Politics

This post was first published on Slipped Disc On the first night of the BBC Proms, the German-based pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Liszt’s solo-piano reduction as a token of his opposition to Britain leaving the EU. His was a reasoned and reasonable gesture by an artist who has strong views and wished to express them in music alone. Not so Daniel Barenboim who, before his Prom last night, announced that ‘Elgar makes the best case against Brexit … because he was a pan-European composer’ and then, from the podium, after a performance of Elgar’s Second Symphony, added ‘isolationist tendencies and nationalism in its very narrow

As Isabel reports, after a week of briefing and backstabbing among the Cabinet, there is a growing feeling from Conservatives that Theresa May needs to stamp what little authority she has left on her party. In this vein, May is expected to tell ministers to keep a lid on it at tomorrow’s Cabinet meeting. But should that fail, the 1922 committee executive has written to May saying that backbenchers will support her if she needs to sack feuding ministers by way of example – in order to get things back on track. But even if May were to decide this was the best route forward, it’s a plan that could prove too

I was on the radio this morning with David Mellor who accused the Cabinet of being appallingly ill-disciplined because of ‘leaks’ in the weekend press. James Forsyth revealed on Saturday that Philip Hammond had told Cabinet that being a train driver is so easy that ‘even’ a woman could do it. Yesterday, Tim Shipman revealed in the Sunday Times that Hammond had gone on to declare that public sector workers were ‘overpaid’. But here’s the thing: that meeting took place on Tuesday. If Cabinet members were queuing up to leak to journalists then we’d have read about it in Wednesday’s newspapers. It took several days for the information to become public precisely because it was not being

Philip Hammond has a bit of a political tin ear. He can be very unaware of how he sounds to other people. This is what lay behind the extraordinary sexism row at Cabinet on Tuesday which I write about in The Sun today. Hammond’s tin ear has already caused trouble for the government. In the Budget, he announced a national insurance hike for the self-employed despite the fact that the 2015 Tory manifesto had ruled out an increase in this tax. This all makes some Cabinet Ministers rather worried about this autumn Budget, which will be inherently tricky. Hammond doesn’t have much room for manoeuvre. But he has to deal

The great physicist Richard Feynman warned of the perpetual torment that lies in wait for people who try to understand quantum mechanics. Modern physics cannot be understood. It can only be observed. ‘I am going to tell you what nature behaves like,’ Feynman said. ‘Do not keep saying to yourself, “but how can it be like that?” because you will get down the drain, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.’ Equally, nobody knows how the Conservative Party can be like that. It just is. Theresa May, to pick an example. Every morning I wake up and check if she

Who will be the next Tory leader? I keep asking the senior contenders over breakfast after the show or at those now notorious summer parties. And they all say the same thing: she will stay for a couple of years and then it will be somebody we haven’t thought of yet. It’s already too late, they say, for MPs in their 50s and 60s. Predicting politics these days is like juggling greased goldfish… but I pass this on for what it’s worth. This is an extract from Andrew Marr’s Diary, which appears in this week’s Spectator