Ten years ago this week I was in the process of helping Robin Cook resign from government. Most of the previous decade had been spent helping him to get into government and stay there, so it's fair to say that walking out in protest wasn't how it was meant to...

Russia's foreign and defence Ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu, arrive in London tomorrow for the first session of the UK-Russia Strategic Dialogue agreed between David Cameron and Vladimir Putin at the London Olympics last year. Whether the results of the meeting live up to the weighty designation of being...

Andrew Harrop at the Fabian Society produced a good and cautiously positive analysis of Labour's electoral prospects at the weekend. Based on a specially commissioned YouGov poll, it concluded that Labour's support has been boosted since 2010 by the addition of 2.3 million Liberal Democrat defectors, 1.4 million...

The ceasefire negotiated over Gaza has held, but there are few reasons to think that it will last indefinitely, let alone become a turning point in relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, there are four particularly tragic aspects to the latest crisis that make it harder than ever to...

It's been a struggle to convince myself that this year's US presidential race matters very much. In 2004 and 2008, I followed every twist and turn of the campaign, every new poll, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis from the convention season to the result. This time I have...

It's been a rollercoaster year for the Don't Underestimate Ed Miliband Association (DUEMA). Formed semi-seriously by Telegraph writer Iain Martin after the 2010 Labour leadership election, it subsequently became an in-joke among Miliband's detractors before being taken over and renamed the Don't Unseat Ed Miliband Association. The joke has now...

We have heard a lot recently about the attitude of conservative politicians on both sides of the Atlantic towards people they evidently regard as their social inferiors. First we had Mitt Romney, in off the record comments to wealthy campaign donors, dismissing 47% of Americans as idlers wallowing in victimhood...