Politics

98 days into the Theresa May government and Philip Hammond is the Cabinet Minister under the most scrutiny. The reports of tensions both between him and the Cabinet’s Brexit Ministers, and him and Number 10, mean that his words are parsed particularly carefully. In front of the Treasury select committee today, Hammond refused to say whether or not he had seen the section of Theresa May’s conference speech that criticised the effects of the Bank of England’s monetary policy. This was effectively an admission that he had not. Given that one well-placed insider told me that May’s comments produced ‘serious trouble’ between her and Hammond this is not that surprising.

After years of delays, point-scoring and heel-dragging, the government will next week announce which airport — or airports — will get the green light for expansion. While it’s a decision that eluded Cameron during his premiership, Theresa May’s spokesman confirmed today that the outcome is now imminent. However before anyone gets their hopes up that the airport saga will soon be over, it’s worth pointing out that the final vote will not take place for at least another year. The government decision will be made by a cabinet sub-committee, with no London MPs among its members. Those on the committee include May, Philip Hammond, Greg Clark, Chris Grayling and Sajid Javid. While the

Steven Woolfe isn’t just dropping out of the Ukip leadership race tonight, he’s quitting the party altogether. He has left with an attack on those who make Ukip ‘ungovernable’; echoing Arron Banks and Nigel Farage’s criticisms of the party’s National Executive Committee. (Though, given that Woolfe ended up in a fight in the European Parliament, he is perhaps not best placed to lecture on behaviour) Woolfe’s departure—and the circumstances of it—shows how far off becoming a well-run political party Ukip is. As long as it persists with this in-fighting and backbiting, it won’t be able to take advantage of the huge opportunities that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s London-centric top team

As part of its preview of Tim Shipman’s keenly-anticipated Brexit book, the Sunday Times today reveals draft article written by Boris Johnson intended to make the case for his voting to stay in the EU. The existence of such an article was known, and a lot of his enemies thought it would expose him as a fraud. In fact, the article (full thing here) reads like an advert for Brexit with a pathetic “but I’m still going to back Cameron” bolted on to the end. It purports to balance both arguments, but weighs in far more favourably for Brexit. It’s not the first time he describes the case for remaining (he

A Brexit deal that would end free movement and see UK goods able to access the EU market without tariffs or the need to jump through any additional hoops sounds, superficially, attractive. These arrangements could also be in place by the 2020 general election, as I say in my Sun column. But this idea of leaving the EU single market, but staying in the customs union is a bad one—however keen some in the Treasury and Whitehall are on it. For if Britain remains in the customs union, then it can’t do proper trade deals with non-EU countries. Instead, it will have to continue to apply the EU’s Common External