Voters have shifted since 2017. Here’s what I’ve seen | Rafael Behr

-

Out on the streets, attitudes to Brexit and Corbyn have hardened. But there’s little trust in Boris Johnson, even among Tory voters has little

At school I was told a cautionary tale about an art teacher who had the tips missing from two fingers. One had been lost showing a class how not to use a craft knife. The second was lost demonstrating what had happened the first time. The story may be apocryphal, but the lesson is real enough: there is no mistake so stupid that it can’t be made twice.

Boris Johnson still has time to bungle this election. If he fails to win an outright victory, his missing lead will take a special place in Westminster folklore alongside its spectral twin – the majority that Theresa May vaporised in 2017. That campaign, defined by the incumbent’s hubris, haunts the current one with unusual intensity, and not just because it is recent. It is hardly a memory; more a presence. It fuels Labour hopes and Tory fears. It lurks in every pundit’s caveat and every pollster’s preamble.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/37D6Zal

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ply in the sky: the new materials to take us beyond concrete | Fiona Harvey

-
Concrete is everywhere, but it’s bad for the planet, generating large amounts of carbon dioxide. Creative alternatives are in the pipeline They call them plyscrapers: the sudden emergence of tall buildings constructed almost entirely from timber. Vancouver , Vienna and Brumunddal in Norway have all claimed recently to have the tallest wooden building in the world, and now Tokyo has its own designs on the informal title. Related: Share your photos of beautiful or ugly concrete Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UeDOmU
Read more

Forgotten plays: No 5 – Owners (1972) by Caryl Churchill

-
The writer unleashed her gift for black comedy to excoriate British attitudes to property and possessions in this sprightly drama Caryl Churchill is rightly admired for many qualities : her formal inventiveness, her questing intelligence, her dystopian vision of everything from cloning to climate catastrophe. But she has one gift that is rarely discussed: her wild humour. It is there in the sudden eruption of a 10-foot bird into the family brouhaha in Blue Heart (1997) and in the backyard banter in the more recent Escaped Alone (2016). It is also vividly present in one of her earliest stage plays, Owners. Given that the piece had a brief run at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1972 and, as far as I know, only one revival, it is one of Churchill’s least-known works yet cries out to be rediscovered. On the surface, it sounds bleak. It is about the urge for ownership and shows Marion, a rampant property developer, eating up everything around her: she’s not only prepared to turf two...
Read more

The 20 best songs of 2020

-
Our writers considered hundreds of contenders – and here are their picks of the year. Listen to all 390 tracks they voted for on our playlist Delivered from a nightmare: why our No 1 song works so well We kick off our end of 2020 music coverage with Guardian critics’ favourite songs, with our album of the year countdown starting tomorrow. As ever, each critic votes for top 20 songs and albums, with points allocated for each placing, and those points tallied to make these lists. There were 390 songs voted for in all – we’ve put ( almost) all of them in a Spotify playlist . Please share your own favourite songs of the year in the comments below, and we’ll hopefully see you in a festival field in 2021 … Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3liPlhp
Read more