According to Conservative Home a 'rebel reserve' of 55 Conservative MP's is waiting in the wings to launch an audacious bid to oust David Cameron from office. Maybe the number is a little on the high side but surely there can be little doubt that the discontent on...

Ed Miliband's used last years Autumn conference of the Labour Party to launch his 'one nation' vision for the party and the country. It was an instant hit and its easy to see why - there was something there for both tribes within the broad church of the Labour family....

Welfare and welfare reform is one of those areas of political debate that is bedeviled by mass, mainly media-driven, ignorance. Politicians are far from guiltless in this Hall of Shame. On all sides of the House they connive in the production of mass hysteria which tell us that there are...

Conservative Home readers, not unreasonably, have voted the rise of Nigel Farage's United Kingdom Independence Party as the big political event of 2012. Certainly, the rise of Ukip has sent tremors through the political establishment. It has however been entirely predictable. Nick Clegg's decision to lead the...

I suspect a few people reading this have just spent the holiday season somewhat alone. Maybe, their New Year's Resolution was not to be a singleton the next time the party hats and bad jokes are back in fashion once again.

If that is the case then some of...

Yesterday, it was the Labour Party's 112th birthday. On 26 and 27 February 1900, a gathering of working-class and left-wing organisations met and passed Keir Hardie's motion to establish "a distinct Labour group in parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a...

Liam Byrne obviously hasn't let the recently departed festive season slow him down. First, he was busy leaking an upcoming speech to the Daily Mail and then he found time today to pen an article in The Guardian. One hopes he isn't actually staking his own...

The debate about Labour's future colour leaves me somewhat aesthetically torn because, if pressed, I would name both red and purple (the, deep, dark and brooding imperial kind) as my favourite colours. Politically, however, my favour definitely falls on red. Despite all this the release of the Purple Book by...

Last week, The Observer, reported on a leaked-memo that shows that the Labour Party's allegedly finest political minds have decided the way to hammer David Cameron is to portray him as right-wing. Well, talk about stating the obvious. Most people know this government is pretty right-wing and they...

In the first episode of the third season of Blackadder, a caricature of David Dimbleby advises a mockery of the Monster Raving Loony Party to, perhaps, "consider taking up politics". This scene always comes into my mind whenever I hear of things like the covering of Deputy Prime Minister, Nick...

Watching the Liberal Democrats in government is becoming rather akin to watching some kind of bizarre and, it has to be said, rather cruel psychological experiment to measure pain tolerance thresholds. You begin to wonder at what point breaking point will come at what point they will just collapse into...

As far as I am concerned the 'Big Society' is a completely vacuous concept, it's an empty bottle of platitudes and concealed agendas. Post-riot, it is virtually impossible to see how David Cameron can make it work. If it were, say, David Davis delivering the message then things maybe different...

Ed Miliband is such a tease. One day he is pushing the unions away, the next he is cuddling-up to them and holding them close.

This somewhat erratic display highlights the contradiction he finds himself trapped in, on the one hand he is desperate to...

James Purnell told the BBC's Newsnight that he wants to "help people love the welfare state" again. His prescription though looks more like the intention is to kill it stone dead. Purnell start's from the wrong position - assuming that people thought Labour was 'soft' on 'benefit scroungers' - therefore...

What happened last week in Oslo is shocking beyond belief. This should go without saying. The way media and politicians reacted on-the-hoof and made rash assumptions about the identity of the perpetrators is equally as shocking and potentially dangerous in its implications. A mosque in Luton was attacked...

Ed Miliband, leader of Britain's Labour Party, is probably not the luckiest man ever in politics but he certainly, in the form of the #Hackgate scandal, enjoyed a significant lucky break. Pre-Hackgate (it's been so significant that you sometimes forget there was a time such as this) he was floundering...

Ed Miliband was quite right, in the pages of the Observer, to say that the root cause of the Hackgate scandal is the dominance News International enjoys over our media. His intimation; that we should look at dismantling it is also the correct conclusion. However, a couple of...

At the end of September the Palestinian Authority, under the seemingly never-ending leadership of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, will push the United Nations to officially recognise their claim to statehood. It is a vote few people seem to want to happen. European Union countries certainly don't because they are split...

Single life, we are told in any case, is the life of riley. However, if you look at the questions on advice sites, like Dear Cupid, and were too do a survey of the martial status of the questioners I bet just as many would turn out to...