Politics

So far, things have gone very smoothly for Jo Swinson since she was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats. The party has managed to increase its numbers in parliament and coalesced around a new hardline Remain position of revoking Article 50. Yet, there were signs today that all is not well with some Liberal Democrat members, when Swinson led a question and answer session at party conference. While most of the questions lobbed at the new leader were remarkably friendly, one woman took issue with Swinson’s decision to allow the former Tory MP, Phillip Lee, to join the party. The defection, while swelling the Lib Dem ranks, has gone down

Steve Barclay – Boris Johnson ‘believes in Brexit’ David Cameron’s memoirs are due to be released this Thursday, with some of the more explosive highlights already seeing serialisation. The Sunday Times has published an extract today that argues that Boris Johnson did not believe in Brexit, and only backed the Leave campaign to win over the Conservative rank and file. The Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay joined Sophy Ridge and immediately refuted the former Prime Minister’s claims: "The prime minister was committed to leave" – Brexit secretary @SteveBarclay tells Sky News that Boris Johnson does believe in #Brexit, following the criticism from former PM David Cameron.#Ridge For more, head here: https://t.co/wp1ylDj7vu

The Liberal Democrats have cemented their credentials as a fully-fledged Remain party this afternoon, after members at their conference in Bournemouth voted to make revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit their official party policy. The overwhelming majority of Lib Dem members at the conference voted to pass a motion, which called for the party to immediately revoke Article 50 if they win a majority at the next election. The motion reaffirms the party’s support for a second referendum, but also adds a pledge to stop Brexit altogether, committing to: ‘Revoke Article 50 if the House of Commons has not passed a resolution approving the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement one week ahead

The EU side regularly points out that the UK government hasn’t presented any detailed proposals on what it wants to replace the backstop with. At a Cabinet committee meeting this week, the Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay set about explaining to ministerial colleagues why this was. As I report in The Sun this morning, He told the Committee that the EU had set three tests for any new proposal. First, it must avoid any infrastructure on the border that would be incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement. Second, it must protect the integrity of the EU’s single market. Third, it mustn’t involve any checks on the island of Ireland. Barclay said

For something that has yet to and may never happen, Brexit has reordered the fundamentals of British politics in just three years. The Tories have shifted decisively from post-Thatcher ambivalence about their role as upholders of the prevailing order to a right-wing radicalism that views Parliament, the legal establishment, and captains of industry as threats to, rather than pillars of, British freedom. Electoral reformers who once downplayed the time-honoured link between constituent and parliamentarian now laud MPs who spurn a national result in deference to local opinion. Cultural identity has replaced austerity as the motor of progressive antagonism towards the Tories, who in turn have lost all interest in fiscal

Boris Johnson is a gung-ho classicist. He has supported the subject throughout his journalistic and political career, is a generous donor to the charity Classics for All, and has a bust of his hero Pericles in his study. Indeed, he says his reading of Pericles’s famous funeral speech (431 bc) when he was 12 or 13 had a powerful effect on him, especially Pericles’s statement that ‘Athens is called a demokratia because it runs its house in the interests not of the few but of the majority’. Last week, however, he turned into the Roman emperor Augustus to explain his sacking of 21 rebel MPs. Augustus, emerging as victor in