Politics

When Turkey’s President Erdogan visits Theresa May in Downing Street on Tuesday, he will no doubt be on his best behaviour and control his baser instincts. Otherwise, as he will be met by a Free Turkey Media demonstration organised by English PEN, he could do as he has done earlier – as in Washington and Ecuador – and call on his bodyguards to beat up demonstrators. Of course, if it had been Turkey, they wouldn’t have been allowed to demonstrate, but if they had, they would not only have been beaten up but also incarcerated. Remember the Gezi Park uprising five years ago when over 8,000 were injured, 8 killed

In the Brexit inner Cabinet meeting last week, it was clear that Theresa May’s main objection to ‘max fac’, the customs arrangement favoured by Brexiteers, is that it wasn’t consistent with her aims for the Irish border. So, Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has been put on the Cabinet’s max fac working group to examine if it is compatible with the government’s position on the Irish border. As I say in The Sun this morning, if, at the end of this process, Bradley says that it could work in Northern Ireland then Mrs May would be able to climbdown with dignity. Bradley is a May loyalist—she was one of

Sadiq Khan has been busy. But the mayor of London isn’t snowed under trying to deal with the capital’s knife crime epidemic. Instead, he is facing down a bigger demon: junk food. This morning, Khan has been touring the studios unveiling plans to ban adverts for unhealthy food on London’s tubes and buses. It is clear the mayor has got his priorities all wrong. What’s more, this censorship is bad for free speech. It also does very little to actually deal with what Khan calls the ‘ticking timebomb’ of childhood obesity. The press release announcing the plan tells us that almost 40 per cent of London 10- and 11-year-olds are ‘overweight

Home Although the world was led to believe that, thanks to the vote of Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, the idea of a ‘customs partnership’ with the EU had been killed by six to five in the cabinet Brexit sub-committee, the corpse was revivified by Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, on the Andrew Marr Show, where he suggested that 3,500 Toyota jobs were at risk. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the pro-Brexit European Research Group, said: ‘The customs partnership is in a sense misnamed because it means single market as well as customs union and therefore we would not in effect be leaving the European Union.’ Boris Johnson, the

Sunday’s March for Freedom on Whitehall was peculiar, as far right protests go. It didn’t just feature the usual suspects as speakers – Milo Yiannopoulos and Tommy Robinson – but Muslims, comedians and queer people. While Milo is flamboyantly gay and For Britain party leader Anne Marie Waters defiantly lesbian, drag artist Vanity Von Glow was queerer than the pair of them together. Yes, Tommy Robinson’s rally for free speech included a proper, honest-to-goodness drag queen. I learnt about her performance not at the time but afterwards, as I watched a Twitter-swarm form and descend on venues where she performs and do its best to put her out of business.