While riding the No 3 bus in Glasgow MATT KERR has ample time to dissect the moribund Scottish Labour decline into near oblivion and watch intriguing bus passenger dynamics
AS the author Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in the Guardian recently, not even the Tories care who wins the contest to be the next Tory leader. With 121 MPs, it’s very unlikely that whoever is elected will get be a Tory prime minister.
The Tory leadership contest has now reached a halfway stage. After two ballots, six candidates have now been whittled down to four.
However, with such a small electorate and with each of the four attracting support, all we have really learnt so far is that the Tories are completely split over where to go for the future.
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
With the recent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie One Battle After Another, STEPHEN ARNELL gives the storied history of the British real-life left-wing urban guerillas
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



