David Runciman

The modern Conservative Party is never happier than when Labour has a unilateral disarmer as its leader. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party’s annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step, despite having endured months of bruising political infighting. She promptly fell over a manhole cover and sprained her ankle but even this did little to dampen her spirits. The reason for her good mood was that over the previous two weeks both the Liberal and Labour Party Conferences had voted in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

It’s hard​ to come up with a good analogy for climate change but that doesn’t stop people from trying. We seem to want some way of framing the problem that makes a decent outcome look less unlikely than it often appears. So climate change is described as a ‘moonshot problem’, though of course it isn’t, because the moon presents a fixed target and climate change...

The Labour Party, putting the decision entirely in the hands of its members for the first time, may elect Jeremy Corbyn. It’s tempting to see this as another IDS moment. But it’s something more than that. The election of IDS was wishful, whereas this looks much more wilful.

This election​ promised to produce constitutional confusion and uncertainty and instead it has delivered stark clarity. The British electoral system values clarity: few people dissent from the line that it is better to have a government that can pass legislation and take decisions when it needs to than to be stuck with one that stumbles on hand-to-mouth from vote to vote. We seem to prefer...

One reason​ this election is so hard to call is that history offers a very unreliable guide. For each preferred or predicted outcome there is a historical pattern from which to draw comfort. If you think the Tories should win you can point to the fact that almost no government in the modern era has been turfed out of office after only one term. The exception is Heath’s 1970-74...