“... in public that watching porn is something lots of adults like to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its ...”

“... cent figure was reached in 2013, on David Cameron’s watch, an achievement regarded with pride. Theresa May, on the eve of her departure from Downing Street, went out of her way to reaffirm the commitment. Even Boris Johnson is standing by it – for now. The promise that DFID will remain a separate government department with a ring-fenced budget ...”

“... have to explain why Verhofstadt’s basic argument is wrong. The EU doesn’t work well, and that may be reason enough for some to want to leave, but whoever stays has to face the reality that making the Eurozone and the Union’s common external border – to take just the most glaring failings – function properly will require more integration. Further ...”

“... would be more familiar with snakes than electric cables, but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t explain everything straightaway, or translate the Punjabi phrases he uses, or spell out the ...”

“... familiar. Companies can make contractual agreements because we have legal rules to determine who may act on their behalf: the CEO of Tesco can make agreements for the company, a temp stacking shelves can’t. The rules that determine who can make agreements on behalf of the state are part of the constitution. Kings once made these agreements, and were bound ...”

“... On 12 May​ , ten days after Reform swept the local elections, Keir Starmer launched a white paper with the title ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’. The timing was a coincidence, he said: ‘People who like politics will try to make this all about politics,’ but ‘it is what I believe in.’ Among other measures – fewer visas for skilled workers, stricter language requirements, more deportations – the government wants to reduce the number of international students in the UK ...”

“... of Jarrow and always spoke for the workers. Yet this well-written biography surprises us: she may have been a founding spirit of the party but her interests, associations and beliefs took her a long way from the straightforward defence of the Labour Party as we have come to know it. At one point a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and ...”

“... Britain possesses nuclear weapons, a blindspot that he was impolitic enough to reveal in front of Theresa May. But complaining about Trump’s ignorance and lack of curiosity is easy: what Bolton and his colleagues fail to do is to measure his strengths. Among them are his mastery of publicity and his ability to exploit the grey space between rules and ...”

“... one of many controversial, not to say fateful, judgments made by the prime minister last year. In May, with infections and hospitalisations falling, political pressure began mounting for a relaxation of lockdown restrictions, not least in order to distract attention from the row that broke out at the end of that month over Dominic Cummings’s drive to ...”

“... the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status ...”

“... wheeze was scrapped on 22 October; the vans were ‘not a good idea’, admitted an unapologetic Theresa May. But the government is going ahead with its plan to outsource immigration control to private citizens, despite a barrage of criticism and a Channel 4 FactCheck report finding no clear evidence that it would work. To have presented objective data ...”

“... from exploding mortgages to collapsing schools and a real-wage death spiral. Its fiscal rules may prove a self-imposed prison. None of this is likely to prevent Labour winning, but there are few certainties about what it will do once it takes office.Starmer’s political statements rarely add up to much or endure for long: the ten moderately left-wing ...”

“... from Peel’s rapid fall. In recent years, aspirants to the role, like Michael Heseltine and Theresa May, have spent Friday evenings eating and drinking with Conservative constituency associations on the ‘rubber chicken circuit’. This interaction is much more than gestural; so is the requirement that the party leader face backbenchers regularly ...”

“... in his last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of ...”

“... was handed in before Christmas; leaks suggest it proposed many urgent reforms, but apparently it may never be published. Instead, Whitehall departments are planning to set up and loudly publicise their own ‘British’ spending programmes, running parallel to the operations of Scottish and Welsh ministries. That was the real motive for the sudden additional ...”