PETER HITCHENS: Tribal voting that is stopping us getting the leaders we need

This is Peter Hitchens��� Mail on Sunday column

By-elections are such useless guides to the future. I used to report on them all the time in the Thatcher years, and the one I remember best was at Darlington in March 1983, where Labour���s high command secretly hoped to lose in a close fight.

Had they been defeated, they were poised to launch a putsch against their then leader Michael Foot, a delightful, kindly but hopeless and doddery old thinker whose curtain of white hair, walking stick and...