Word: labour
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...With these sad, sober words outside the party's London headquarters, Conservative leader William Hague dramatically and unexpectedly announced his resignation, leaving a stunned party to find itself a new head. Hours earlier, he had conceded his party's defeat after a night of results he found "deeply disappointing." Labour's second successive landslide victory was a bitter blow to Hague, whose passion for politics began in his early teens and whose dazzling career in the party - he was an M.P. at 27, a cabinet minister at 34 - suggested he might one day move into 10 Downing St. Back...
...This time everything has felt rather déjà vu. The polls have been remarkably similar to those of '97, with Labour in the high 40s, the Tories at around 30% and the Liberal Democrats around 17%. (The results of the vote in '97 were: Labour 44%, Conservatives 31% and Liberal Democrats 17%). New Labour, meanwhile, is no longer new and doesn't offer the piquancy of the unknown. Labour has been in power for four years, it has a mixed record, and is not expected to provide many surprises when it takes office, as appears inevitable, on June...
...Although the leaders have manically driven and flown around the country campaigning, the journalists in pursuit of them on press buses have seemed more dutiful than excited. To enliven the tedium of long journeys with little opportunity for much real journalistic coverage, media on both the Labour and Tory buses played a bingo game. This involved picking slips out of a hat filled with Blair's and Hague's oft-repeated phrases, with scoring based on which of the phrases popped...
...Rory Bremner, an impressionist and comedian, certainly perked up one of the Hague trips. Bremner, who was writing about the election for the Sunday Telegraph but was banned from the Labour press bus on the grounds that he was not really a journalist - his TV impressions of Blair are rather cutting - sat in front of me in the coach. Hague kept popping out of Bremner's mouth, his voice and mannerisms so perfect one wondered whether Hague in fact hadn't somehow slipped in beside Bremner. The local press clustered around the comedian at a stop in a Portsmouth shopping...
...diversions were welcome, particularly when it came to covering the Blair campaign. The Labour bus was half blacked out by party propaganda stuck to the outside of the windows, so that it was hard for half the journalists to see where they were going. The effect was claustrophobic and the tight control exerted by Labour minders equally so. Journalists were endlessly chivied around, cordoned off, and told where they could or could not stand. After a day of this tight shepherding, an Australian reporter covering Blair said that in his country journalists would have rioted. The British journalists tended...