Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The Brexit rebellion is an embarrassment for Theresa May, not a disaster

The government threw everything at trying to defeat Tory rebels led by the former attorney general Dominic Grieve and their amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill – which forces the government to enact a statute “approving the final terms” of Brexit before the UK leaves the EU. And that is one of the big reasons why this defeat for Theresa May matters: it shows the fury among some of its MPs, notably those who voted to Remain, that they are being ignored, as Theresa May engages in the most important negotiations relating to this nations’ future since those that took us into the EU (or what was the Common Market).

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The government should have listened to the rebels, not tried to crush them

The government has just been defeated in the House of Commons on whether the final Brexit deal will get a ‘meaningful vote’ by Parliament. MPs voted 309-305 to pass the amendment to the EU withdrawal bill by Dominic Grieve. There were dramatic scenes in the Commons, as MPs had initially believed that the government had won. This was based on the way one of the tellers for the rebels was standing in the Chamber (the tellers are MPs who announce the result, and they stand according to whether the Ayes or Noes have it). Heidi Alexander only moved to the other side of the floor at the very last minute,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Jeremy Corbyn reveals his inner Blairite

Simple result at PMQs. Mrs May won without trying. Mr Corbyn lost in the same way. Even at his most animated, the Labour leader sounds like a second-hand appliance being tested by repairmen. Sometimes he’s a Hoover, sometimes a food-blender, sometimes a wood-sander grumbling away in a garden-shed. Today’s noise was the faint, ruminative drone of an electric toothbrush. He hunched over the despatch box, his jaw slack, his head down. His words dropped from his lips like scraps of dry parchment. It seemed he was addressing all his remarks to his socks. This did not work in his favour. The game-plan today was to portray the prime minister as

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

May survives awkward PMQs on homelessness

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May turned up in good form to PMQs today. The Labour leader was unusually nimble with his ripostes, deploying statistics on home ownership straight after the Prime Minister’s mockery of the Labour party’s attitude towards home ownership. But as usual, he didn’t manage to make the homeslessness figures that he made his key theme for his questions into a matter of great discomfort for May. The Prime Minister, for her part, managed to recover from each attack pretty well, arguing that the Conservatives were the party who believed in building more homes so that people could have a roof over their heads. She did, though,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How Ruth Davidson plans to become First Minister of Scotland

Ruth Davidson is clear in her interview with Fraser Nelson and me that she won’t be making her mind up about standing for a Westminster seat until after the Scottish Parliament election in 2021. Why does Davidson want to wait until then before making any decision? Because she thinks she can become First Minister of Scotland. This might seem a bit bizarre, delusional even; the Labour revival in Scotland means that the Tories are sometimes coming third in the polls and it is hard to see what other party would back her for the job. But Davidson is convinced that there is a ‘clear route’ to the Scottish Tories taking power. In

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why the Conservatives are pushing a green agenda

One of the things MPs complain about when it comes to Brexit – aside from its handling by the government – is that it means there is little time left for the Conservatives to pursue much in the terms of domestic policy. The one area which appears to be the exception to the rule is the environment. Since Michael Gove was appointed Defra secretary, there have been a raft of good news announcements coming from the department. From a £140 million fund for developing countries to tackle climate change and a clean energy programme to reintroducing beavers into the wild and saving trees in Sheffield, the Conservatives are on a

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s hostile reception

Ever since the EU referendum, Boris Johnson has found his local neighbourhood in Islington turn a little bit frosty. Residents in the Remain-voting borough have taken on occasion to heckling him over his pro-Brexit stance. Happily, the Foreign Secretary has since managed to find a safe space – even if it is a little far away. Speaking at the Foreign Office Christmas reception in Lancaster House, Johnson was lauded by government officials for proving Britain’s global reach by receiving a warm reception on the streets of Tehran, on his recent trip to Iran– to try and free Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Johnson proceeded to joke to a room full of diplomats: ‘I

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The age of volatility

Every year in British politics seems to be more surprising than the last. Few predicted in 2015 that the Conservatives would win a general election outright for the first time in 20-odd years. Fewer still realised that Theresa May would become the most popular Prime Minister since records began. And almost no one foresaw how the tide would turn against her so dramatically that the Tories would lose their majority, or that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour would make such significant gains. How to make sense of it all? Tory MPs are being offered an explanation by Gavin Barwell, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, who has been seeing them in groups

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mission impossible? | 13 December 2017

If you work for the Church of England in any capacity, from Archbishop of Canterbury to parish flower-arranger, how do you deal with the distressing statistics that in the past 20 years, average Sunday attendance has plummeted to 780,000 and is going down by a rate of about 20,000 a year? Do you pretend it’s not happening and just tell everyone about the spike in your numbers at Christmas, or accept that it might be happening but believe that God’s grace will deal with the problem in its own good time? Or do you throw your weight behind a vast national marketing initiative, hurling millions of pounds at the problem?

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Queen of Scots

‘You wouldn’t make good spies, would you,’ chuckles Ruth Davidson as she finds us sitting with our backs to the door in the Scottish Parliament café. She then triumphantly declares that she knows who we’ve been speaking to when preparing for the interview — getting two out of the five names isn’t bad going. After this, she sets off for her office at a pace that leaves us and her communications director trailing in her wake. She scrolls impatiently through her phone as she waits for us to catch up at every security door. Davidson is as direct as she is energetic. When the editor begins by pointing out the

Quentin Letts

Order, order | 13 December 2017

Diet nannies will spend Christmas telling us ‘you are what you eat’ but in the House of Commons ‘you are where you sit’. Are you a Tory Whips’ stooge or a Dominic Grieve groupie aching to block Brexit, a braw new blue Scot or an English provincial plodder without hope of advancement? Parliament-watchers discern plenty about your political leanings from where you park your posterior. Each side of the Commons chamber has five green-leather benches that are divided by a gangway. On the government side of the chamber, all MPs are Conservatives except for a couple who have had the Whip withdrawn. On the opposition side, the lower four benches

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Instead of schmoozing at City parties, I’m Sarah the Cook in a Yorkshire panto

Last Christmas I offered you a cruel satire about a boardroom big-shot whose career went so awry that he ended up as a pantomime dame. So perhaps there’s justice in the fact that this year, that’s what’s happened to me. Instead of schmoozing the City’s festive party round, I’m cross–dressing nightly on a Yorkshire stage as Sarah the Cook in Dick Whittington and His Cat. The original Whittington, four times Lord Mayor of London between 1397 and 1419, was a mercer who exported English cloth across the North Sea, importing silks and velvets in return. But in panto, Dick and his crew turn their backs on our European partners and

Matt Ridley

The ‘designer baby’ myth

Christmas Day marks the birthday of one of the most gifted human beings ever born. His brilliance was of a supernoval intensity, but he was, by all accounts, very far from pleasant company. I refer to Isaac Newton. Would you like your next child to have the intelligence of a Newton? It may not be long before this is a consumer choice, according to an ambitious new company founded in America a few months ago. Genomic Prediction initially plans to offer people who use in-vitro fertilisation the chance to identify and avoid embryos that would be likely to develop diabetes, late-life osteoporosis, schizophrenia and dwarfism. The key is the application

Tuesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why the Tories are wrong to restore the whip to Anne Marie Morris

The Tories have decided to restore the whip to Anne Marie Morris. The Newton Abbot MP had it suspended for using the phrase the ‘n—– in the woodpile’ at a think tank event. This decision is a mistake. Whatever Morris says, it is hard to see how anyone could use this phrase unintentionally and it is clearly offensive. Restoring the whip to Morris less than six months after it was taken away from her suggests that the Tories are not taking this incident as seriously as they should. This is the wrong call both politically and morally. Morally, this kind of casual use of racist language is deplorable bad manners.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs express fears about refuge cuts

Tory MPs are now sufficiently worried about the changes to the way that refuges for domestic abuse victims are funded that they have started to speak out publicly. This morning, in a Westminster Hall debate, three Conservative backbenchers told the Communities and Local Government minister Marcus Jones that the government ‘must intervene’ to stop refuges closing as a result of these funding changes. Sutton and Cheam MP Paul Scully, Bolton West MP Chris Green, and Ochil and South Perthshire MP Luke Graham all expressed concerns about the new funding model. Both Scully and Graham described how members of their own families had been victims of domestic violence. Scully paid tribute

Douglas Murray

Sadiq Khan should tell Trump the truth about multicultural London

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, likes to make a stand. Specifically he likes to present himself (and the city in which he has been elected Mayor) as an antidote to global concerns about immigration, human unpleasantness in general and Donald Trump in particular. For instance, on the BBC on Sunday morning he explained his opposition to President Trump receiving a state visit to the UK. Though he added: ‘If [Trump] wants to meet with the Mayor of London, of course I’d be happy to meet with him and show him parts of London where Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, members of organised faiths and those that aren’t, don’t just

Steerpike Steerpike

Sajid Javid’s strong and stable jibe

With two new polls putting the Conservatives ahead of Labour for the first time since the snap election, there’s reason for Christmas cheer in No 10. However, despite this, the result of the disastrous election remains a sore point in government. So, Steerpike was curious to see Sajid Javid make a joke at the expense of Theresa May and her election campaign in a speech to the Federation of Master Builders. Talking about the work the FMB does, the Secretary of State for local government said that not even Winston Churchill was immune to ‘shoddy workmanship’ – before going on to suggest May was: ‘After all, none of us are immune from

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Let’s hear the good news about Brexit more often

In my lifetime, I cannot remember any thing or idea or person getting as bad a press as Brexit has. It’s relentless. It’s not daily — it’s hourly, minutely, by the second. Open a newspaper, switch on the radio, browse the web, and there it is: more Brexit-fear, more predictions of economic calamity and national decline if we continue down this course dumbly mapped out for us by the electorate. It’s exhausting to read; heaven knows what it must be like to write it! I fear for the sanity of the Brexit Doom hack. No doubt reporters and columnists will say they’re doing their job and reporting uncomfortable facts. But

Matthew Lynn

The last thing the UK needs is higher Scottish taxes

A top rate of 50 percent? A wider range of tax bands? Lower allowances? Or some combination of all three? When it unveils its Budget on Thursday, the Scottish National Party is just about certain to use its power to increase income taxes. The only real debate is about who will take the hit. On the day, Nicola Sturgeon will no doubt wheel out the usual lines about the need to ‘invest’ in public services, reverse ‘Tory cuts’, and perhaps add in a sound-bite or two about the damage done by a ‘hard Brexit’. And yet, in fact higher taxes will only damage the Scottish economy, and by extension the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

What is Gavin Williamson up to?

What is Gavin Williamson playing at? That’s the question on the lips of Conservative MPs after two weeks of mayhem which have seen the beginnings of a defence budget rebellion complete with a briefing war with the Treasury. Since his surprise appointment as Defence Secretary, the former Chief Whip has been keen to prove his credentials – and commitment to his department – even if he does lack a military background. So far, this has involved banning Philip Hammond from flying in RAF jets until he paid his outstanding bill (now paid), a call for British jihadists to be hunted down and killed in the Middle East rather than allowed to