Politics Archives

Tuesday

2 Jul 2019

Steerpike

Watch: Brexit party MEPs turn their backs on the EU anthem

Today was a big day for Nigel Farage’s band of Brexit party MEPs. After 29 of the Brexiteers won their seats in the EU elections in May, they finally headed to Strasbourg today, to take their places in the European Parliament. But it appears that while the party may now be part of the European elite, they haven’t quite signed up to the ideals of the European project in spirit. As the new batch of 751 MEPs were sworn in this morning to open the inaugural sitting of the European Parliament term, a stirring rendition of the EU’s anthem, Ode to Joy, was played from the centre of the Chamber. And while

Robert Peston

Why Boris Johnson’s team fear the tide is moving against him

William Hague is not noted for agonies of self-doubt. But the former Tory leader’s judgement, in his Telegraph column on which of Johnson and Hunt is best suited to lead his party and our country, was not a close run thing: Hunt is one of the most impressive ministers Hague has worked alongside, and might even avert what he sees as the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit; Johnson has made him laugh. At a time of national emergency, Hague went for the least amusing of the two. None of which will surprise Brexit true believers, because Hague has been saying clearly and loudly for some time that he fears leaving

Monday

1 Jul 2019

Anna Nadibaidze

Why the EU is struggling to pick Juncker’s replacement

Who will replace Jean-Claude Juncker? That’s the question being decided at the European Council summit. But so far, things are not going to plan. From Sunday afternoon, leaders – along with Theresa May, who promised to be “constructive” in the debate – have been discussing who should take over the most senior EU jobs, including the successor to Juncker as European Commission president. Now, the meeting has been suspended until tomorrow without any decision made. Whoever takes over will do so at a key time in the Brexit process. The president will handle the Brexit process on the EU side, whether in terms of making changing to the Political Declaration (which

Charles Day

The EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit

We are now meandering towards a real Brexit deadline. In typical British fashion, we’ve let the other two times that they bumped into us with their trolley in the supermarket go. In similarly typical fashion, the third time is about to be “not on”. But as we head towards the inevitable, it is worth understanding the simplest of truths: the EU was never capable of dealing with Brexit. And an even bigger truth must be whispered very quietly: they can’t conclude Free Trade Agreements. We turned insular immediately after the vote. We blamed ourselves and began a long internal debate which almost never mentioned the EU – just a lot

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s last-minute legacy panic

Theresa May has just a handful of days left as Prime Minister, but is still trying to secure a domestic legacy for herself. She is doing this in a last-minute manner that makes David Cameron’s famous essay crises look incredibly well-organised. Last week, she called for better design rules to prevent ‘tiny homes’ being built, which sounded odd given as Prime Minister she could feasibly have introduced some rules herself. May would say that her beef is with local government, not her own failure, when it comes to the lack of quality in newly-built homes. Localism is very convenient when it allows you to blame someone else for not doing

Ross Clark

Jeremy Hunt’s foolish no-deal promise

As Jeremy Hunt has repeatedly claimed during the Conservative leadership campaign, to set a deadline of 31 October for leaving the EU is foolish. Why tie yourself to that date if a deal with EU negotiators seemed close to being sealed? But if you have fallen for that argument, it seems no less puzzling why you would want to set a deadline of 30 September instead – as Hunt has done this morning. That is the date, he has announced, that he will decide whether a deal is achievable or not. If it is, he is prepared to carry on negotiating with the EU indefinitely. If it isn’t, then he

Steerpike

Listen: Matt Hancock’s flip-flop on prorogation

It may not seem long ago that the Tory leadership candidate Matt Hancock was positioning himself as a key opponent of the frontrunner Boris Johnson, and saying ‘f*** f*** business’ in contrast to Johnson’s alleged ‘f*** business’ remark. A key thing has changed since then though: with Johnson’s victory looking increasingly likely, Conservative MPs have begun jockeying for the Cabinet positions that will soon be available in his next government. Which may explain why Hancock, after being booted out of the leadership contest, suddenly lined up behind his former opponent, and with his eye on the Chancellor position, became a key cheerleader for Johnson in the press. Unfortunately, Hancock’s previous

Sunday

30 Jun 2019

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: ‘I don’t like the idea’ of proroguing Parliament, says Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson – We should increase borrowing for ‘great infrastructure projects’ Sophy Ridge began the day by interviewing the man who many are expecting to be the UK’s next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. The interview began with how Johnson expected to finance his campaign commitments, which include £4.6 billion for education, 20,000 more police officers, improving transport in the North and extending full fire broadband: Boris Johnson says he'd be happy to see borrowing go up: "If it’s borrowing to finance great infrastructure projects and there is the opportunity to borrow at low rates, to do things for the long term benefit of the country then we should do them"

James Kirkup

Who will defend the civil service from the Revolutionary Conservative Party?

It’s said that when Iain Dale, overseeing last night’s Conservative hustings in Manchester, announced the news that Oliver Robbins, the senior civil servant in Theresa May’s Brexit team, was leaving his post and the Civil Service, many of the Tory audience cheered. I’m told Iain Dale just read this tweet out at the Tory hustings and there was a huge cheer https://t.co/BxTjMXcdJt — Tim Shipman (@ShippersUnbound) June 29, 2019 By doing so, they underlined several of the most striking, and troubling, elements of Britain’s Brexit drama. First, the cowardice of politicians who seek to blame the civil service for failing to deliver impossible goals and for pointing out that some

Katy Balls

The Tory leadership contest is entering its most important week

Although there’s three weeks until the next Tory leader is announced, the contest is entering what is the most important week of the membership stage. On Saturday (6 July), postal ballots will begin to be sent to the Tory membership. The expectation is that the majority of members will vote quickly rather than wait to see how the contest plays out over the remaining weeks. It follows that each campaign sees this week as pivotal for getting its message out there. In that vein, Jeremy Hunt hardened his Brexit position over the weekend. The Foreign Secretary used an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show to try and beef up his

Guglielmo Verdirame

Why GATT won’t break the Brexit deadlock

There has been a lot of talk about how Article XXIV of GATT can provide an alternative to the Withdrawal Agreement. But here’s the deal with Article XXIV of GATT: it is a solution to a problem which is not the problem. Let me try to illustrate this with a story. Imagine a couple – let’s call them Joe and Angela – who are going through a divorce. After a long-drawn process, and hundreds of billable hours, their lawyers have at last produced a draft divorce settlement. The successful business that Joe and Angela have built will continue, but Joe will need to make a series of maintenance payments to

Saturday

29 Jun 2019

Nikki Da Costa

Will parliament be able to stop the next PM leaving without a deal?

Since the referendum we have seen a steady escalation of the battle between the Commons and the government over Brexit. It will reach new heights in the run up to October 31st – as the new prime minister seeks to negotiate with the EU and maintain his room for manoeuvre by keeping no deal on the table, and those ardently opposed to no deal find more and more creative ways to stop it from happening. The question is: who will win? Much depends on the way the Commons seeks to prevent no deal, the options available to the prime minister in responding, and crucially, the political cost associated with each option. Backbenchers

Mark Lobel

Can the Brexit party keep its right and left-wing supporters happy?

This weekend, the most popular political party in Britain will hold a rally in Birmingham to plan its march to Westminster. The Brexit party came first in the European elections but to its supporters, this was just the warm-up. If today’s polls became tomorrow’s election result, then the Tories would be left with just 87 MPs, barely a quarter of their current strength. Nigel Farage would lead an army of 193 MPs, and doing such damage that Jeremy Corbyn would still hang on to a party of 234. It is scenario that is terrifying the Tories – and delighting the Farigistas. In Birmingham tomorrow, the party aims to unveil the

James Forsyth

Hunt won’t let up in his attacks on Boris

It is a week on since the first hustings of the Tory leadership run off. Boris Johnson appears to have righted the wobble that led to his rather lacklustre performance in Birmingham. But Jeremy Hunt is not going to ease off. As I report in The Sun this morning, the Hunt campaign’s attitude is, ‘We’re not going to let up on attacking Boris because we know it is cutting through’ The Hunt camp point to polling in the last few days which shows that he has a bigger advantage over Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson and that the public prefer Hunt to Johnson as Prime Minister. This may be, and

Friday

28 Jun 2019

Katy Balls

The Jo Coburn Edition

34 min listen

Broadcaster and journalist Jo Coburn tells how German got her into journalism, what it’s like to work with Andrew Neil, and what happened behind the scenes of that infamous Will Self-Mark Francois death stare. Presented by Katy Balls.

Philip Patrick

Theresa May says goodbye to old friends at Japan’s G20

Theresa May makes her final bow on the world stage in Japan, where she is attending the G20 heads of government meeting in Osaka. It’s a funny place for it all to end. Japan’s second city prides itself as the country’s comedy capital. It is home to Japan’s ‘manzai’ tradition – a slapstick straight man/funny man double act which involves a lot of head slapping and cross talk. Besides their sense of humour, Osakans are known for their garrulousness, gaudy clothing and their suspicion of haughty, overly serious Tokyo. Think of Glasgow’s relationship to Edinburgh, or Newcastle’s to London, and you’re not far off. To ram home the message of

Stephen Daisley

It’s time to no platform the Labour party

This evening in Britain, the Jewish Shabbat dinner will follow the traditional order: blessing the candles and the wine, washing hands, giving thanks for the bread and trying to get through the first serving of noodle kugel before someone brings up the Labour party. The decision by the national executive committee to restore the whip to Chris Williamson will be on the menu tonight. The Jew-baiting Nosferatu was suspended in February for ‘a pattern of behaviour’, that pattern taking the shape of a giant middle finger to the Jewish community and culminating in a grisly speech declaring Labour ‘too apologetic’ about anti-Semitism. One of the NEC members who voted to

Steerpike

Watch: Boris suggests the Foreign Office is behind ‘turdgate’

Last night it was suggested that when Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he was caught on camera by a BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary saying that the French were ‘turds’ for their intransigence during the Brexit negotiations. According to the Daily Mail the Foreign Office then allegedly lobbied the BBC to remove the offending line from the documentary when it aired last November. As shocking revelations go, being caught secretly insulting the French is probably not going to seriously harm Johnson’s prospects with the Tory membership. Nonetheless, speculation has already turned to where the story came from. Johnson certainly fuelled the rumours today when he was asked about the incident during Tory leadership hustings. Asked by interviewer

Douglas Murray

Are Tories fanatics? The New York Times thinks so

The New York Times’s strange jihad against post-Brexit Britain continues. Some readers may have missed the paper’s insistence that having only just finished eating mutton, the British public are currently stock-piling food and all but preparing to start eating each other (see here, here, and here just for starters). But yesterday they have returned to the fray with the international edition of the paper carrying a front-page piece declaring ‘Extremists hijacked UK politics’. The online version of the story is headlined ‘A fanatical sect has hijacked British politics’. The author of the piece is someone called William Davies, who we are informed (in fact in the circumstances we really do need

Steerpike

Brexit party MEP Claire Fox shows solidarity with Boris

Tom Penn and Eve Leigh, the next-door Remainer neighbours of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds who recorded their late-night row, managed to spark a lively debate about the balance between public interest and privacy when they passed the recording on to the Guardian shortly after the incident last weekend. It appears though that the Brexit party’s Claire Fox is squarely in camp Boris when it comes to the couple’s right to argue in their own flat. Speaking at Forest’s 40th Anniversary Gala Dinner, the Brexit party MEP and Moral Maze panelist hit out at their neighbours’ decision to pass the recording on to the newspaper. In her speech, Fox said