Politics

On the day Theresa May signed her Brexit withdrawal agreement with Brussels, Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned. She tried to dragoon Michael Gove, a leader of the Brexit campaign, into taking the job. Dominic Cummings, the erstwhile campaign director of Vote Leave, persuaded Gove to resign rather than take the job. It was mayhem. That day Cummings texted a friend in Westminster to say: ‘Sometimes nothing happens for years. Sometimes years happen in days.’ The phrase was originally Lenin’s, though he referred to ‘decades’ rather than years – but it was apt for the almost revolutionary cascade of events unleashed by the EU referendum of 2016, which we are

When the Rwanda Bill had its second reading in the House of Commons just before Christmas, there was a revolt on the right of the Tory party. A group of legal experts, with the self-appointed ‘Star Chamber’ title, were convened by Eurosceptic MPs. They declared that Rishi Sunak’s plan was not ‘sufficiently watertight’ to allow deportations to take place, with too many legal loopholes vulnerable to exploitation. They said they would vote against the bill unless changes were made. In the end, Sunak faced down the rebels; only a small number came out against him. Soon after the vote, the cabinet met. Michael Gove was quick to congratulate the Prime

Most states spy. In principle there’s nothing to stop them. But China’s demand for intelligence on the rest of the world goes far beyond anything western intelligence agencies would typically gather. It encompasses masses of commercial data and intellectual property and has been described by Keith Alexander, a former head of America’s National Security Agency, as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history’. As well as collecting data from government websites, parliamentarians, universities, thinktanks and human rights organisations, China also targets diaspora groups and individuals. Chinese cyber intrusions have targeted British MPs and stolen population-level data from the UK Electoral Commission database. In the US, meanwhile, Congress has just cracked