Politics

It is the fate of all new prime ministers to be compared with their recent predecessors. Theresa May has already been accused of being the heir to the micro-managing Gordon Brown. Her allies, meanwhile, see a new Margaret Thatcher, an uncompromising Boadicea destined to retrieve sovereignty from Europe. But perhaps a more fitting model for May would be a less recent Labour prime minister: Clement Attlee. When Labourites reminisce about Attlee, it isn’t so much the man himself who makes them misty-eyed. It is the achievements of those who worked for him — Nye Bevan, Ernest Bevin and the rest. Attlee’s government created the welfare state and the National Health

Just a day after Sir Ivan Rogers’ resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU, his successor has been named as Sir Tim Barrow. Currently political director at the Foreign Office, Barrow is a career diplomat who is a former ambassador to Russia with significant experience of Brussels. Speaking on LBC, Rogers’ old boss Charles Crawford, a former British diplomat critical of the EU, says that Barrow will be a popular choice with the Foreign Office. He adds that Barrow will be ‘fearless’ in putting to ministers the choices ahead: ‘If you have to choose someone for this job, he is — given where we are — as good as it gets at the

Today’s Fabian Society paper on the state of the Labour Party — and what a state it is — has put Labourites and the leftish Twitterati into a spin. Aptly titled ‘Stuck’, the paper says just over half of the people who voted Labour in 2015 support the party today. And if an election were called right now Labour could expect to win a measly 200 seats: 40 fewer than in 2015 and 70 fewer than in 2010. Most strikingly, Labour has lost four times as many Leavers as Remainers. Clearly sensing their party’s hostility to the idea of leaving the EU, the inhabitants of those Labour heartlands in the

Back in the summer of 2015, a year before the Brexit vote, I was summoned to the German Embassy in London for a special briefing by a senior member of Germany’s Social Democrats. The man from the SPD didn’t mince his words: David Cameron might secure a few small concessions in his forthcoming renegotiation with the EU, but it was inconceivable that he could obtain any significant changes in Britain’s relationship with Europe. For Germany, free movement of people within the European Union was sacrosanct – and even if Deutschland had been willing to change the rules for Britain’s sake, any major alteration would need to be ratified by all

At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started lining up at three, getting ready for a six o’clock start. In Edinburgh, hardy shoppers braved flurries of morning snow to make sure they were first in line for Boxing Day bargains. Whatever else is happening at the close of this year, British shoppers are as indefatigable as ever in their determination to keep spending. Surely it wasn’t meant to be like this? In the wake of the vote to leave the EU back in June, mainstream economists were unanimous in their view that we would be in a recession

Every year closes with ‘fury’ as the press reacts to yet another honour for a ‘mandarin’ who has been doing something they disagree with, and 2016 is no exception. This year’s villainous recipient of a gong is Sir Mark Lowcock, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development. Much of the anger directed as Lowcock’s gong is really frustration with the government’s policy on aid spending, which is that 0.7 per cent of national income is spent on development projects around the world every year. That’s not Lowcock’s decision, but something that the Coalition Government introduced and that this majority Conservative Government under David Cameron and then Theresa May has remained committed