Election

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

No election? Don’t bet on it

When Dwight D. Eisenhower had to decide whether to launch the D-Day armada he kept a close eye on the weather. Pick the wrong moment and the entire cause of winning the war would have been set back and the lives of 135,000 soldiers imperilled. The supreme allied commander, head of a fractious coalition riven by egos and infighting (you see where I’m going here), had plenty of expert advice, as is made clear in David Haig’s play Pressure. The British meteorologist, James Stagg, warned that the original date for D-Day, 5 June 1944, would be storm-ridden, but saw a window of opportunity the next day. The American meteorologist Irving P. Krick was more gung-ho and urged Eisenhower not to postpone. Ultimately, the decision was Eisenhower’s alone.

Thursday

Rupert Hawksley

The invaluable lessons of school mock elections

The 2005 election campaign was brutal. All the major parties succumbed to infighting, the hustings were hostile and the drip-drip of poisonous briefings reached a nadir when a Ukip candidate was compared to Hitler. One special adviser was found crying in the loos. More than two decades may have passed, but the Sherborne School mock election certainly left its mark on those who witnessed it first-hand. I remember it well. In fact, I was that tearful special adviser. I was working for the Labour party (sadly not endorsed by Tony Blair) and during one hustings managed to persuade the crowd to walk away when the Ukip candidate – a close friend of mine in the same boarding house – stood up to speak. I stayed back to watch him deliver his carefully crafted speech to an empty courtyard.

Monday

Elliot Keck

Cancelling council elections means taxation without representation

For 350 years it has been established in the British constitution that taxes can only be levied for the crown with the consent of parliament. Ever since the Bill of Rights this principle - articulated most famously by the American revolutionaries in their call for no taxation without representation - has been core to our understanding of what it means to be a democracy. Delaying elections, unless as a result of a national emergency, should be considered an extraordinary act That principle is clearly being breached with the delay of local elections in 29 local authorities across England. These councils, many of them delaying elections for the second time, from May of this year can no longer be considered democratically elected.

Thursday

Alan Dershowitz

How Donald Trump could serve a third term

From our US edition

The 22nd Amendment leaves open several possible ways a two-term president could serve all or part of a third term without being elected. The text of that amendment, as ratified, prohibits a two-term president from “being elected” to a third term, but it doesn’t prohibit him from “serving,” “acting” or “holding” that office. Indeed, the framers explicitly rejected broader exclusionary language that would have made it constitutionally impossible for a two-term president to get anywhere near the Oval Office. Instead they accepted a compromise that created a loophole bigger than the new ballroom in the East Wing of the White House.This doesn’t mean that President Trump will actually run for a third term. He has told the media that he won’t.

Donald Trump

Tuesday

Monday

Rod Liddle

Does Farage have a path to No. 10?

My contention was always that Reform UK would struggle to reach 30 per cent in the polls and, while the party is edging upwards, that still seems to be a ceiling. However, the latest MRP poll in the Sun suggests that, for Nigel Farage to become our next Prime Minister, the party need not gain much more support than it is currently attracting. The Sun had Farage on course to win 180 seats, largely by polling at about 30 per cent in some of the red wall constituencies. Labour and the Conservatives were each predicted to gain 165 seats. In such a finely balanced parliament, discussions about a Conservative–Reform deal would become otiose: a Reform–Conservative coalition would almost certainly emerge, regardless of any prior negotiations.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of Radio 3

Vote of no confidence Sir: Rod Liddle is too harsh on those calling for another general election (‘I hope you didn’t sign that petition’, 30 November). You do not have to be a Trumpian denialist to believe the result in July raised serious concerns. Labour received just 33.7 per cent of the votes cast, yet won 411 of the 650 seats in the Commons. Labour’s total votes amounted to 23,622 per MP elected. The figure for Reform UK was 823,522. First past the post in individual constituencies works well with two major parties. But when support is significantly more divided, it is not fit for purpose. The petition was surely born out of signatories’ frustration that their votes were not fairly reflected in the new membership of the legislature.

Monday

Spectator Editorial

The 2024 Hobson’s choice

From our US edition

After what seems like four straight years of a presidential campaign, we’re finally here. When we say “here,” we are talking of course of the last stage of grief, exhausted acceptance. One half of the population accepted that their nominee could be replaced without a single primary vote. The other half accepted that their 2020 nominee couldn’t be replaced at any cost. Many this year are casting votes with considerable pain as they select from two less than ideal options. Andrew Sullivan details his grudging support for Kamala Harris; while Bridget Phetasy describes the reluctant undecided voters pulling the lever for Trump. We’re sure they’re not the only ones holding their noses. The lesser-of-two-evils election is nothing new.

2024
Roger Kimball

Why Kamala Harris will lose

From our US edition

When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost, there are a few things to remember. The first is that the two most important issues for American voters were the border and the cost of living. By “the border” I do not just mean the incomplete physical barrier along our southern frontier. That structure is merely the objective correlative of a policy that has its roots in such lofty ideas as sovereignty, the meaning of citizenship and national identity. After her coronation as the Democratic candidate in late July, Harris began to squirm and prevaricate about her appointment by Joe Biden as the “border czar.” But we have the phrase in black and white in the record of the appointment.

Harris
voters
Amber Duke

The turnout election: a tale of two ground games

From our US edition

In the past two months, the Harris-Walz campaign has texted five times asking me to join its door-knocking efforts in Virginia. I am a young woman living in Northern Virginia, so I am statistically likely to be a Democrat. But a data file of reasonable quality would also tell you that I have voted in every Republican primary since 2012, that I am a weekly Mass-attending Catholic and that I am married: three signs that I am probably not going to spend my weekend pounding the pavement for Kamala. This is anecdotal evidence, but it suggests to me that contrary to mainstream media reports, the Harris-Walz campaign doesn’t have the most sophisticated ground-game operation. “In 2020 the DNC actually wrote a press release bragging about appending cell phone numbers to the voter file.

Kennedy
Bill Kauffman

‘Democracy’ in New York State

From our US edition

Batavia, New York Election Day in New York just ain’t the same anymore, thanks to nepo numbskulls George W. Bush and Andrew Cuomo. Though I always vote for longshots and losers, radicals and reactionaries, I have such happy memories of early November Tuesdays. Mr. Milward, dressed as Uncle Sam, would tour the polling places of my hometown, benign and reassuring in a way that his model — the autocratic “I Want You!” martinet — was not. When I was a tyke, I trailed my mother as she cast a 1964 ballot for LBJ. The gray-haired election inspectors panicked — “There’s a child in the voting booth!” — but my violation of polling-place etiquette paled in comparison to Landslide Lyndon’s stolen US Senate election of 1948.

joy
Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The joy of politics

From our US edition

Laramie, Wyoming The Joy of Sex, by the appropriately named Alex Comfort, was a bestselling illustrated sex manual published in 1972 and released in a new edition in 2008. In 2024, anyone with sufficient imagination to describe and illustrate The Joy of Politics would beat out Elon Musk in the race to become the world’s first trillionaire. Politics — like sex — has always been with us, but the conception of politics as “joy” began, you may argue, with the adoption of the “Ode to Joy” that concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the European Union as its official anthem in 1985.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

What happens if the American election is a tie?

32 min listen

America has a peculiar way of deciding national elections. Instead of a cumulative national vote, the president and vice president are determined by fifty separate state elections. The top ticket in each state (except Nebraska and Maine) receives all that state’s electoral votes, no matter how slim the margin of victory. Each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of House members plus its senators. The winner needs 270 electoral votes.  What if, in this razor-thin election, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris fall one vote short? Freddy Gray is joined by Charles Lipson, contributor to The Spectator and political scientist,  to answer that question. You can read the rest of his piece here.

Thursday

Sebastian Shakespeare

Can I find my tribe in Brighton?

Recently I lost my mother, my job and nearly my wife in quick succession (she was diagnosed with breast cancer). My son now needles me by asking what I do all day. ‘Son, I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have dark thoughts.’ That is what I want to say, but I don’t have the courage. It is hard to explain to an 11-year-old that the black dog can be as demanding as any full-time employer. Besides he wouldn’t get the Blade Runner reference. But his niggling question makes me realise I am a man in need of an alibi, or another alias. My old headmaster once described me as the opposite of a whited sepulchre. I think he intended this as a compliment My grandfather S.P.B. Mais earned his keep as a novelist, broadcaster, gossip columnist and schoolteacher.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

How I lost my faith

God used to exist. He doesn’t any more, but back in the early 1970s he was a major presence in my life. The world at that time was run by President Nixon and his adviser Ted Heath, but their power was limited, and even they had to defer to God’s authority. That’s how it seemed to me. A howling spirit or a weeping martyr might burst forth, dripping blood or swathed in tongues of fire I was encouraged by the adults to converse with God and to ask for his guidance and I spoke to him often, in class when we prayed, at night in my bedroom, and at Mass on Sunday. God listened to everyone, regardless of their wealth or status, and even great leaders had no better claim to his attention than I did. This made me feel special and powerful.

Thursday

James Heale

Farage’s next move in his plan to destroy the Tories

On Tuesday afternoon, a familiar figure pulled up at a Westminster café to plot the Tories’ downfall. Nigel Farage beamed from the back of his black Range Rover as he arrived to welcome Reform’s latest recruits. The purpose of the Old Queen Street summit was to plan the party’s path to next year’s local elections in May. Where better to scheme than in the neighbouring street to Conservative Central Headquarters? ‘It baffles me how we’re the most successful political party in the western world,’ says one Tory While the Tories are enjoying a four-month leadership contest, Farage and his aides are hard at work. A constitution has been drafted to turn the limited company into a proper political party, with parameters to prevent any Ukip-style feuding.

Nicholas Farrell

My Egyptian mau pyramid scheme

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next to a derelict farmhouse so she could look for shooting stars in the endless night and make a wish. That is how she found the latest animals to join our household: a very strange silver-grey cat with long legs and blackish spots and a single kitten who looked exactly the same in miniature. This tiny kitten constantly interrupted the star-gazing activities of Caterina and her suitor by straying out on to the road, followed by its mother, who was so weak that she looked half-dead.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The dark side of your local dog show

Over at the judging for Waggiest Tail, things were getting acrimonious. ‘That bloody woman,’ my new acquaintance muttered. We were sitting behind the rope barrier in the front row and had formed a bond over a serious injustice in Prettiest Bitch. ‘I’m pretty sure she threw this category three, four years back. I happen to know – for a fact – that she made her husband stay overnight in a Travelodge. Dog’s got awful separation anxiety. Husband comes to the park, sitting round the corner. Once the Waggiest Tail starts up, she texts him, and he appears in the dog’s eyeline. Dog starts wagging fit to bust. First prize. Disgrace.’ ‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘You’d be surprised what people are capable of,’ he said.

Thursday

William Moore

The curious rise of Kamala Harris

48 min listen

This week: Kamala takes charge. Our cover piece discusses the rise of Kamala Harris, who has only one man standing in her way to the most powerful position in the world. Her's is certainly an unexpected ascent, given Harris’ generally poor public-speaking performances and mixed bag of radical left and right-wing politics. Does she really have what it takes to defeat Trump? Kate Andrews, author of the piece and economics editor at The Spectator, joins the podcast with deputy editor Freddy Gray to discuss. (02:34) Next: Will and Lara go through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine including Damian Thompson's article on how the upcoming Hollywood film Conclave may be mirroring real-life events at the Vatican. Then: Olympics on steroids.

Nicholas Farrell

I still support England. What’s wrong with me?

There was not a Spaniard in sight, I was pretty sure of that. But I was surrounded by the enemy, nevertheless. Naturally, the enemy included my Italian wife, Carla. We were at the open-air restaurant for the Euro 2024 final in one of the two village campsites not far from the nudist beach. If England beat Spain, I would have a plausible excuse to break out the booze after being on the wagon for far too many months and get patriotically sloshed. I knew that none of those gathered in front of the giant TV screen beneath the stars could be from Spain, because the Spanish do not come to Dante’s Beach near Ravenna. Nudism isn’t really their cup of tea. Instead, we get loads of Germans and Dutch who drive thousands of miles to strut about naked in front of each other.