When his family fell on hard times, education made the difference. Were there to be a vacancy in that department, he would be an obvious candidate.
Plus: Russia’s opposition leader was poisoned, so now slap Magnitsky sanctions on Putin. And: Phil Collins’ ungracious departure.
Pro-Leave support piles up for the Mayor, Gove and Fox – leaving Osborne and May with most of the pro-Remain rest.
Reflecting people’s gripes back at them will take you only so far. To get further, you must also offer something better.
The most straight forward way to achieve a Living Income for everyone would be to align the Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds with the Minimum Wage.
A defeat to the wrong brother would surely force the mother of all rethinks.
It’s a modern form of One Nation Conservatism. Harold Macmillan would have liked it.
Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare’s new project is a radical, inventive and long-termist injection into Conservative thinking.
Yes, younger voters are harder-edged, but they also believe that government has a big, positive role to play in their lives.
The numbers are clear – and neither of the main parties should be popping the champagne.
It's extraordinary that at this stage of the electoral cycle, and after years of a pretty miserable economy with further cuts coming, the opposition party should be less than 10 per cent ahead. Were it not for the continued strength of UKIP, we'd be confident of seeing Cameron remain in Downing Street. Perhaps it's not […]
Stephan Shakespeare is a founder and global CEO of YouGov. Follow Stephan on Twitter. People are not good at predicting their own behaviour, so pollsters are wary of drawing conclusions from questions that ask ‘what would you do if…?’
Follow Stephan on Twitter. There is a widely-held and wrong assumption that only a small section of the electorate is open to being persuaded from their current political voting intention to a different one. A second, also wrong assumption is that these few voters are located along specific parts of a supposed political spectrum, for […]
Follow Stephan on Twitter. Imagine you are going into battle and alongside you in your struggle to survive you can have either mercenaries or regular soldiers – which do you choose? Easy: the ones you can unthinkingly trust. Well, suppose the mercenaries are clearly superior in the craft of fighting; but the regulars are unquestionably, […]
I was very much the junior partner in the team that launched 18 Doughty Street in 2006. Here’s what we tried to do, and this new enterprise should do.