Politics

If you’ve felt your heart beating a little faster than usual, and a strange sense of excitement creeping all over you, it’s because #letbritaindecide fever is back in Parliament. Yes, folks, the fun returns, and this time for the committee stage of the bill, from 2pm today. I’ve already reported Mike Gapes’ amusing amendments to the legislation which are designed to cause trouble. He has put a few more down of a similarly mischevious ilk, changing the question about Britain’s membership of the EU to a question about whether Britain should join the Schengen Agreement, or the euro. But Labour’s frontbench has also tabled some changes to provoke a row.

There is almost nothing more emotive than a murder trial, particularly when it takes place in the United States and involves the shooting dead of a black boy on the basis of self-defence. Public sympathies are inevitably roused and divided on the basis of prejudices and predilections. That is understandable. It is understandable that disaffected black youngsters in Florida hoped to see George Zimmerman found guilty and Trayvon Martin vindicated: for all that it would do, for all that it would say. The converse is also true. Neighbourhood activists like Zimmerman, many members of the American public who live in fear of kids on the streets, those who themselves have

Justice and Home Affairs ministers have spent a muggy afternoon in the Commons slogging through several hours of tetchy questions from backbenchers about the government’s plan to opt out of European Union justice and home affairs measures, before opting back in to the ones the government has decided it likes. It’s at times like this that anyone other than Theresa May, who spent a considerable amount of time hopping up and down to take endless interventions from her own Tory colleagues, would start to wonder whether the party leadership really was a prize worth working so hard for, given the amount of reassurance MPs need on just one policy area.

The Conservative party hasn’t won a parliamentary majority for more than twenty years. If it is to start doing so again, then it will have to need to expand its pool of potential voters. Renewal, run by former Policy Exchange deputy director David Skelton, is a new Tory ginger group trying to focus the party’s attention on this problem. It launches tomorrow and, I suspect, that at least one of its idea will immediately catch the eye of the Tory leadership. It is proposing that the law should be changed so that not only should union members have to opt in to affiliate to a political party but they should

In this increasingly secular age, you would expect the Archbishop of Canterbury to be a figure of diminishing importance. But Justin Welby is fast becoming the most politically influential Archbishop since the war. Part of Welby’s influence stems from the fact that both the Conservatives and Labour think that he is, secretly, one of them. I remember within days of his appointment being approacedh by a Tory minister and then by one of those closest to Ed Miliband. They both wanted to explain how Welby was going to help move public debate in their direction. One never had this kind of conversation about Rowan Williams whose views were thought not

Twelve years ago, Andrew Rawnsley put a bomb under Westminster with his book on the Blair first term Servants of the People: the Inside Story of New Labour. Impeccably-informed and brilliantly-connected, Rawnsley used all his access to lift the curtain on what the New Labour lot were really up to. As Peter Oborne said in The Spectator, ‘it was a devastating piece of contemporary history, as well-informed as it is lethal’. So Mr Steerpike notices with much interest that former Speccie editor Matt d’Ancona has chosen the same subheading for his book.  In It Together: the Inside Story of the Coalition comes out in September. D’Ancona is to the coalition what Rawnsley