Whitehall
Was Graham Brady really the awesome power-broker he imagines?
His kiss-and-tell memoir implies that the past five Tory prime ministers all feared him. But the longtime Chair of the 1922 Committee was in reality no ‘kingmaker’
Whoever you vote for, the Blob wins
At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I…
Who are ‘the blob’?
Liz Truss calls them the ‘deep state’, Dominic Cummings ‘the blob’ and for Sue Gray they are simply former colleagues.…
Battered but unbowed
Don’t bring a bottle. Your chances of finding a party in full swing down those chilly corridors are close to…
The slow horses gather pace
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
Workshy Whitehall
Too few civil servants are returning to the office
Is this the end of borrow and spend?
Since the spring statement last week, Rishi Sunak has been dealing with complaints from all sides: the right have been…
Boris Johnson’s survival rests on reforming Whitehall
More than 40 years after it was written there are still lines in Yes Minister that are painfully accurate about how…
Power failure
A fortnight ago, the energy minister, Andrea Leadsom, declared grandly that Britain, alone in the world, would commit to a…
The wrong man
Why Jim O’Neill isn’t fit to run the Northern Powerhouse
Promising more than he delivers
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and…
A misogynistic reshuffle
The PM doesn’t want the new women in his cabinet to do anything but look nice
The corpse in the cupboard
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August…
