As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM

THE coronation of hard-right Tory Boris Johnson as party leader and hence prime minister will no doubt be hailed as a great victory by the Murdoch press and the Mail.
Elements of the Corbynphobic Labour right won’t lose too much sleep either perhaps, reckoning that of the no-hopers and losers the Tories have available Johnson has the best chance, even if a small one, of beating Labour in a general election.
Yet the reality suggests a sharply different story for the Tories and privately many of them know it.

In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT

Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT