Stephen Bush Articles

If Clement Attlee was so great, then why is This Boy so sad? Alan Johnson’s memoir – out in paperback later this week – is a book of almost unbearable sorrow. Reading it was like unpacking a series of heavy crates; I kept having to stop and take a breath every few...

Ukip are fast becoming specialists in failure. They came second in the 2009 European elections; and then vanished like the airy fabric of a baseless dream in 2010. They came second in Eastleigh, Rotherham, and South Shields: but the only byelection victory for a party...

The good news: it was a speech Tony Blair could easily have given. The semi-approving invocation of Margaret Thatcher, the silence where Labour’s past ought to be, the promise to break down old institutions and reorient public services: it was all there. Now for the...

As is often the case with leftwingers, JK Rowling did a better job of finding the enemy than the answer. She was right to say last week that the brilliant Hermione Granger – the real hero of the Harry Potter books, as any fool knows – was cruelly ill-suited to Ron...