Politics Archives

Sunday

10 Jun 2018

Sunday shows round-up: Nicola Sturgeon, Keir Starmer, Ken Clarke, Dominic Raab

Keir Starmer – Tory Remainers should vote with us The week ahead promises a showdown in the House of Commons as the government’s EU Withdrawal Bill will face several key votes which could decisively impact the future of Brexit. The votes come after the bill was substantially amended by the House of Lords back in April, with peers notably seeking to keep the UK in the EU’s customs union and to give Parliament a ‘meaningful say’ on the final Brexit deal. Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer joined Andrew Marr to discuss Labour’s approach to the bill, with Marr highlighting that Labour was not seizing the opportunity to keep the

Saturday

9 Jun 2018

Stephen Daisley

Mean Girls and meaner trolls: the rise of Twitter diplomacy

You can tell a lot about a leader by the diplomats they choose to represent them. Brezhnev had Anatoly Dobrynin, Nixon had Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Netanyahu has Regina George. The queen bitch of North Shore High, fictional setting of the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls, is blunt, conniving and vicious with a mid-hallway putdown. Played by sweetness personified Rachel McAdams but scripted by the acid Tina Fey, Regina is not someone you’d like to encounter in double French — or at Camp David. That is no doubt why the Israelis selected her as the latest face of digital hasbara. Ayatollah Khamenei — probably not a connoisseur of high school

Steerpike

Brexit, the view from Love Island

Theresa May’s cabinet is divided and her MPs increasingly worried over the government’s Brexit plans – or lack thereof. Yet despite all this, the latest Times/YouGov poll puts the Tories seven points ahead of Labour. With many in Westminster left scratching their head over the apparent disconnect, could a clue be found in ITV2’s Love Island? Mr S only asks after Friday’s episode saw contestants on the popular reality show – in which twenty-somethings attempt to find their perfect match – discuss the issue of the day. Only, rather than talk backstop options, customs arrangements, the Irish border or post-Brexit immigration systems, the conversation centred around what Brexit was and

James Forsyth

David Davis warns Tories are at risk of 1997-style defeat if Britain is under the backstop in 2022

David Davis has, I write in The Sun this morning, warned the Brexit inner Cabinet that if Britain is under the backstop at the time of the next election then the Tories will suffer a 1997-style defeat. The Brexit Secretary argued that this risk meant that the UK had to keep control of the backstop: it had to be able to choose when to end it. But Davis lost this argument with the Prime Minister. However, Number 10 have assured Brexiteer Cabinet Ministers that the UK will be out from under the backstop by the time of the next election in 2022. I am told that Theresa May is hopeful

Friday

8 Jun 2018

Tom Goodenough

Barnier’s reality check adds to May’s Brexit woes

Could Brexit talks soon be heading for the ‘meltdown’ that Boris Johnson predicted? Michel Barnier’s press conference just now hardly inspires confidence that things are going to plan. The EU’s chief negotiator said that Britain was playing a ‘blame game’ in Brexit talks and that it had to accept the consequences of its decision to leave the EU. He went on to call for the British government to have something of a reality check over the way things were going. Today, that reality check came in the form of his rejection of Britain’s backstop proposal to solve the Irish border problem. Theresa May had put forward the suggestion that the

James Kirkup

Boris Johnson must learn there is more to life than Brexit

I know we’re not supposed to be shocked or even surprised by anything Boris Johnson says any more – “Boris is Boris” and all that. But still I find that one of the comments revealed in Alex Spence’s excellent Buzzfeed scoop about the Foreign Secretary is gnawing at me. It’s this: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We’re allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.” He was referring to the small matter of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic

Steerpike

Watch: Shami Chakrabarti heckles voter over Brexit

Labour’s flip-flopping on Brexit means that many Leave supporters simply don’t trust the party. So Mr S wonders whether it was really such a wise idea for Shami Chakrabarti to heckle a voter on Question Time last night: Audience member: We’re the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We voted to leave so let’s pull up anchor and sail away, OK. Shami Chakrabarti: Where you going? … I mean ‘Sail away’ is a lovely song but you need to go somewhere. Perhaps it’s time for Shami to listen to voters rather than shout at them…

Thursday

7 Jun 2018

The Spectator

Barometer | 7 June 2018

Ready for take-off? That Heathrow timeline in full: 1949 Labour government proposes an additional two runways for newly opened Heathrow airport. 1990 Conservative government publishes plan for third runway. 2003 Labour government produces white paper proposing short third runway, involving demolition of 700 homes. 2007 Consultation begins. 2009 Gordon Brown decides to go ahead with third runway. 2010 David Cameron elected on promise to ditch third runway, ‘no ifs, no buts’. 2012 Cameron commissions Sir Howard Davies to look into airport expansion. 2015 Davies recommends a third runway. 2016 Theresa May’s cabinet decides to go ahead with third runway. 2018 Theresa May’s cabinet re-decides to go ahead with third runway.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 7 June 2018

A distinguished retired EU diplomat from a small EU member state sends me a thoughtful letter. He complains that Brexit ‘has been handled in the most amateurish way by British politicians’. ‘When one removes something,’ he goes on, ‘one has to be ready with its replacement’: Mrs May ‘is far from clear in her plans, but those who criticise her are not any clearer’. All this is true, and it points to the weirdness of our current situation, which is that Brexit is not being executed by a government that wants it. In conversation, people often say ‘The Brexit supporters promised X’, and then accuse them of breaking that promise.

The Spectator

The lessons of Grenfell

The opening of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry is good news. It will now become harder for politicians and campaigners to do as they did in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and exploit it for their own ends. The 72 who died were not victims of an uncaring government bureaucracy, as some on the right have said. Nor was this about austerity and ‘Tory cuts’. The costs of the renovation which had been completed shortly before the fire worked out at more than £70,000 per flat: money had been spent, and an expensive deathtrap unwittingly created. The company which managed the block, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO)

Steerpike

Boris Johnson leaked tape: best quotes

While David Davis has hogged the headlines recently, Boris Johnson has been slowly losing his cool over Brexit and lost it, just a little bit, when addressing Tory activists at the Conservative Way Forward on Wednesday. It was a candid speech but, with recording devices built into every smartphone, it was hardly surprising that it should have leaked. Perhaps BoJo, fed up with Theresa May’s Brexit backsliding, wanted it to leak. The Times and BuzzFeed have the story, and here are the best quotes. On HM Treasury “What they don’t want is friction at the borders. They don’t want any disruption. So they’re sacrificing all the medium and long-term gains

James Forsyth

Theresa May gives David Davis a backstop concession

After a morning of high drama in Westminster, the UK government now has a backstop proposal to put to the EU. Last night, the backstop text said that it was time limited but didn’t specify an end date. In two meetings with the Prime Minister this morning, David Davis demanded changes. He has got some concessions: the text now talks about how ‘The UK expects the future arrangement to be in place by December 2021’. But there is no hard cut-off date in the text. Theresa May was acutely aware that if one had been included, the EU would have rejected it out of hand. We now wait to see

Robert Peston

David Davis stays put – for now

For the past 24 hours, there has been a power struggle between the Prime Minister and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Theresa May – or rather her officials – had been insisting that a backstop plan for keeping open the Ireland border would not be amended, to include a sunset clause and formal end date for the backstop. Davis said he would quit in the absence of an end date. She caved. According to sources close to Davis, ‘the backstop paper has been amended and expresses, in much more detail, the time-limited nature of our proposal’. So to be clear, there is now a termination date in May’s backstop proposal.

Stephen Daisley

Why won’t the Tories take a stand against Hezbollah?

On Sunday, thousands of demonstrators will gather outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for the annual al-Quds Day march. From there, they will proceed through the capital chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – which is to say, the State of Israel will be destroyed. Alongside the Palestinian tricolour, many will be waving another flag: the banner of Hezbollah. In doing so, none of them will be breaking the law. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation with a bloody rap sheet but the UK Government only proscribes its paramilitary wing, not the group as a whole. As such, the Hezbollah flag, which depicts an assault

James Forsyth

Hedgers vs Ditchers: the new Brexit divide

Brexit could look very different by the end of this month. In the coming days, the government is expected to present a new version of the ‘backstop’, which is meant to address the Irish border problem. This would see the whole of the UK stay in a customs union with the EU and copy EU rules on goods and agriculture until, and unless, a comprehensive trade deal is done. So much for taking back control. There is another great danger in this approach — it would result in a permanent Brexit limbo. Britain would be a rule-taker unable to pursue a meaningfully different economic model. Once the ‘backstop’ is in

Stephen K. Bannon

Europe’s new democracy

By 25 May the world was learning of the Italian populist parties’ plans to form a coalition government. This would ditch the ideological divide of left vs right while unifying the country’s north and south and its populists and the nationalists against a long history of technocratic governments and European Central Bank demands. Over the next 48 hours, a combination of foreign politicians, foreign capital and foreign media descended upon Italy to demand the Italian people’s choices in voting for the right-wing League and the left-wing Five Star parties were dismissed. And indeed they were dismissed. The Financial Times called the coalition ‘the modern barbarians’, while the German press called

David Goodhart

The age of incivility

How long ago it now seems that the big political worry was apathy. Today, wherever you look — Brexit negotiations, US politics, the latest news from Europe — the talk is only of polarisation, division and a coarsening of political behaviour and language. According to a Ipsos MORI survey, most Europeans believe their countries are more polarised than ten years ago. But are we really as divided as the new consensus presumes? What if recent political trends represent instead a long overdue rebalancing of interests after nearly 30 years of liberal domination — both economic and social — favouring the affluent and educated, and so a case of democracy not

Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s hope we get a better RBS when it’s finally back in the private sector

At last the government has restarted the process of selling its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. A first £2 billion sale in 2015 (of 5 per cent of the bank’s shares) took place at 330 pence per share, against a purchase price of 502 pence in the 2008 bailout. Those numbers looked so embarrassing for George Osborne that the sell-off file was consigned sine die to a Treasury basement; but now that RBS has returned to a slim profit after nine years of losses, Philip Hammond sold another £2.5 billion tranche on Monday, ahead of what his advisers evidently think will be a weaker stock market after the European summit,

Wednesday

6 Jun 2018

Robert Peston

Will David Davis resign tomorrow? I would not bet against it

David Davis, the Brexit secretary of state and arguably the most important minister in this government other than the Prime Minister, faces a moment of truth tomorrow. He is completely clear that it would be a disastrous mistake for the Prime Minister and the UK government to offer Brussels a backstop proposal for keeping the Irish border open that does not contain a specified end date. His reason is simple. That backstop would commit the UK to staying in the customs union and single market. And once the EU were to have that commitment, Davis believes – plausibly – that his Brussels interlocutor Michel Barnier would no longer have any

Lloyd Evans

Are the late nights flogging Labour Live tickets getting to Corbyn?

Odd sights at PMQs today. Theresa May wore a dark blue outfit covered in an outbreak of Pollock-esque dots, as if she’d just arrived from a paintballing contest. Jeremy Corbyn looked angry, knackered and distressed. His scarlet tie was all askew and his eyes appeared shadowed and hollow. Why so fatigued? Yesterday he was in Brighton, he told us, addressing the Fire Brigades Union, ‘who work hard to keep us all safe.’ (Strike-days excluded). It’s rumoured that Corbyn has been up late at night flogging seats for Labour Live, the party’s summer rally on June 16. He’s the headline act. Tickets are £35. A discount of a fiver is available