Politics

David Cameron has been chairing a Cobra meeting this morning to discuss the UK government’s response to yesterday’s terror attacks in Brussels. Inevitably, the issue has become deeply partisan, with Ukip’s Mike Hookem managing to release a statement while the attacks were still taking place, arguing that ‘this horrific act of terrorism shows that Schengen free movement and lax border controls are a threat to our security’. Yesterday, too, Tory MPs attacked John McDonnell for calling into question the fitness of George Osborne for the job of Chancellor while a major terrorist attack was unfolding. What those Tory MPs didn’t acknowledge was that logically if it was wrong for a Shadow Chancellor

For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde. The adored MP of my childhood, Tony Benn, preached against it in any shape or form. ‘When I saw how the European Union was developing,’ he said, ‘it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don’t

I do not know if it has officially been measured, but my guess is that Christine Shawcroft, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, has an IQ of somewhere in the region of six. This would put her, in the global hierarchy of intelligence, directly between one of those Activia yoghurts women eat to relieve constipation and some moss. I’m sure Christine would argue, perhaps forcibly, that intelligence is an overrated, elitist concept and that no store should be put by it. Judging people by whether they are too thick to breathe in and out fairly regularly is discriminatory. The views of an imbecile, or, say, a Jerusalem artichoke, are