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Michael Foot and I did not get on. Our contacts were solely across the floor of the House and in print. I think he found it outrageous that any one lacking a university education, especially one from a working-class background, should challenge him at all, let alone challenge him successfully. It was nearly 35 years ago

There can’t have been a lot going on at the Mail on Sunday this week if all they could find to splash on was “Mrs Cameron might have voted Labour”. I can’t get overly excited about the lovely Sam’s past voting preferences – but I was intrigued to read that she may consider backing Gordon

In 1999, John Stevens, a former Conservative MEP, announced that his new Pro Euro Conservative Party would fight the European election “to show how much support there is for the single currency”. And it did: it won precisely 1.38 per cent of the vote. Stevens then became a Lib Dem. Now, for reasons he gives

It is often suggested to me that I and my fellow incorrigible Labourites have no idea just how deeply the present Government is loathed and despised. Oh, but I do. And even if we can’t empathise ourselves, we remember how we felt about the Major Government in 1997 and it’s easy to do a mutatis

Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in

It’s not often I agree with Daniel Hannan, but his tribute to Michael Foot was gracious and much appreciated. At a time when so much in politics is all about image, soundbites, and spin-doctors, and when the prerequisite for being a successful political leader is how good one looks on the telly, then it’s a

You cannot force people to have liberal opinions, or legislate for good manners. A free country must tolerate obnoxiousness. An open society must allow eccentricity to the point of insanity. These things shouldn’t need saying. Yet we seem to have lost sight of some basic principles. Nigel Farage was extremely rude to the President of the European

Does Gordon Brown have a split personality? Or are there, perhaps, two Gordon Browns? The schizophrenic flavour of the Prime Minister’s evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry was baffling in its contradictions on one central aspect of the Iraq affair. Was Gordon in the loop or was he, as Clare Short told us some time ago,

A sharp-eyed viewer has noticed that when I was debating George Monbiot on TV yesterday and I mentioned that his cherished “peer-reviewed science” had been discredited by Climategate he bared his teeth like a cornered cur. Says my body language expert John Lish: “It was a quite aggressive and defensive gesture which was noticeable when he

Wow. Gordon Brown’s ability to bear a grudge is legendary, but even by his standards, his Chilcot testimony about Robin Cook was remarkably terse. Students of Scottish Labour history will recall that Mr Brown and Mr Cook fell out in the early 1970s over, well, something. (No-one’s quite sure what; there are various accounts

Thanks to Guido Paul, I have just caught up with the details of an exchange between Tom Bradby of ITV News and Peter Mandelson. His Lordness acknowledges that it is legitimate to ask about Labour non-doms – who they are and how much they have paid – although he doesn’t offer the answers himself. Here