Ballots & Bullets

George Arliss is a long forgotten figure. But in the 1930s he meant a lot to British movie audiences, so much in fact one poll made him the most popular film star of 1934, knocking Clark Gable into second place. Arliss was, however, an unlikely star – in his sixties, he had a stoop and bad teeth – but his …

Image by Christian Bauer

At the last Conservative conference, George Osbourne announced “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”. While he was referring specifically to climate change, he articulated a commonly-held view: that protecting the environment always comes at an economic cost. And so in times of economic hardship, environmental action is a …

Tomorrow, we launch our annual report on the rebelliousness of MPs, packed full of data about the behaviour of MPs in the last session – who’s rebelled, how often, over what. And whether the record-breaking behaviour seen in the first session of the Parliament continued into the second. But how do the public react to MPs who are rebellious?

To …

If you are a political scientist or a political historian or – like me – some hybrid of the two, you really should avoid predicting the future. That said, put a microphone and a camera close to our faces and most of us will do just that.

In the early days of the current coalition government I was asked by …

Image by Andreas Solberg

Not so long ago, I used this blog to raise the issue of whether the property-owning democracy – the vision of widespread home ownership that has long been the dream of Conservative politicians – was under threat.

At the time, speculation about declining levels of home ownership was exactly that – speculation. But courtesy of newly …

We’ve been producing end-of-session reports detailing the rebellions of government backbenchers for several years now, and last year’s was a whopper: the largest number of rebellions faced by any Prime Minister in any post war session, the largest rate of rebellion to boot.  Without pre-empting this year’s report (and not least because the session is not yet complete), the one …

Amongst the acres of coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s life and death over the last week, there were some interesting What Ifs, trying to imagine a Britain without her as Prime Minister.  Dominic Sandbrook’s account, in the Mail, has Tony Benn becoming Prime Minister.  Philip Henscher’s for the Guardian is perhaps more plausible, although not exactly upbeat (‘You are …

Image from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation

Huge controversy exists over whether Margaret Thatcher deserves to be buried with full military honours, an accolade awarded to her hero Winston Churchill on his death in 1965. Critics argue that her achievements didn’t match Churchill’s of saving the nation from Nazi tyranny.

And yet Margaret Thatcher was the only British Prime Minister to …

Image by David Spencer

Yesterday’s post detailing how Labour perceived David Cameron’s debating skills before the 2010 leaders’ debate was a bit of a success.  Several people asked if I’d seen the material about Nick Clegg or Gordon Brown. Indeed, I had.  And so, again with the permission of its author, Theo Bertram, here is Labour’s pre-debate briefing on …

Image by World Economic Forum

When doing qualitative research, people are sometimes willing to talk to you or to show you material but only on a background basis; that is, that it can inform what you write, but you cannot quote from it.  Amongst the many documents that Dennis Kavanagh and I were shown when writing our book on the …