Politics

If Theresa May is in it for the ‘long term’, does this mean that she plans to do big things with her premiership? The Prime Minister promised a great deal when she stood on the steps of Downing Street over a year ago, but has so far delivered a snap election which messed up her chances of actually achieving what she promised. She now has to rely on a party which doesn’t share all of her values – the DUP – or the good will of Labour MPs who happen to support what she wants to do. But this is all about May’s weakness in the House of Commons Chamber.

On Tuesday, the FT lead with a confident headline: May’s Hopes for Tokyo Dashed as Japanese Hold Back of Trade Talks – and quoting a Japanese trade official commenting on the Prime Minister’s visit to Japan by saying ‘I don’t think there will be substantial progress’. It also quoted the president of Japan’s Institute of International Affairs as saying ‘we can’t negotiate until Britain is out of the EU’. Given that at the time the headline was written May hadn’t even met with the Japanese PM Shinzo Abe it seemed a little premature. Yet needless to say it was swallowed whole by Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson who tweeted: ‘May

The victims of foreign dictatorships have become chips in our political games. In our corner of the rich world, for instance, the suffering of Venezuela matters only because Jeremy’s Corbyn’s enemies can use it to attack his support for the Chavist regime when it was unchallengeable, and his cowardly equivocation when the inevitable catastrophe followed. Saudi Arabia matters only because leftists can use it to damn the British establishment’s bootlicking support for the House of Saud and its suppression of democratic, women’s and minority rights. Yet the smallest concern of the Venezuelans is the praise the western far left lavished on their corrupt and massively incompetent dictators. I don’t mean

When Kezia Dugdale was elected Scottish Labour leader, she tweeted: ‘Mission: Impossible has a happy ending, right?’ As she steps down from the job, Dugdale is getting enough praise to suggest that her mission has a happy ending. But is that really fair? She leaves with more Scottish Labour MPs in Westminster than she started with: impressive, given many had assumed Scottish Labour was dead for at least a generation after the SNP surge in 2015. But then again, she leaves with her party in third place at Holyrood. Her critics on the Left will argue that the party’s recovery in its Scottish seats was far more down to Jeremy

Even in Scotland, ‘Name the post-devolution leaders of the Scottish Labour party’ is a pretty decent pub quiz question. There have been so many and so few of them left much of a legacy. The people’s standard has been borne by Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale. Eight leaders in eighteen years. (In the same period, the SNP and the Tories have each only had three leaders.) And now there will be a ninth. Kezia Dugdale’s resignation as leader of the Scottish Labour party surprised even some of her closest allies and senior aides. Many of them are, not

Jean-Claude Juncker is a ‘preposterous oaf’, according to the Sun. The paper says that, particularly on this side of the Channel, people shouldn’t care much about what he thinks. Yet ‘diehard Remainers’ continue to treat his word as gospel and ‘seize on Juncker’s every self-serving snippet as “evidence” of our Government’s failings’. Yes, there are some ‘reservations’ with how ministers are dealing with Brexit. But the papers published this month on Brexit by the Government actually look ‘eminently reasonable’ – a stark contrast from the ‘childish, posturing amateurs in Brussels’. Juncker isn’t the only one to have criticised the British government’s attitude towards Brexit in the last few days. The EU’s chief