Lord Godson is director of Policy Exchange and the author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism (2004)
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Northern Ireland may not be the most sectarian place in the world, but it is surely among the most begrudging. Ulstermen often resent their compatriots’ successes. Yet every now and again, the Province surprises. It did so last week — when it was announced that Paul Bew, the Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast,
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Is Kensington and Chelsea, that jewel in the crown of Conservative parliamentary seats, becoming the Bermuda Triangle of Tory politics? Thanks to the little-noticed workings of the Boundary Commission, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, could soon find himself in a battle royal to remain in the Commons. The local precedents are not good
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Colin Cramphorn, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, occupies one of the two hottest seats in British policing today. Since it emerged that all four British suicide bombers of 7 July came from his patch, he has scarcely drawn breath. Cramphorn’s only relaxation in that fevered week came after his surgeon — who has been
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Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most
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If Slim’s 14th was the ‘Forgotten Army’ of the second world war, then the trade union Right and its sponsored MPs are surely the ‘Forgotten Army’ of Labour’s civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. They were ‘old Labour’, but not in the sense which the term has taken on in recent years to mean
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Could terrorism turn the British political landscape on its head, much as it has done in Spain? Government sources naturally give this scenario short shrift. They argue that Tony Blair faces no comparable electoral test here any time soon. They add that the war in Iraq, though never popular, has never been quite as universally
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That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,’ quipped David Trimble with black humour as he bounded in to meet with Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in the Lady Grey Room at Hillsborough Castle last Saturday. As well he might: for the first time, Ian Paisley’s anti-Agreement Democratic Unionists had won more seats than