Alex Wickham

Kudos to the Labour politicians, most admirably Ed Balls, who reacted to their party’s incredible defeat with good grace. Others, not so much. Take one well known left-wing tweeter: “Most terrifying of all is the Tories won as the Nasty

It does feel like something has changed this week. Labour started the election campaign very strongly, winning the first two weeks by dominating the narrative and succeeding in showing Ed Miliband in a better light than voters had previously seen

If you had said six months ago that Ed Miliband would be schooling Boris Johnson on live television two weeks before the election, even Justine would have raised an eyebrow. Yet that is exactly what the Labour leader did on

Labour certainly had the upper hand during the two weeks of the election campaign before this one, but there has been a shift in the fortunes of the parties over the last few days. This was supposed to be Labour’s

Monday brought Labour’s manifesto launch, which was policy-light and therefore tough for Ed Miliband’s opponents to unravel. You can’t really see the party making many gains from suddenly claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility three weeks before the

“Literally we would not know what we were voting for if we were going to vote for Labour.” That is the damning verdict of Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on Ed Miliband’s manifesto launch yesterday. It

This Bank Holiday week picked up on Tuesday as Tony Blair made an unusually peaceful intervention, criticising the Tories on Europe and declaring his unequivocal support for Ed Miliband. The former PM’s toxicity with some of the British public and

Above all else, last night showed why no party will win a majority at the general election on May 7th. The snap polls were all over place. One said Ed Miliband was the winner, another said he came fourth. He

So, who won day one? Labour will feel they spent far too much of yesterday talking about their strained relationship with business, after the party’s advert in the Financial Times backfired spectacularly. Siemens and Kellogg’s both publicly expressed their dismay

The reaction in the press room at Sky HQ as last night’s leaders’ interviews came to a close was unanimous. Ed Miliband had, almost unbelievably, won. Of the two men vying to be Prime Minister, against all odds, it was

Earlier this month two prominent conservatives, Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare, launched something called The Good Right. Despite boasting Michael Gove as a vocal supporter, much of what they proposed was unlikely to convince dry right-wingers. Luxury taxes and above-inflation

Well, that Budget was a bit of an anti-climax. There was some optimistic talk beforehand that George Osborne might produce some sort of game-changing policy that would transform the election campaign. In the end there was no fabled ‘rabbit in

Fifty days out from the election, Westminster is a strange mix of speculation, tedium and delusion. No one really has any idea who is going to win on May 7th. As frustrating as that is for pundits, it’s not really

There is a saying in the morally upstanding circles of Westminster in which I dwell: “leave the wives out of it”. Unless there is some particular significance to a great matter of state, or perhaps if taxpayers’ money is at

It feels like no one can divide the Labour Party quite like Tony Blair. The former Prime Minister has donated £106,000 to the candidates in his party’s top target seats ahead of the general election. Good news, or so you

Nigel Farage has this morning revealed UKIP’s policy on immigration going into the election. Gone is the party’s previous pledge to cap net migration at 50,000, instead they will not adopt an “arbitrary” target. Reading Farage’s explanation for this, it

Ahead of the 2001 General Election, William Hague’s Conservative Party secured a quite stellar cast of celebrity backers. Among them were some of the best of Britain: Jim Davidson, Peter Stringfellow, Anthony Worrall-Thompson, Frank Bruno, Mike Read and Bill Roache

It’s fair to say it has been a tough few weeks for UKIP. The party has tailed off in the polls recently, dropping from above 15 percent to around 13 percent as election campaign season gets underway. Nigel Farage’s trip

Last week, the BBC’s Newsnight programme aired the first in a series of focus groups looking at the political views of families across Britain. One of the families featured was from South Wales; a mother in her forties called Julia,

Donations are back in the news, with some £20 million being raised by political parties in the last quarter of 2014. These sorts of stories tend to hurt each party about the same – whether it is union gold lining

Try asking a politician to condemn an abuse of the MPs’ expenses system and you will get the same response from almost all of them: “sorry, not one for me”. In fact, newspaper stories about expenses scandals almost never carry

Last week the Labour Party managed to offend British business, teachers and nuns. In the seven days since then, Miliband and his team have further succeeded in antagonising the British Chamber of Commerce, people who drink Irn-Bru, the family of

Last week I spent the day at Facebook’s London headquarters, which was playing host to a Q&A session between the main party leaders and those two words no one in politics can say without sounding about ninety: “young people”. The

Three months out from the election, you would expect Labour to be on the offensive. Instead, they seem to be offending as many people as possible. Emily Thornberry’s snobbish comments sneering at White Van Man and the St. George’s Cross

We are forever hearing that there is great public apathy towards our politics. Whether it is the expenses scandal, MPs being sent to prison, foreign wars or disastrous government policies at home, voters don’t like politicians. I remember vox-popping a

Whatever happens on May 7th, Europe is going to shape the next two years of Conservative Party politics. If David Cameron stays as Prime Minister, either in another Coalition or forming a minority government, he is going to be the

“The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”. So said H.L. Mencken of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Puritanism; the tyrannical do-gooders of the temperance movement, authoritarians pushing their Victorian values on “sinners” across the Atlantic. Whether it

That faint sound you can hear in the distance is the laughing from 4 Matthew Parker Street, home of the Conservative Party, and Downing Street, home of the Prime Minister. Within a week David Cameron has gone from the chicken

It doesn’t really feel like it, but in just a few months’ time David Cameron could well have retired from politics. Or, we could be saying goodbye to Ed Miliband forever. Despite the predictions of anarchy, this coalition government has

This is really quite remarkable. The Labour Party has effectively admitted that its flagship policy going into the election would have actually made things worse for consumers. When Ed Miliband announced his energy price freeze he was credited with seizing

As Carmine Falcone says to Batman, “This is a world you’ll never understand. You always fear what you don’t understand”. David Cameron has little in common with the Caped Crusader, other than a submissive sidekick who is yellow on the

ITV’s Tom Bradby this afternoon reports that David Cameron will refuse to take part in the pre-election TV debates unless Ofcom reverses its decision to ban the Green Party from taking part. Asked “are you saying you are not going

A couple of years ago, at a drinks reception held in his office in parliament, Ed Miliband plucked up the courage to walk over to the group of journalists from those publications less likely to endorse him as their choice

The Unite the Right campaign aiming to forge a tactical voting alliance of Tory and UKIP voters has been killed by its founder, the journalist Toby Young. Named “Country Before Party”, the highly commendable idea was the only way the

“We are all Thatcherites now,” David Cameron said as he paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher following her death last year. Around that time Nigel Farage was describing UKIP as “the true inheritors of Thatcher”, arguing a young Maggie “would get