Politics

Unless Theresa May delays the vote, 11 December 2018 might be about to become one of the most important in recent British history; more important even than 23 June 2016. If MPs vote down Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, as nearly all ministers expect them to, they will set Britain on course for either the softest possible Brexit or a second referendum. In the process, they may well split the Tory party. Theresa May’s strategy has been to play chicken with Parliament. Her team saw virtue in intransigence and calculated that at the last moment MPs would get out of her way. They thought that fear of no deal would bring

There’s been a strong sense of pre-Christmas turkeys coming home to roost in this week’s news, as stories I’ve written about for months or years have reached, if not a denouement, then at least a new twist in the plot. Saddest of these is Crossrail, London’s east-west mass–transit system that was originally scheduled for its royal opening next week: now we hear it needs ‘hundreds of millions’ more of public money if it is to meet its delayed completion a year hence, though even that date no longer looks a safe bet. Its chairman Sir Terry Morgan has announced that he’s waiting to be sacked, both from Crossrail and from

Thank the blessed Lord it’s over. Not Brexit, or Theresa May’s flailing and spastic governance. I’m talking about John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, which has been serialised on the BBC on a Sunday evening, just when people want to watch something interesting. I watched it with the missus, and by episode two decided I would much rather spend my Sunday evenings assaulting my own head with a claw hammer. But we persisted with this expensively shot garbage because we are a married couple and therefore think it right and proper to engage in joint activities and stick with them regardless of how distressing and unpleasant they may be

As a white, straight male, it’s not often that I get to feel in a minority but at the Spectator Brexit debate – as a Leave voter in favour of Theresa May’s deal – it was apparent that I’m an endangered species on a par with the white rhino. But I also found that I have an eloquent champion: Rory Stewart, the prisons minister, who gave the best case that I have heard for the deal He was on stage with Dominic Raab, on the opposite end of the pragmatism spectrum. Raab, in effect, argued for a no-deal Brexit, while Stewart mounted a most robust defence of the May deal,

In Parliament yesterday, Theresa May repeated Philip Hammond’s fallacious argument that because the Brexit referendum result was 52:48, the form of Brexit should be a compromise between leaving the EU and remaining in it. This argument completely distorts the notion of democracy. Firstly, no such argument was ever deployed when it was a question of accepting the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties. Secondly, the referendum was not subject to any threshold level of support for one position or the other. And David Cameron and George Osborne stated very explicitly that a victory for “Leave” – even by a single vote – would mean leaving the Single Market and the

Despite numerous attempts by the government to keep it hidden, the Attorney General’s legal advice has finally been published. The move came after opposition MPs – to whom Mr S is very grateful – found ministers in contempt of Parliament for with-holding the information. Remember our 40 horrors of the deal? Well, Geoffrey Cox’s hotly-anticipated legal advice has some nasty surprises of its own. As ever, Steerpike has compiled the top horrors from the latest document: 1. This is not the full legal advice on the May’s deal. It is a very selective piece of advice solely on the Protocol, art. 184 and 5. So no other issues are considered.