Alex Wickham

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

“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

Labour MP Luciana Berger has today called on Twitter to “automatically ban” certain racist words, after she received more than 2,500 anti-Semitic hate tweets from neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Berger argues: “At the height of the abuse, the police said

Birds fly, fish swim and politicians tell lies, so the old cliché goes. Most of the time, the really big whoppers are so bad that everyone notices them. If a politician tells a porkie about why he took us to

At first, they liked him. The audience of last night’s Question Time actually liked Russell Brand, the millionaire Marxist comedian turned far left foghorn. Shifting in his seat, fidgeting, fiddling with his beard or scratching his chest through his open

An insurgent party confounding its critics and rising inexorably in the polls. An established party finding its core vote disillusioned and flirting with a more hardline, principled alternative. A renegade, sometimes controversial leader whose ideas are seen by many as

There are two types of people who should be most worried about George Osborne’s Autumn Statement: the rich and the Labour Party. The Chancellor’s big move reforming stamp duty means those buying properties over £1.5 million will in future be

The art of using the internet to hold politicians to account has taken a battering over the last few days. Critics have rounded on keyboard warriors who think they can decide elections with Twitter hashtags, largely in response to the

Former Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell today lost his long-running libel case against The Sun newspaper, and with it quite possibly his political career. As yet another politician is destroyed by a needless act of sheer stupidity it makes you

Forever, it seems, Britain has been a divided nation. At least that is what the last two centuries of political discourse in this country tell us, before you accuse me of going all Karl Marx. One of my earliest political

What was Emily Thornberry thinking? While campaigning in Rochester this afternoon, Labour’s MP for Islington South, a metropolitan area of London, tweeted a photo of a terraced house with a St George’s flag in the window and a white van