Politics

Here’s a pre-Christmas party game. Each player comes up with a word to fill the blank in ‘If Brexit was a …, which one would it be?’, and everyone else has to come up with witty answers. If the word is ‘film’, for example, obvious answers are Independence Day or Death Wish, according to taste, though a much funnier one was offered to me by former Tory MP Jerry Hayes: The Italian Job — in which Michael Caine, in the David Cameron role, famously complains ‘You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’ after a bullion van is accidentally obliterated, and the whole caper ends up hanging over a

In the autumn statement, Philip Hammond chose to mock Boris’ failed leadership bid. This wasn’t the first time that one of the Foreign Secretary Cabinet’s colleagues had had a laugh at his expense. At our parliamentarian of the year awards, Theresa May joked that Boris would be put down when he was no longer useful. But Boris and his circle are getting rather fed up with him being the butt of the joke, as I say in The Sun today. Those close to Boris feel that these gibes undercut him on the world stage. ‘If they want the UK to be taken seriously, they need to back him not mock

It’s not been a great week for Sir Kim Darroch. On Monday, he suffered the embarrassment of having the president-elect call for Nigel Farage to take his job. Now the interim Ukip leader has stuck the knife in further, giving an interview to Sam Delaney on Russia Today — natch — about the current UK ambassador to the US. Asked about his apparent job rival, Farage said he was unimpressed with Darroch when the pair previously met: ‘He once came to my office in Brussels and it was one of the most unpleasant conversations I’ve ever had.’ He also criticises Sir Kim’s pro-EU credentials for dealing with the Trump administration: ‘He

For most people being Foreign Secretary would be a great job, but Philip Hammond never looked like he particularly relished that role. What he has always wanted to be is Chancellor and today in his first major parliamentary event in the role he crisply set out what he thinks is wrong with the UK economy. He said that to make a success of Brexit, Britain would have to deal with its productivity gap, the housing challenge and address the regional imbalances in the economy. Cabinet colleagues say that Hammond talks more passionately about productivity than any other subject. Judging by today, he views investment in economically productive infrastructure as the