We agreed to disagree, God and I, more than 30 years ago. I concluded that He was a metaphor, He begged to differ, and things went downhill after that. Yet for all I've led a secular life in a country regularly described as the least religious in the world, God takes some shaking off. His teams say He is omnipresent and though I don't agree, He has quite a property [...]

It is a great education for a hack to find himself on the wrong end of a story for once. The past fortnight of press comment on my appointment as the BBC's political editor from August has included hilariously wrong and unchecked facts, made-up quotations, some unexpected generosity and a fair amount of green-eyed bile. Every journalist I know who's been directly involved in a story eventually asks the same [...]

We are leaving the Conservative century. The next one will be the progressive century. Aside from the passing rows over asylum policy or Railtrack, that is the big promise Tony Blair makes to the centre-left. He is a strategic politician, a man with one eye on history and another on the big rhythms of politics; and golden-tongued. A passage from dark reaction to a century of light is the most [...]

Whatever happened to Hugh MacDiarmid? In the 1970s the irascible prophet of Scottish Leninism was a huge cultural influence. Today, despite the appearance, volume by volume, of his collected works, he seems to have vanished. I was recently reviewing an anthology of poetry about the events of the past 100 years, Penguin's Scanning the Century. Of the better-known poets included, no one I can think of was more tilted towards [...]

William Hague is a naturally good-humoured man - a robust digestive system, one imagines, strong constitution, good sleeper. He is unnaturally equable. And the problem with that is that sometimes it's right to be a little panicky, just a touch tormented. And for the Tories, the time is now. Are they not strolling, smiling blandly, just a little condescendingly, to oblivion?

It is all very well to titter, but politics [...]

Why is the left so nasty? Why are politicians brought up in a Labour movement that bangs on about brotherhood and sisterhood so consumed with dislike and suspicion of one another? If we believe the newspapers, most members of the cabinet and many other Labour MPs are almost perpetually at daggers drawn, or at least simmering with mutual resentment. The rejoicing at Peter Mandelson's fall, and then the whooping at [...]

The Eurosceptics are right. It is time for a bare-knuckle fight about what we really believe; the kind of people we are and want to be. This country is on the edge of a great battle about British identity, focused on the likely loss of the pound. It is a pivotal moment. But all the rage and the passion has been on one side.

I am a federalist and [...]