I left the north, I travelled south (ardent Smiths fans can fill in the rest), at a time when Thatcherite Conservatism was something of a swearword in most of England’s northern territories. So as David Cameron’s ascent has switched a Tory victory from possibility to likelihood, I’ve been itching to find out how Brand Dave is faring – and have been making a Radio 4 documentary to find out. Teasing [...]

How often have we wished that an election would fall conveniently at a time when we most wish to take out ill-feeling on those in charge? By sheer fluke, the local and European elections offer a seriously displeased electorate the opportunity to play Judgement Day.

The most unintentionally comical headline in the past few weeks was the Financial Times’s deliberation on the latest work and pensions reform: “Purnell outlines ‘jobs [...]

The London Evening Standard, for which I work, has a new Russian owner. There is some poetic justice in this for my generation, whose defining event was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening up of the Wild East.

Having covered East Germany's transition, the awful chaos of the Yugoslav break-up and the helter-skelter Yeltsin era in Moscow, I was weaned journalistically on the painful and [...]

This is a rare example of a novelist attempting to describe the political process and finding in it a rich seam of human reflection rather than commonplace satire at the expense of politicians and their ambitions. It follows the campaign trail of Willy Brandt's election to the West German chancellorship in 1969. In an early example of politicians co-opting fashionable authors, Grass was invited along on the journey to campaign [...]

In all the statements by senior Conservatives about who should lead them and why, I do not recall one reflecting on which candidate could best beat Labour. Indeed, it is fashionable to appear to be above such considerations during this "debate about the direction of the party", as they call power struggles these days. David Davis said so this week: "We must first ask ourselves, not what we must do [...]

Tory Boy, where are you now? Butt of Harry Enfield jokes, target of lefty student protests. What became of the storm troopers of the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation so embarrassingly right-wing that even Norman Tebbit as party chairman felt obliged to close it down?

To be Tory Boy was not just to be Conservative and male. It demanded something else - the deliberately strident, trying-too-hard quality, the flaunting [...]

We're lacking in integrity, but full of good intentions, seen as soft on crime, but itching to swell the prisons with muggers. Widely loathed but worthy of affection, diffuse but determined, distrusted but trustworthy, we are a government so determined to be loved that any sign of disenchantment induces in us a state of paranoia.

The revelations of anguished sleeve-plucking and self-flagellation in Downing Street have laid bare doubts about [...]

Everyone knows that new Labour foreign policy is supposed to have an ethical dimension, but ethical in pursuit of what? Slobodan Milosevic is bombed into submission; a few months later, the leader of the country that heads the global league for summary executions is received with the full pomp of a state visit. The government "deplores" mercenary activity. But it turned the blindest of eyes to Sandline in Sierra Leone. [...]

Spare a thought for media woman. Considered either too boring to reach the top or too flashy to be taken seriously, she is always on the rise but never entirely risen. Featured an average of once a year in a "women breaking through the glass ceiling" feature, media woman is invariably described as pushy and ambitious, qualities deemed reprehensible in her, although entirely natural to her male colleagues. On the [...]

The Tories surprised even themselves at the local elections. Yet if the party is still breathing, a question hangs over its future: will William Hague be the next victim claimed by the nuclear fallout of Peter Lilley's now infamous speech? And how exactly did that near-disaster come about?

It was the triumph of the focus group that led Hague to the brink. For some time, Andrew Cooper, Hague's rotund strategy [...]