As Labour meet in Liverpool, from Sunday, Andy Burnham and his advisers are worrying about his lack of a mandate. You can see why. They have an almost unprecedentedly large majority with an unprecedentedly low vote-share, and when they won it, Mr Burnham was not even in Parliament. He gained his party’s leadership uncontested. Since there is a split right, he may feel he should boldly go to the country and offer it something or other. I suspect he won’t, because his majority would fall, and voters might curse him for troubling them. And I hope he won’t, because the mandate doctrine should not be pushed too hard. Our highly flexible system means legitimate government can usually be carried on by anyone who can command a majority in the Commons, limited only by the Parliament’s five-year term. Our two most important decisions ever made in the era of universal suffrage were completely innocent of a direct democratic mandate. They were the declaration of the second world war and the later choice of Winston Churchill to lead us through it.

I like a good hypocrite

The English are a mongrel people, not an Aryan master race

Why does it cost £237 million to build a railway bridge?

Just possibly, some readers will have allowed this week’s Liberal Democrat Assembly in Brighton to pass them by. Not I. For me, it is Proustian. It was a Liberal Assembly (the ‘Democrat’ was added much later) in Brighton which gave me my first taste of a national political gathering. I am........

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