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 resignation of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and his likely eventual departure from Number 10 is a moment of crisis for the Tory Party. Post-1945 history shows that it’s a crisis they can overcome though.
The wooden image of Keir Starmer correctly calling for the Tories to go will hearten them. Perhaps the worst that could happen Tory-wise is for them to lose an election to be replaced by a similar Labour one.
In 1957 Anthony Eden resigned after the Suez Canal war which Britain lost. Eden claimed he was unwell. Labour did improve its poll ratings but Eden’s successor Harold Macmillan easily won the 1959 election.

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