Somewhere in England this year, a force advertised for a chief constable and received one applicant it considered suitable. Not one outstanding candidate among several — one, full stop. This is not a story about a shortage of ambitious police officers. It is a story about what happens to a leadership
In 2023, two-thirds of every pound handed to a British political party came from nineteen people. Not nineteen companies, not nineteen unions — nineteen individuals, most of them multi-millionaires, writing cheques large enough that the rest of us writing £20 by direct debit might as well not bother. That number sat
At four in the morning on 19 September 2014, Mary Pitcaithly stood in front of the cameras as Chief Counting Officer and delivered the line the whole apparatus of the referendum had been built to earn: "I am satisfied that all counts were conducted properly." Hundreds of independent
Two years ago this week, Labour won 412 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, the largest majority any party has assembled since Tony Blair's in 1997, achieved against a Conservative Party in a state of genuine institutional collapse. Two years on, almost to the day,