Politics

Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Grazia (a 2017 sentence if ever there was one) was helpfully revealing. Not his assertion that ‘there will probably be another election in the next 12 months’ and that he ‘will probably win’. That just tells us that the man who supposedly never wanted the job really wants the job. His chat with the glossy magazine provides deeper insights into his character and his methods. Interviewer Anna Silverman writes: ‘I want to know whether his jovial good nature is genuine or whether he’s mastered the true politician’s art of charming the crowds. I ask a couple of members of his team – which, interestingly, is mostly female

The last PMQs before the Christmas recess often has a rather pantomime atmosphere. Unfortunately, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Theresa May are anywhere near nimble enough to be able to create anything more than the sort of play that everyone leaves at the interval – and today’s performance wasn’t helped by John Bercow’s decision to extend the previously half an hour session to 53 minutes with no apparent good reason. The Speaker himself contributed to the overrunning PMQs by providing interesting details about MPs’ weddings that he’d been invited to. Jeremy Corbyn had one Christmas pun, which was about there being ‘no room at the A&E’. Quite a difficult pun for

Robert Tombs, author of the majestic ‘The English and their History’, has written in the latest Spectator about how Brexit has become the trigger for a new culture war in Britain. He likens it to the sectarian arguments of the 18th century, pointing out that: ‘When I hear prominent Remainers unquestioningly supporting the demands of the EU Commission, however incoherent and excessive, I cannot but remember the opposition leader Charles James Fox happily admitting during the Napoleonic Wars that ‘The Triumph of the French government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which is very difficult to disguise.’ ‘Is this just coincidence? There does seem