There comes a moment for most prime ministers when a big public blunder takes their momentum away and from which they never really recover. But often it’s the little things that historians note as fatally eroding that sense of solidarity their governments depend on. With Margaret Thatcher, the big one was the poll tax and subsequent riots, with John Major […]

I’ve no idea whether it’s true or not that deputy prime minister Angela Rayner actually threatened to quit when she twigged the Government’s 1.5 million house building target by July 2029 is completely impossible and had to be talked out of it by Tony Blair. But it’s plausible. The story appeared in an updated biography of Keir Starmer penned by […]

Anyone who has watched roads lobby dinosaurs placidly munching on their trunk road contracts even as Comet Climate Change approaches the Earth will not have been surprised by the Government’s decision to approve the destructive Lower Thames Crossing The road will add £9 billion to the country’s pointless debt mountain, investment which could have been used for acutely needed sustainable […]

It’s funny, I searched in vain through Labour’s 2024 manifesto Change for any firm commitment to exterminate the country’s bat population, or at least any of the scarce, tiny, flying mammals that had the temerity to hinder Sir Keir Starmer’s passion to build “infrastructure” – but at least we knew what he regards as infrastructure. In his 2023 conference speech […]

Future generations – or current generations in fact – really aren’t going to look kindly on the current government’s “dash for growth”, not least because thousands of them will be left looking from the upper floors of homes built under the current push for fast construction of one-and-a-half-million homes. They’ll be confined there because all-too-predictable flood waters surround their houses […]