Politics

It’s a shame that protocol, being protocol, prevents Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson from meeting President-elect Donald Trump during his trip to Washington. Boris can’t even meet Rex Tillerson, the man Trump has chosen as his Secretary of State, until Tillerson is confirmed by the senate. A Trump-Johnson encounter would be a meeting of considerable media and public interest: the Donald and the Boris have become aligned in people’s minds ever since the EU referendum, when Nick Clegg and others called Johnson ‘Trump with a thesaurus’ and so on. It’s true that Boris is, in a tabloid sense, a thinking man’s Trump. The two men are born New Yorkers. They share

Because the SNP have won so often and so conclusively in recent years there is an understandable temptation to suppose they must always know what they are doing. Accordingly, Nicola Sturgeon sits in Bute House like some political Moriarty: motionless, perhaps, but like a spider at the centre of its web. And ‘that web has a thousand radiations, and [s]he knows well every quiver of each of them’. Other political parties may plan, but the SNP plots. Everything is done for a reason and nothing is left to chance. The nationalists are relentless and implacable. No wonder they put the fear of God into their foes (especially a Labour party they

In the past week, a report predicted Labour will win less than 20pc of the vote in the 2020 election, Britain’s ambassador to the EU resigned over Brexit ‘muddled thinking’ and the Red Cross claimed there is a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in UK hospitals. So, surely Labour’s top command have much to talk about? Alas not. It turns out that — despite recent events — Jeremy Corbyn has only communicated with his deputy Tom Watson by text of late. Speaking on Ridge on Sunday, Watson disclosed that the pair have only messaged twice since Christmas — once to say ‘merry Christmas’ and the other over the death of John Berger, the art critic: ‘By text, yesterday.

Theresa May has clearly learnt one lesson from David Cameron’s failed negotiation with the EU. As I write in The Sun this morning. she has realised that if she just asks for what cautious officials think she can get, then she won’t get enough to satisfy the voters—hence Sir Ivan Roger’s resignation as the UK representative to the EU. But an even bigger problem for Cameron’s renegotiation was that the other side never believed he would walk away from the deal. Cameron compounded this problem when he made clear that he wanted the whole thing done quickly, further reducing his negotiating leverage. So, when May makes her big Brexit speech

The response to Milo Yiannopoulos getting a big-bucks book deal with Simon & Schuster has been nuts. Even by today’s standards. The cry has gone up that S&S — or SS, amirite? — is endangering the wellbeing of women and gays and blacks and other minorities that have felt the sting of Milo’s camp polemics. Please. It’s a book, not a bomb. It’s words, sentences, ideas, not fire and pogroms. Everyone needs to calm down. Milo is the Breitbart editor turned darling of the agitated, anti-PC right, given to manicured fuming against feminism, Islam, censorious students, ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other things that apparently threaten Western civilisation. When it was revealed

Quercus Books recently published a series of parodies of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories which reimagines the five as adults. Titles include Five Go Gluten Free and Five on Brexit Island. Everyone loves a spoof, it seems, to judge by the phenomenal success of the chart-topping Ladybird Books for Grown Ups. And never one to ignore the siren call of the literary bandwagon, I thought I’d invite you to have a go — either by contributing to the Famous Five series or by giving another children’s classic the same treatment. On the whole, the standard was high. A.R. Duncan-Jones, Bill Greenwell, Toni Hinckley and Anne du Croz shone and deserve

Sir Tim Barrow has been appointed as Britain’s ambassador to the EU. Yet still the row over his predecessor’s departure rages in today’s papers. Sir Ivan Rogers may well have thought that the country made a mistake in backing Brexit, says the Daily Telegraph, but it is ‘not his place to make that impression public in the way that he did’. There was ‘nothing even-handed about the way in which he left, according to the paper’s editorial, which hits out at Rogers’ apparent inability to deal with politicians not always taking on board his advice. But the Telegraph’s most stinging criticism for Rogers is the way in which this row

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

The headline business story of the holiday season was the latest bailout of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. This is Italy’s third largest bank and, according to recent ECB ‘stress tests’, Europe’s weakest — regarded by pessimists both as a potential catalyst for systemic collapse and a symptom of deeper Italian problems that could kick off another euro crisis this year. Monte dei Paschi is also of special interest to me as the world’s oldest bank, having been founded by the magistrates of Siena in 1472 to provide loans at non–usurious rates to ‘poor or miserable or needy persons’, underpinned by wealth from local agriculture. Though it evolved more