Over the next few weeks, we can expect breathless reporting about the Brexit deal and its dynamics: the state of phytosanitary checks in the Irish Sea and the desirability of chlorinated chicken. But the real question about Brexit is about what type of country we become, once the process is complete and sovereignty has been
Home Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, played a well-nourished Banquo’s Ghost at the Conservative party conference, where Theresa May, the Prime Minister, declared that Britain after Brexit would be ‘full of promise’. She had insisted that the Chequers proposals for Brexit were the only ones possible. Mr Johnson called them ‘deranged’. Mrs May felt obliged
A weekend news report says Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s childhood has been scrutinised by colleagues ‘for clues to understanding this most paradoxical of politicians — the popular, ultra-courteous free-thinker who, by knifing Boris Johnson in the 2016 Tory leadership election, became a byword for treachery’. Gove was adopted as a baby and has never sought
At the Labour party conference, Jeremy Corbyn said that he would do whatever his party members told him to. This, apparently, is what he means by democracy. Neither the original nor the modern version bears any resemblance to it. Full-on Athenian direct democracy developed from its origins in 508 bc into a system in which
From ‘News of the week’, 5 October 1918: The Western Front is now aflame from the sea to Verdun. This week has seen the hardest fighting of the war. Marshal Foch has launched not one offensive but a whole series, in one sector after another, so that now the battle is joined along a front
What would Smith say? Sir: Adam Smith’s writings were so definitive that it is said one can find the kernel of every modern branch of economics within them. But Jesse Norman is surely wrong to imply Smith would see merit in Trump’s tariffs (‘Politics trumps trade’, 29 September). Not only did Smith, as Norman points
