All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It seems that the editors of the New York Times will print any nonsense about Britain — the British live on mutton and oatmeal! — so long as it confirms their prejudices about Brexit. ‘With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our
I’ve had a lot of flak for describing Saturday’s march for a ‘People’s Vote’ as ‘disturbing’. Angry emailers inform me it was actually a super-polite demo at which children and even pets joined hundreds of thousands of adults in a good-natured traipse through central London calling for Brexit to be rethought. It’s true the marchers
A point of significant tension at this morning’s cabinet will be over whether the PM is to allow her ministers and MPs to vote with their consciences on the indicative votes today and tomorrow to find any Brexit – or no-Brexit plan – that a majority of MPs can support AND on the statutory instrument
For the latest challenge competitors were asked to submit a recently discovered lost poem by a well-known poet that makes us see him or her in a new light. Step for-ward, Philip Larkin, flower arranger, Slough fan John Betjeman and knickers-on-fire Emily Dickinson. Congratulations all round are in order this week, but I especially admired
The first job of a columnist on a big newspaper is to be noticed. If people aren’t talking about the things you’ve said, what’s the point? By that measure, Sarah Vine is a good columnist. Her name is known. At the Daily Mail she says things that people notice and talk about. She does it on
I am reliably told that Theresa May told Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Steve Baker, Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Davis et al at Chequers that she will quit if they vote for her deal, including the backstop they hate. But she gave no specifics. So there is not a lot of trust she would actually quit. And the
In determining that Donald Trump did not engage in secret collusion with Russia, Robert Mueller may well have done Democrats a solid. Instead of going down the chimerical road of impeachment, they can focus on ousting him from office in 2020. At the same time, they can keep the base agitated with intimations that not
What makes me chuckle about the Brexiteers is how little they understand the German mindset. Here in Germany, the European Union is a religion. It is ingrained so heavily in the DNA of nearly every German citizen that any reasoned argument to counter its domination, or challenge its direction, is swiftly dismissed. The integrity of
Katy Balls asks ‘Will there be an election?’ (16 March). That prompts the question: ‘To what purpose?’ Jeremy Corbyn may be ‘keen for an early election to break the deadlock’, but as the EU has repeatedly emphasised that its withdrawal deal is the only one on the table, how would Labour win a substantively better
Philip Hammond – Removing May ‘will not help’ Brexit process The Chancellor has taken to the TV studios once ahead of what was intended to be the UK’s final week inside the European Union. He needed up commenting on reports in several of this morning’s papers that the Cabinet was preparing to oust Theresa May
On Friday in the Spectator’s Coffee House podcast I suggested Michael Gove should be installed as a caretaker leader until June. I believe this is our best chance — perhaps our only chance — of honouring the result of the referendum. To be clear, I’m a passionate Brexiter and would like as clean a break with
David Lidington is the most powerful minister you’ve never heard of. He is Theresa May’s de facto deputy, tasked with both supervising the domestic agenda and solving the trickiest Brexit conundrums. And the Sunday newspaper front pages talk about a plot to enstool him as a caretaker Prime Minister: an idea supported, we read, by
The correct reports in Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday this morning that some ministers (not all) want Theresa May to go now, and make way for a caretaker – either David Lidington or Michael Gove – tells me NOT she will definitely go within a few days (though she may) but that the government
On Monday, the government announced that Penny Mordaunt, the Minister for Women and Equalities as well as the Secretary of State for International Development, had appointed an advisory panel on LGBT health. Needless to say, it immediately attracted criticism on social media for being insufficiently diverse: the 12-person panel is 90 per cent white, 66
For years, Britain has been failing to train enough doctors and has been importing them instead. This has been a well-known and much lamented fact, raising several ethical issues. Is it right for us to rob developing countries of their much-needed medics? Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, said at the Spectator’s health summit
Benjamin Netanyahu’s face at the online campaign event his Likud party hosted on Wednesday afternoon was pale and drawn. A new series of allegations was coming out from the legal authorities, pounced upon by an eager press, and it was at the worst possible timing. Less than three weeks before the election on April 9,
‘No Platforming’ and intolerance within the left are too often cited as the only reasons behind the purported demise of free speech on campus, which this week was proven to be untrue. On Wednesday, King’s College London blocked at least ten students from accessing their campus during a visit from the Queen, and passed on
In a blink, everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. Life goes on. The long, hot days of a record summer are lazily tumbling into autumn, gridlock has returned to the motorways, the kids are back at school. But the murderous events in Christchurch last Friday have distorted everything for us as a nation.
It is bad form to be a killjoy when it comes to gaming, so I will start by saying that there is nothing essentially wrong with it. Everyone has to relax, and there are more damaging forms of relaxation like drink, drugs and arguing with strangers on social media. About half of Britons game, playing
Will Theresa May make it to the end of the week? It’s a question that’s been asked before of the Prime Minister but this time the situation is more serious. After a disastrous few days in which May lost the support of her whips, Remain MPs and Brexiteers, the Sunday papers report that a Cabinet
As you know, I have been banging on about the probability that the UK will leave the EU without a deal on 12 April. Having talked to very senior members of the government, and also well-placed sources in the EU, it has become clear to me that MPs have one shot to prevent that –
Ever since MPs first voted to trigger Article 50 everyone has been told that Britain, by law, will be leaving the EU on 29 March. And if that date was ever to change, then Parliament would have to vote for it to change. That’s the British constitution which can be summed up in eight words: ‘What
At the moment, the Brexit deal isn’t going to pass. As I say in The Sun this morning, getting it through was always going to be tough, but the errors that Mrs May has made this week have made it even more difficult. As one Secretary of State puts it, ‘She would have been much
For many people, next Friday was supposed to be a celebration. Boris Johnson spoke about an ‘independence day’ marking the beginning of a new era of national self-confidence. But as we approach 29 March, not even ardent Brexiteers can claim that there is anything to celebrate. Theresa May has been reduced to asking, or rather
The trouble with Mr Speaker, even when he makes the right decision, is his motives. Fame is the spur and so is his love of hurting the Conservative party which nurtured him. However natural these feelings, they are completely wrong for the Speakership. The occupant of the chair is supposed to be a pillar of
This week opened with the cautious optimism of a third meaningful vote passing, and ends, as our cover depicts, with Theresa May begging the EU for an extension. After John Bercow’s ruling that May’s Brexit deal cannot be voted on a third time, unless with ‘substantive changes’, the chances of May passing her deal before
Pavlos Eleftheriadis is as Anglophilic a Greek as they come. His wife and children are British, and he is a professor of public law at Oxford. But the prospect of Brexit has altered Eleftheriadis’s view of Britain. ‘Psychologically, it’s difficult to accept that half of the society you live in is against the presence of
All the talk among Cabinet ministers – who as usual in Theresa May’s government know next-to-nothing about what the PM is actually going to do – is that the bloomin’ meaningful vote won’t be held next week after all. “The DUP don’t look as though they are coming on board,” said one. “It looks as
The city of Amsterdam is to finally ban guided tours around its most notorious window brothel area, the sex tourist trap known as De Wallen. Since Holland legalised its already burgeoning sex trade back in the year 2000, it has become apparent that if you display women in windows, wearing nothing but a bikini and
On Saturday I will join hundreds of thousands of British people demanding a People’s Vote on Brexit. The Put it to the People march will give voice to the growing concern in the nation that Brexit is going horribly wrong. Of course I argued from the beginning that we were better off in the EU
In these divided times the politics of centrist parties is all about building connections and crossing divides, so what better flyer design for a by-election in Newport, Wales than a local bridge? Unfortunately for the anti-Brexit Renew party, the bridge they chose for their election flyer was the Claiborne Pell Bridge in Newport… Rhode Island,
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to review the extraordinary and historic events that took place here in Brussels and talk to people involved in the talks, I have a new take on what happened and why. The big drivers for why the EU 27 leaders came up with their new formula for determining when
Speaker Bercow may have thrown a grenade in the works with his surprise decision to block a vote on May’s deal, but now the PM has returned from Brussels with an extension, a third meaningful vote looks set to go ahead next week. Before the vote, Coffee House is keeping track of the Tory MPs May
After yesterday’s historic negotiations between EU leaders here in Brussels – while Theresa May was out of the room – here is what we now know about Brexit. We are not leaving the EU on 29 March 2019, the Brexit day that was supposedly set in stone. We may yet leave on 22 May this