist, David Cameron almost certainly realises this … Continue reading →

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‘Cameron looks more like a captive than a captain of his party’, ConservativeHome, 26 April 2015

You don’t have to have succumbed to full-blown “Milifandom” to notice that Labour’s leader seems to be having a better election than his Conservative counterpart. He can’t possibly be as ubiquitous in real life as he’s been on Twitter of … Continue reading →

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