Politics

Britain is going to proscribe the terrorist group Hezbollah in its entirety. This is a victory, not least for common sense. For just over a decade the UK government has stuck to a very strange lie on this matter. In 2008 they banned the military wing of Hezbollah. This idea – only ever believed in by a few officials in the British Foreign Office – survived on an extraordinary presumption: which was that the Lebanese terrorist group had two totally separate arms. On the one hand was the military wing of Hezbollah, which has spent decades raising the levels of violence in Lebanon and bringing destruction to various neighbouring countries,

  It is playing out just as Olly Robbins – the civil servant negotiating Brexit for the PM – told his mates it would in that Brussels bar, as overheard by my ITV colleague Angus Walker. Because the PM has just said that she will not put a reworked Brexit deal to MPs for a vote till 12 March. Well actually she said “we will ensure that happens by 12 March” – which probably means on 12 March. And that in turn means MPs will face what may be their last chance to decide whether the UK leaves the EU with a deal desperately close to the wire, 17 days

Brexit is back in the Commons next week. As I write in The Sun this morning, two of the big questions are: what will Eurosceptic Tories accept in terms of changes to the backstop and will the Cooper amendment pass. A document circulating among Tory Eurosceptics sets out what MPs should and shouldn’t regard as a meaningful change to the backstop. It warns that assurances from the EU Council would be ‘worthless’ and that changes to the political declaration would be ‘not legally binding’. It says that an interpretative instrument would have, ‘Some legal value’ but ‘would be a face-saver that would be legally pretty meaningless.’ Interestingly, though, it suggests

It is becoming clearer by the day that Mrs May was right not to consult her colleagues, let alone the Brexit-loathing parliament, on what the withdrawal agreement from the EU should look like. Had she done so, negotiations would never have begun. She must now show similar resolve in bringing matters to ahead. The Romans can show her the way. In 241 bc Rome finally defeated Carthage (in North Africa) in a long drawn-out fight for control of Sicily. In 237 bc Hannibal’s family conquered southern Spain with its silver mines, agricultural wealth and manpower and put themselves in a position to take on Rome again, if necessary. Rome was