Politics Archives

Thursday

15 Feb 2018

Peter Jones

Article 50 and the Athenians

Europe, a majority of MPs (party loyalties aside), the Lords, the civil service, the BBC and the CBI are all determined to keep Britain in the EU. To that end, emitting crocodile tears, they would welcome a final Brexit deal that is effectively worthless. That, they hope, will cause a second referendum, resulting in a ‘remain’ vote. The Athenians knew how to deal with that sort of situation. Athens from 508-322 bc was a direct democracy, in which all decisions were taken by male citizens over 18 meeting in assembly. But since they could not just turn up and wonder what to talk about, a council of 500, appointed by

The Spectator

Justice for jihadis

The success of the military campaign against Isis in Syria and Iraq has left behind a diplomatic and legal problem: what to do with the British citizens who travelled to join and fight with Isis, but who have survived hostilities. The problem has been brought to a head by the capture, by a group of Syrian Kurds, of El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey — two Londoners who were members of ‘the Beatles’, a group which tortured and beheaded at least 27 hostages. There is little use in looking to the government for consistent guidance as to what should happen to the two men, who have been stripped of their

Steerpike

Sarah Champion does a Leadsom

Here we go again. During the last Conservative leadership campaign, Andrea Leadsom came under fire for suggesting that having children made her a better choice to be prime minister than Theresa May. In an interview with the Times, the mother of three said having children meant she had ‘a very real stake’ in Britain’s future. The furore over Leadsom’s comments was a contributing factor in her decision to pull out of the contest. Now it seems that Sarah Champion has taken a lesson from the Leadsom rule book. In an interview with the House magazine, the Labour MP suggests that tackling child sexual abuse has taken a back seat since Theresa

Steerpike

Ukip’s woes go from bad to worse

Poor old Ukip. The party is already in dire straits, with its collapsing vote share, lack of funds and a laughing stock for a leader. You might think that things couldn’t get any worse for Ukip. But you’d be wrong: the party’s troubles look to have just increased dramatically. Ukip has just been ordered to shell out for part of a £670,000 legal bill brought about as a result of a libel action made by three Labour MPs against Ukip MEP Jane Collins. The court order says: Ukip is already said to have little left in the bank, with reports that the party could struggle to afford to pay for

Katy Balls

How should the Tories attack Corbyn on foreign policy?

How should the Tories attack Jeremy Corbyn on foreign policy? Today’s Sun splashes on a story about the Labour leader and a Czechoslovakian communist spy. The paper claims that Corbyn briefed a communist spy – masquerading as a Czechoslovakian diplomat – during the cold war. Gavin Williamson has been quick to denounce Corbyn’s behaviour as a ‘betrayal of this country’. As for Corbyn’s response, his spokesman says he did meet with a diplomat but insists he ‘neither had nor offered any privileged information’. The story has divided opinion online with Corbyn’s critics quick to cite it as further proof that he hates the West and Corbyn’s fans quick to slam it as another

Stephen Daisley

The SNP should reinvent itself

The SNP, you’ll be distressed to learn, are having a time of it. The party is embroiled in a deputy leadership contest that could have been designed by their worst enemies. Angus Robertson, who lost his Moray seat last June, has resigned, depriving the party of one of its most formidable and respectable advocates. His departure couldn’t have come at a worse moment. The SNP has tried Scots’ forbearance for constitutional agitation and now has a reputation for banging on about independence that more justly belongs to Ruth Davidson’s Tories. After more than a decade in power, the SNP government shows signs of wear and tear and perhaps some structural

Siobhan Fenton

Could direct rule solve Northern Ireland’s political crisis?

Power-sharing talks at Stormont have dramatically collapsed again. This is a shock to many in Northern Ireland, where an apparent thawing in the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Fein led to speculation that the announcement of a deal was imminent. Instead, the stasis continues. Northern Ireland has now been without a functioning government for just over 13 months, since Sinn Fein first plunged Northern Irish politics into limbo by pulling out of their pact with the DUP in January 2017. The reason for their decision to back out of the power sharing agreement was Arlene Foster’s apparent complicity – which she has denied – in the botched ‘cash for ash’

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Boris has been rumbled

Boris Johnson painted Brexit as a source of ‘hope not fear’ in his speech yesterday. The Foreign Secretary said that Britain’s departure from the EU was not a ‘great V-sign from the cliffs of Dover’. ‘That’s how you do it!,’ says the Sun in its editorial in which it urges other members of the Cabinet to follow Boris’s lead. His barnstorming speech ‘laid out the exciting case for a truly global Britain’ and was the same ‘vision’ which persuaded 17.4million Brits to back Brexit in the first place. ‘Too often’ other Ministers ‘treat our exit like a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized’. Philip Hammond

Harry Mount

The greatest story ever told

Did the Trojan War really take place? The Foreign Secretary certainly thinks so. ‘The Iliad must have happened,’ Boris Johnson once told me. ‘That description of the Trojans attacking like birds is so chilling, it must be true.’ Boris was referring to the beginning of Book 3 of the Iliad, where the Trojans ‘advanced with cries and clamour, a clamour like birds, cranes in the sky, flying from the winter’s storm and unending rain, flowing towards the streams of the ocean, bringing the clamour of death and destruction to Pygmy tribes, bringing evil and strife at the break of day’. You only have to stand on top of the ruined

James Forsyth

A Brexit deal depends on Tory unity

In a hung parliament, recess takes on a particular importance for the government. It is a chance for ministers to travel, free from the fear that they might be called back for a crunch vote at any moment. Explaining to your European hosts, for instance, that you have to cancel all meetings with them and go home now, or else the government might fall, doesn’t send quite the right message. Helpful though it is, recess will get ministers only so far. Those doing the rounds of European capitals this week still don’t have a detailed Brexit position to sell to their counterparts. This is a problem. Next month’s European Council

Wednesday

14 Feb 2018

Ed West

A tale of two Brexits

At one point during Boris Johnson’s speech today he asked the audience: ‘We all want to make Britain less insular, don’t we?’ Silence. Media-training experts use an initialism to try to get journalists and other talking-heads to come across well on television – BLT. Does the audience believe you? Do they like you? Do they trust you? The Foreign Secretary has never had a problem with the middle one, perhaps the most important of the three, but during the EU referendum there was certainly an issue with belief, since some of the more nationalistic rhetoric of the campaign clearly sat ill at ease with this ‘esoteric product of millennia of

Ross Clark

Why are animals more important than unborn children?

Most of the time I feel perfectly at ease in my own country, and that would be the case had we voted Brexit or Remain, Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. But just occasionally Britain seems to me an utterly alien place – bizarre even. Today, Jeremy Corbyn launched his manifesto for pets. He wants to ban foie gras, make it mandatory for motorists to report that they have run over and killed cats, and pass a law giving tenants the right to keep a pet. I don’t suspect that he will encounter a great deal of opposition on these things – bar a token protest on the last from buy-to-let investors.

Alex Massie

Boris’s Brexit vision is an answer to a non-existent problem

The thing to understand about Brexit and Remain voters is that Brexit is only part of the problem. Many Remainers cast their votes with only moderate enthusiasm. They were not motivated, most of them, by any great enthusiasm for the European project. But they took what they considered to be a prudent, pragmatic, view of the national interest. They wanted a moderate, quiet life; and the status quo, however irritating it might sometimes be, was at least a known quantity and therefore preferable to the great unknown that must be unleashed by Brexit. Remain was a proper, old-fashioned, Tory choice. And therefore, of course, rather unfashionable. But then, as far

James Forsyth

‘Old Boris’ is back

Boris Johnson has been down in the mouth in recent months. The ‘old Boris’ appeared to have been worn down by the cares of the office. Also, for a politician who loves to be loved, it has been difficult adjusting to his more divisive post-referendum status. But today was far more of the old Boris. He returned to his 2016 case for Brexit in a speech that was full of his trademark optimism and humour, including a slightly off-colour joke about dogging. Today had been billed as Boris reaching out to the 48 per cent—and there was a bit of that. But the real audience for this speech were the

The Spectator

Full text: Boris Johnson’s Brexit speech

The other day a woman pitched up in my surgery in a state of indignation. The ostensible cause was broadband trouble but it was soon clear – as so often in a constituency surgery – that the real problem was something else. No one was trying to understand her feelings about Brexit. No one was trying to bring her along. She felt so downcast, she said, that she was thinking of leaving the country – to Canada. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be in the EU; she just didn’t want to be in a Britain that was not in the EU. And I recognised that feeling of

Steerpike

Janan Ganesh, citizen of… Washington, DC?

Theresa May’s decision to launch a verbal attack on ‘citizens of nowhere’ backfired in the snap election when metropolitan voters turned on the Prime Minister over fears her Brexit vision was an inward one. Happily, citizens of nowhere have since found some champions of their own. Citizen-of-nowhere-in-chief Janan Ganesh, the Financial Times columnist, kindly wrote a column titled ‘how to be a true citizen of nowhere’: ‘True, we tend to come from nowhere. I live in one continent, was born in another, but originate from a third. So I am not even from where I am from. I grew up in an ambiguous social class in one of those zone

Gavin Mortimer

Britain must learn from France’s approach to jihadis

Gavin Williamson, Britain’s defence secretary, and Florence Parly, minister of the French armed forces, share the same opinion, that it would be in their countries’ best interests if their jihadists never set foot on their soil again. The Defence Secretary has said of two captured members of the Isis gang dubbed ‘The Beatles’: ‘I don’t think they should ever set foot in this country again’; while France’s armed forces minister said recently that her country’s jihadists ‘have shown no mercy so I don’t see why we should show them any’. Few in France disagree with Parly’s comments, except the jihadists themselves, who have suddenly become all contrite after years of nothing but contempt

Tuesday

13 Feb 2018

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s Valentine’s speech is a chance to prove his critics wrong

It’s been a quiet day in Westminster with the main excitement involving a suspicious package containing white powder that was delivered to an office in Parliament. The powder was later found to be non-harmful but police are investigating the incident. Tomorrow the relative calm will end when Boris Johnson gives his big speech. Titled ‘a United Kingdom’, the Foreign Secretary is to give the first in a series of government speeches that together form Downing Street’s ‘roadmap to Brexit’. Boris’s aim is to reach out to those who voted Remain and reassure them that Brexit Britain will be a country that reflects their liberal values. The last time Johnson wanted

Fraser Nelson

Katy Balls nominated for Political Commentator of the Year

At the start of last year, Katy Balls was assigned to the political beat for The Spectator. With the snap general election, she had a baptism of fire – and, before too long, a regular column in the national press (the i newspaper). This morning, she was one of the six journalists shortlisted as Political Commentator of the Year in the Press Awards, the Oscars of the UK media, alongside Stephen Bush of the i and New Statesman, John Harris of the Guardian, Dan Hodges of the Mail on Sunday, Marina Hyde of the Guardian and Rachel Sylvester of the Times. You can read her entry here. The Spectator’s political

Steerpike

CCHQ vs the Moggster

Last week Theresa May came under fire from grassroots activists not over her weak and wobbly leadership but over reported proposals to limit the say local party members have when it comes to selecting candidates. So, it’s rather unfortunate for the Prime Minister that the man currently favoured by the membership as her successor is with the grassroots on this one. Speaking on the ConservativeHome Moggcast, Jacob Rees-Mogg criticised plans to centralise power on candidate selection as ‘undemocratic’. He offered a cautionary tale of his own – had central office had their way the Moggster would not be in Parliament today. Rees-Mogg says CCHQ were at pains to prevent his