Politics

It’s that time of the week again: crunch time for Theresa May. Tomorrow MPs will vote again on Dominic Grieve’s meaningful vote amendment along with the government’s ‘compromise’ meaningful vote amendment. The problem with that compromise is it’s already been rejected by several Remain Tory rebels – who say the Prime Minister personally misled them last week on the issue. The problem with their preferred amendment is that it has been rejected by the government on the grounds that it would tie their hands in the negotiations. Only one side can come out of this the winner. Government figures are sounding increasingly confident that they have the numbers to defeat

Forgive me if I seem out of sorts but my country has been through a lot this past week. We have been subjected to ‘provocation’ and our imperial masters in Westminster intend to ‘exert a kind of colonial authority’ over us. Our parliament has been ‘slighted’ and we are bearing the ‘impact of such condescension on the psyche’. The UK Government has sought to ‘lessen the ability of the people of Scotland to govern their own affairs’ and in doing so its ‘contempt for Scotland was laid bare’.  The amen corner of the Scottish commentariat is once again standing up and bravely telling it like Nicola Sturgeon says it is. The

When Sir Christopher Chope stopped to a bill to ban upskirting on Friday, he was denounced in the most vicious terms, as Steerpike revealed, by his fellow Tories. They were appalled by the optics of a 71-year-old Tory who rejected the bill without saying why. Sir Christopher has now come out swinging, saying how appalled he is that his fellow Tories assumed he was against the ban when he was – and remains – all for it. In fact, his main complaint is that it has taken the government so long to back a ban. Theresa May, he says, has ‘a lot to answer for’ in not banning upskirting until now.

The day has finally come – it’s Labour Live. The inaugural JezFest – first imagined as a follow-up to Jeremy Corbyn’s Glastonbury appearance – has been beset by difficulties from slow ticket sales to failure to secure headline acts. Happily, thanks to some last minute giveaways, transport by Unite and price reduction, there are more people than first expected in the North London 15,000 capacity venue. ‘Labour are for the many,’ said Eddie Izzard as he told a half empty field of his recent hobby: learning Russian. Meanwhile, Len McCluskey found himself in the firing line in the peoples’ Question Time with union members asking why he wasn’t being more

How embarrassing for Tory MPs: one of their own has managed to block the unblockable: a bill creating a new criminal offence of ‘upskirting’. Plenty of Conservatives have turned on the culprit, Christopher Chope, both in WhatsApp groups and in public, to show that they do not have the same views as him. To be fair to Chope (and it is hard, especially for a magazine that prefers its motto of ‘firm but unfair’), he wasn’t suggesting that upskirting was in some way OK. He is part of a group of MPs with the odd hobby of objecting to Private Members’ Bills on principle because they don’t think that MPs