Paul Linford

Labour hobbled itself in Thursday's election by choosing the wrong brother as leader in 2010, while the Liberal Democrats lost their pol...

IF a week is a long time in politics, then two weeks is twice as long – and the fortnight since this column last appeared seems to have been...

Whatever else the past seven eventful days in politics will ultimately be remembered for, it’s certainly been a good, maybe even vintage wee...

Andy Murray will win Wimbledon, Roberto Mancini will be sacked as manager of Manchester City, David and Victoria Beckham will return to the ...

Here's my annual political review of the year, published in this morning's Newcastle Journal. Until the early months of this year,...

When the history of David Cameron’s government comes to be written, the Budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne on 21 March may well b...

There is a school of thought that says that once a government gets itself into a position where it needs a relaunch, the brand is probably ...

In last week's column, I suggested that the key strategic task facing the Liberal Democrats as they gather for their spring conference i...

Back in the bad old days of two-party politics, the Liberal Democrat spring conference was one of those recurring events in the political ca...

So farewell then, Chris Huhne – well for the time being at any rate, as the erstwhile Energy Secretary quits in order to fight charges of pe...

Religion and politics have always been a potentially lethal combination. It is way too simplistic to say they don’t mix. Actually the prob...

Following on from last week's Review of 2011, here's my look ahead to the political year 2012. Predicting the future is always a ...

Ever since the formation of the Coalition between David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in the aftermath of the M...

‘Make or break’ is doubtless an overused term in politics. Many are the times when it is said that a politician needs to make the “speech o...

At first sight, former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn's criticisms of the Conservative-led Coalition's revamped health reforms...

First David Cameron announces a “pause” in the government’s plans to reform the National Health Service in order to listen further to the vi...

Ever since the Coalition government was formed a year ago with the intention of governing for five years, a single overarching question has ...

At the beginning of this year, I wrote that if the Coalition government survived 2011, it would in all likelihood achieve its original objec...

Of all the changes introduced by the Coalition government since it took office last May, it is fair to say that its proposed reforms to the ...

When Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg took the historic gamble of joining the Tory-led coalition government last May, he created for himse...