Martin Bright

I am travelling to Conservative Party conference in Birmingham today and thought this would be a good time to return to this blog. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments in my absence. As ever, I will try to respond where I can. I should be up to full speed during the week. Meanwhile, I

I will be taking a sabbatical from the Spectator over the summer in order to think about the future of the Left and the historical connections between Britain and the Islamic world. I will return for party conferences. Thank you for all your challenging comments. 

The choreography of the new coalition is designed to make this look like a partnership of equals. But I’m increasingly convinced that Nick Clegg pulled a masterstroke here. This really is a joint premiership. Someone suggested I take a look at the full coalition document  on the Cabinet Office website to see just how much the

Thanks to Richard Millett who has alerted me to the latest outburst from Labour’s failed mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone on Irainian state-funded Press TV. In an interview with Andrew Gilligan, Livingstone comes close to condoning suicide bombing in his defence of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the controversial cleric. “There would not be any Palestine suicide bombers if

I have yet to get really excited about the Labour Party leadership race. I was deeply depressed by the manner of Andy Burnham’s entry into the fray. Too many Labour politicians and activists were over-impressed by talk of immigration on the doorstep. They think that because the subject was raised again and again, then it

Congratulations to David Cameron and to Nick Clegg. It is a remarkable achievement to have formed this coalition government. Now we shall see whether it can hold together. Some in the Labour Party are already feeling smug about the Liberal Democrats’ discomfort. But this way madness lies.  The Labour Party should begin from the assumption that

I left the Labour Party in 1994 and re-joined on May 6th 2010. There, I’ve said it. I had always intended to vote Liberal Democrat in this election, but changed my mind in the polling station. It seems I wasn’t alone.  I couldn’t ever quite buy in to the New Labour project, but I would

If there is one lesson to be drawn from the television debates, it is that people have grown tired of politicians slagging each other off. David Cameron promised an end to “yah-boo” politics, but the institution of parliament makes this near-impossible in practice. However, while parliament is out of action, there just might be the

The old political hands in the Labour Party at least knew that they had to talk down their prospects (beyond the usual nonsense about fighting to win). Lord Mandelson was right to fight this election as the underdog because this now looks in some ways like a victory.  In fact this is a massive achievement

I have been deeply disappointed by Tory negative campaigning in the past few days. The Cameroon coup was inspired, in part, by Tony Blair, so to decry 13 years of New Labour is deeply hypocritical. The message, pioneered by Oliver Letwin, was that praise would be given where it was due. Britain has become a

I have just watched the last images of the election campaign on the Ten O’Clock News on the BBC. David Cameron was surrounded by some seriously off-putting party apparatchiks (why not choose some of the perfectly presentable and normal-looking young people for CCHQ rather than these awful gargoyles?), meanwhile Gordon Brown was struggling to fill

I have had a number of shocked emails from old friends on the left following my previous post here, which many saw as an endorsement of the Liberal Democrats. In fact, I remain one of the great undecided. This weekend I witnessed some good comrades embracing the party of the workers. Nick Cohen devoted his

The letter in support of the Lib Dems in today’s Guardian was a brave intervention from Richard Reeves, John Kampfner and a group of prominent figures from left-liberal Britain. It is all too easy to dismiss such interventions as the actions of the usual suspects addicted to writing to the papers to remind themselves of

Gordon Brown clearly didn’t read my blog post before last. There was something biblical about his humiliation in Rochdale. His loss of dignity was total. It wasn’t as if the status of Gillian Duffy as an archetypal Labour voter had not been telegraphed – father singing the red flag at Manchester Free Trade Hall, working

In September 2005 I wrote about the “stampede for the centre ground” in an article for the New Statesman. I had just been underwhelmed by the Liberal democrat conference in Blackpool and noted how easy it was to sneer about the centre party from the Westminster village. The Lib Dems were not making it easy