Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

The EU never understood Northern Ireland

At the heart of the crisis over the Protocol is its failure to deliver on its own stated aims. To understand this crisis, it is necessary to know some key aspects of the Protocol’s genesis and history. Exactly a month after Theresa May triggered Article 50, the European Commission was instructed by the member states

Katy Balls

The next Brexit battle

12 min listen

The Foreign Secretary has outlined fresh legislation to change the post-Brexit trade agreement with the EU today – allowing ministers to override parts of the Northern Ireland protocol. Whilst the government insists that this is not a breach of international law, critics remain unconvinced. ‘I had one member of government say to me this bill

Brendan O’Neill

Carole Cadwalladr’s staggering victory against Arron Banks

Arron Banks, the pugnacious Brexiteer, has lost his claim for defamation against Carole Cadwalladr, the darling of the Brexit-loathing bourgeoisie. Banks brought the action in relation to two public utterances made by Ms Cadwalladr. First, her TED talk of 2019, in which she said:  ‘And I’m not even going to go into the lies that Arron

James Forsyth

Boris’s Protocol shake-up faces two major challenges

The UK government has now published both the text of the Northern Ireland Protocol bill and a summary of its legal arguments. The main plank of the government’s case for why it isn’t breaching international law rests on the doctrine of necessity. The government document states that ‘the term ‘necessity’ is used in international law

Welsh Tories would be wise to split from the Conservatives

Conservatives in Wales are jumpy. Seeing Boris’s name as poisonous on the doorstep, a number of them have suggested disaffiliating from the national party and forming their own Welsh Conservatives as the party of the right west of Offa’s Dyke. Some in the central party in London are, perhaps unsurprisingly, aghast: one unnamed Tory MP has

Kate Andrews

There is more to the UK’s latest GDP figures than meets the eye

Today’s economic growth figures serve as a reminder that it’s important to be specific about what’s actually being measured. Headline GDP numbers show a contraction of 0.3 per cent in April: worse than what was expected (the forecast consensus was a fall of roughly 0.1 per cent), suggesting a fall in economic activity and output,

Gavin Mortimer

France’s Socialists have been punished for their intolerance

One of the more significant results from the first round of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday was in the Corrèze. There, in the rural south of the country, Sandrine Deveaud of the Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale (Nupes) came top with 25.4 per cent of the vote. This is the left-wing alliance assembled by

Robert Peston

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a problem Boris created

If Boris Johnson was elected on a single slogan, it was ‘Get Brexit done’. He then claimed it was done at the end of 2019 in the terms for leaving the EU he agreed. Not so. Today legislation will be introduced by the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unilaterally overhaul a central pillar of the

Ross Clark

Ordering farmers to grow tomatoes won’t make us any richer

Should we cover Britain with greenhouses so that we can be self-sufficient in tomatoes? That seems to be the latest thrust of the government’s see-sawing farming, environment and food policy. Government advisers appear to have been looking longingly across the North Sea to the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s leading salad producers thanks

Steerpike

Cadwalladr wins libel case against Banks

Visitors to Westminster this morning might have experienced a meteorological disturbance shortly after 10 a.m as SW1 types took a sharp intake of breath. For Carole Cadwalladr, the ever-online Observer journalist has today won her libel case against brash Brexit-backer Arron Banks, the founder of Leave.EU. Banks tried to sue Cadwalladr for defamation over two instances

Katy Balls

The next Brexit battle is here

The government will today reveal its plans to unilaterally rewrite parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Depending on who you speak to, this is either a necessary step in protecting the Good Friday agreement or a breach of international law set to damage the UK’s standing on the world stage. The details of the bill

Sam Leith

Are we ignoring AI’s ‘lived experience’?

Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public against the wishes of his employers with his belief that an artificial intelligence called LaMDA has achieved sentience. Mr Lemoine has posted the (edited) transcripts of several of his conversations with LaMDA, a chatbot, in

Why is America bombing Somalia again?

You may not have caught it amidst other international developments, but the United States bombed Somalia last Friday. No, that isn’t a misprint. On June 3, the Somali government announced that the US had conducted an airstrike against al-Shabaab militants west of the southern port city of Kismayo, killing approximately five fighters. The Pentagon has

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s Plan B

Emmanuel Macron is about to activate his Plan B.  If he cannot control the National Assembly, after the current round of legislative elections, he will simply bypass it,  creating a new ‘people’s assembly’ with which he might appear to consult the French. This would obviate the need to refer or defer to the elected members

Patrick O'Flynn

Will the government stand up to mob rule?

A very big week is in store for the government’s strategy to tackle illegal immigration with all eyes on the planned first air transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, due to take place on Tuesday. Whether the flight takes off at all and how many migrants will be on board is yet to be seen.

Ross Clark

Did Rishi Sunak really make an £11 billion blunder?

Could Rishi Sunak really have saved the taxpayer £11 billion by insuring against higher interest rates last year? That was the extraordinary claim made by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and in the Financial Times on Friday. The NIESR claims that the government could have saved the money had the Chancellor

Sunday shows round-up: Tories ‘united’ behind Boris

Brandon Lewis: Conservatives are now ‘united behind the PM’ Mounting dissatisfaction with Boris Johnson’s leadership came to a head last Monday when he survived a vote of confidence amongst Conservative MPs by 211 to 148. The party’s rules as they stand mean that his position is now notionally safe for a year. The Northern Ireland

How long will Xi Jinping rule China?

For some time now it has been assumed that in November the National Congress will rubber stamp Xi Jinping’s continued role as China’s supreme leader for a third five-year term, which would make Xi the first Chinese leader for a generation to serve more than two terms. Just a year ago his position as one

Lisa Haseldine

The ironic reincarnation of McDonald’s on Russia Day

Today is Russia Day. A muted affair compared to the pompous and bellicose displays seen on Victory Day, today is the day Russia commemorates no longer being a part of the Soviet Union and becoming the Russian Federation instead. Unlike other patriotic holidays in the country, most ordinary Russians pay little attention to its significance.

The NHS’s disturbing trans guidance for children

Sajid Javid spoke some sense earlier this week when he said that the word ‘woman’ should not be removed from NHS ovarian cancer guidance. The Health Secretary was responding to the revelations that the NHS website had been stripping the word ‘woman’ from its advice pages. But fine words are only a start. The Health

Julie Burchill

Kim Kardashian is a better role model than Marilyn Monroe

When Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala recently – the shimmering, crystal-studded, second-skin gown in which MM sang her infamous rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ to JFK in 1962 – many people had a collective fit of the vapours. You’d have thought someone had wiped their nose – or worse

How Uruguay held out against South American socialism

Of all the epithets for Latin America, the most frustrating and demoralising must be the ‘forgotten continent’. Latin America is not so much forgotten as overlooked. Part of the reason for this may lie in its cultural proximity but geographical distance to the West: what Alain Rouquié, the French political scientist, called ‘far-western’. Familiarity, even

Prince Charles is playing with fire

Charles is a prince on a perilous path. It’s a well-trodden one that is proving more problematic the closer he gets to having a crown placed on his head. He has opinions, who doesn’t. He wants to share them, like the rest of us. His decades long predicament is that he occupies a privileged position

Is Britain heading for a summer of discontent?

With workers across the economy looking set to go on strike during the next few months there is talk of a ‘summer of discontent’. The inspiration for this trope is the infamous 1978-9 ‘winter of discontent’, when despite the urgings of Labour ministers to show pay restraint, poorly paid public sector workers left rubbish piling

Max Jeffery

Will Jeremy Hunt run for PM again?

12 min listen

Has Jeremy Hunt had a good week? When the former health secretary – and 2019 leadership hopeful – announced on Twitter on Monday that he would be voting against the Prime Minister in the confidence vote, Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, replied that Hunt was ‘wrong about almost everything’. Boris Johnson went on to narrowly win the

Britain’s ivory ban is needlessly draconian

The world’s most draconian ban on the trade in ivory came into force in the UK this month. It does not increase the legal protections already enjoyed by all living elephants, but rather extends these protections to elephants that have been dead for decades. Trade in ivory and most ivory products from elephants killed after