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‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady is pretty impregnable. Even the keys to her vaults are more than a foot long (the locks also now incorporate voice-activated software). Until 1973 the building was guarded at night by soldiers from the Brigade
When I first visited Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was struck by a set of black-and-white posters in the shopping concourse advertising the Co-op Bank’s ethical banking stance: essentially, no lending to arms, tobacco, gambling or oil companies, or to regimes that disrespected human rights. A cynic might have argued that it was
Earlier this week, Trump met Putin. But beneath the outcry against Trump’s press conference, a peace plan for Syria was slipped out. Is America withdrawing its troops and leaving Assad in place? We also ask – should we push back the March 2019 deadline for Brexit negotiations? And last, why is communism still chic? While
In this week’s Spectator Books, I’m talking to a man who has spent more time on Air Force One than even Piers Morgan: President Obama’s former foreign policy speechwriter and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, author of new memoir The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House. What is it really like
As Dominic Raab headed to Brussels for his first meeting with Michel Barnier since his appointment as Brexit Secretary, all eyes were on the drama unfolding in Westminster. Theresa May’s Chief Whip Julian Smith found himself in hot water over a pairing arrangement that went wrong in this week’s crunch customs union vote. On Tuesday,
Theresa May’s Brexit plan is going down badly and the EU is telling members states to step up preparations for ‘no deal’. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Brexit isn’t going entirely to plan. But this mess didn’t stop the Prime Minister’s Brexit guru Olly Robbins getting a bonus last year. Robbins was rewarded with a payment
The EU is afraid of us, but we’ve got a prime minister who is afraid of the EU. The declaration by the European Commission that member states should prepare for ‘no deal’ is a powerful reminder that EU oligarchs are petrified that we will make a success of independence and expose the flaws in their
Although the government managed to win the crunch customs union vote this week, the victory was short-lived thanks to a row over the fact Brandon Lewis voted despite being on a pairing arrangement with Lib Dem Jo Swinson – who missed the vote after recently giving birth. Today the Times reports that despite claims from the
According to the Times, a new academic study finds that nations become richer when they become more secular. It contests the traditional idea that a nation gets rich, probably with the help of Protestantism, and then loses interest in religion. Instead, a nation first becomes secular, then becomes rich. There might be some truth in
As Love Island enters its final fortnight and the ink dries on the annual moralising thinkpieces, decrying a younger generation happy to flaunt their bronzed bodies and sex lives before the viewing public, a new survey reminds us of the more depressing reality: that young people are less debauched than ever. According to the British
Every four years, when the World Cup ends, I make a promise to follow the players I’ve come to know, or the ones I’d forgotten about for four years, until the next tournament; but I never do. It’s not that following the Premier League, the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, or Ligue 1 is difficult, even
To conclude that relations between the United States and the Europeans are in quite a chaotic and unpredictable state is like saying German Chancellor Angela Merkel misses the good old days of Barack Obama and John Kerry. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need repeating. There are a whole slew of foreign policy and economic
Boris Johnson – an apology. His speech today was a very fine one and correct in each and every aspect. A week back, I took a shot at Johnson for what seemed to me the self-serving nature of his political manoeuvrings. They may still be intrinsically self-serving, I suppose. But it is nonetheless laudable that
Boris Johnson’s resignation speech wasn’t the Geoffrey Howe moment some had built it up to be. But the former Foreign Secretary’s critique of Theresa May’s Brexit policy certainly gave Tory MPs food for thought. Johnson made clear he thought the policy amounted to Brexit in name only – and pushed for a change of course.
There is something horrible and unnatural about seeing Theresa May in trouble. Her aloof and grandmotherly face becomes a canvas on which all kinds of dreadful emotions are drawn. It’s almost too much to watch, really, it’s like seeing Miss Marple on a shoplifting charge. She arrived early at PMQs with a gravestone pallor. It
Snap. It was a long time coming but it was always coming. Jeremy Corbyn, who has traded on an image of saintly anti-racism for his entire career, was finally confronted by someone who sees through it. Yesterday, Labour’s national executive committee adopted a new policy that rejected the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of
Boris Johnson did not launch a full-on attack on Theresa May in his resignation speech. But he was brutally critical of the Chequers plan, saying that in crucial respects it was ‘Brexit in name only’. He complained that since the Lancaster House speech ‘a fog of self-doubt has descended’ and that the UK never even
So this is what a principled politician looks like. They can be hard to spot these days, but last night, in parliament, we saw four of them in action. Kate Hoey, Frank Field, John Mann and Graham Stringer. Four Labour MPs who, despite knowing they would get flak from both Corbynistas and centrists, despite knowing
Thank you Mr Speaker for granting me the opportunity to pay tribute to the men and women of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who have done an outstanding job over the last two years, and I am very proud that we have rallied the world against Russia’s barbaric use of chemical weapons with an unprecedented
‘I used to worry that something bad would happen, now I worry that something catastrophic will happen.’ This is how a Cabinet minister sums up the new political crisis facing the Conservative party – and soon the country. Last night one such catastrophe was narrowly avoided. The government managed to defeat the Tory rebel amendment
It is said that the story of diamond mining in South Africa began with someone who inadvertently kicked a large stone in the dusty ground, only to discover that said stone was in fact a huge diamond. This started a rush of speculators hoping to make a fast buck. For many of today’s speculators, blockchain
The government suffered a defeat in the Commons this evening. The good news for Theresa May is that it wasn’t the one No 10 were so worried about. Although Philip Lee’s amendment for European medicines regulatory network partnership succeeded, the Tory rebel amendment calling for the government to join a customs union if it does
There are moments that cut through the din of braggadocio, vindictive utopianism and arrant stupidity surrounding Brexit. Anna Soubry has provided one in an impertinence during yesterday’s debate on the cross-border trade bill. She let into Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group (ERG) for coercing ministers to abandon much of the substance of the
Last week, the left-wing blogger Ash Sarkar told Piers Morgan she was ‘literally a communist’ after the pair got into a heated debate over her decision to protest Donald Trump’s visit to the UK when she hadn’t done the same for Barack Obama. Since then, the clip has gone viral and Sarkar – who works
Oh dear. As No 10 attempt to stop more Commons rebellions today on the customs bill, relations between Tory Remain rebels and Tory Brexiteers have hit an all-time low – and that’s saying something. Appearing on the Daily Politics, Nadine Dorries launched a broadside against Anna Soubry over her comments in the Chamber on Monday
Theresa May’s government may be on the verge of collapse but it’s still business as usual on the Westminster summer party scene. At think tank Freer’s summer party at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Liz Truss introduced the new Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab – finding time to send him up after he was outed for
Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial
Why do the British turn to the Germans in their moments of European trouble? It never works. When Jacques Delors conceived his single currency plans, Mrs Thatcher over-relied on Karl Otto Pöhl at the Bundesbank to squash them. Dr Pöhl preferred to side with Helmut Kohl. When Britain was struggling to stay in the ERM
I’ve just returned home from seeing Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris on stage at the O2 Arena in London before a crowd of 8,000 people. And I have to say, it was a pretty good show. Once you’re past the bizarreness of seeing three top-flight intellectuals calmly occupying the same stage normally strutted
If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was
When Theresa May tried to get her Cabinet to agree on a unified Brexit position at Chequers earlier this month, the hope was that this would mark a new chapter of party unity that would allow the Prime Minister to get on with delivering Brexit. Yet a week or so later, the Conservative party is
Both the Brexit and and Foreign Secretaries have resigned. The Chequers agreement, if that is the right word, looks about as enduring as the latest relationship on Love Island. The Prime Minister is staggering so uncertainly from one option to another that even Donald Trump’s advice over the weekend seemed almost sane. The UK’s strategy
Andrea Jenkyns is regarded by many Tory MPs as a Brexit champion – after the Conservative MP for Morley pre-emptively quit last month as a PPS to fight for Brexit. Since then Jenkyns has become one of the loudest voices calling for a new tack from No 10 in the negotiations. However, Mr S can’t