Boris johnson

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Why Boris would like Brexit to continue

After all the parliamentary drama of the past four and a half years, the final Commons phase of Brexit is passing with remarkably little drama. Boris Johnson knows his agreement will be voted through this afternoon and, following the European Research Group decision, with nearly universal Tory support. Johnson’s speech was upbeat, as he sought to declare the deal a triumph. He pointed to the exclusion of any role for the European Court of Justice, the speed with which the deal had been done and the fact it was zero tariff, zero quota. In a sign of the fight to come, Johnson had to fend off multiple points of order

Nick Tyrone Nick Tyrone

Starmer is about to make a big mistake in backing Boris’s deal

Keir Starmer has announced he is whipping his Labour MPs to vote for Boris’s Brexit deal in the House of Commons today. There are two likely reasons behind this decision: firstly, to make himself seem like a Labour leader who is a grown up, after Corbyn’s teenaged politics; secondly, to demonstrate that Labour accepts Brexit in order that it may win back Leave voters in red wall seats at the next general election. But there is a big problem with this calculation. While all of Starmer’s Brexit options are difficult ones, he may be about to enact the worst of the lot. A no-deal situation would have allowed Keir Starmer

Saturday

Petronella Wyatt

Boris Johnson’s surprising new love of animals

I am amused to learn that Carrie Symonds interrupts cabinet meetings to complain about newspaper stories featuring her dog Dilyn. I was surprised that Boris agreed to a rescue dog in Downing Street. In all the years I have known him, he has never seemed very fond of animals; at least he has always shown a rather cavalier attitude towards Mini. Mini is a gentle soul, with the milk of canine kindness bursting from every pore. The only person she has ever attacked is our current Prime Minister. One could plead this was out of self-defence. Boris had just sat on her.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Boris’s Brexit gamble faces its next challenge

This country will end the Brexit transition period with a zero tariff, zero quota deal with the EU. Four and a half years after the Brexit vote, the issue that has so convulsed British politics is settled. We are still awaiting the text of the deal. But from what both sides have said it is clear that this is a pretty full fat Brexit: Britain leaves the single market and the customs union and there’ll be no dynamic alignment with EU rules in the future. On the three key tests of money, borders and laws – it looks like the deal passes The two sides will be able to put

Boris Johnson

Full text: Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal speech

It is four and a half years since the British people voted to take back control of their money, their borders, their laws, and their waters and to leave the European Union. And earlier this year we fulfilled that promise and we left on Jan 31 with that oven-ready deal. Since that time we have been getting on with our agenda: enacting the points based immigration system that you voted for and that will come into force on Jan 1 – and doing free trade deals with 58 countries around the world and preparing the new relationship with the EU. And there have been plenty of people who have told

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

At last: we have a Brexit deal

Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen have both confirmed that we have a deal: one with zero tariffs, zero quotas. The details are not yet published, but several details are now being reported. What follows is a summary of those reports and rumours: we should soon have 2,000 pages of chapter and verse. The upshot: it’s Brexit. No single market, no free movement, no role for the European Court of Justice, no quotas, no tariffs. At least in goods: there won’t be much in the deal for the services sector (plus ça change) but more on co-operation over terrorism, security and preserving the cross-border energy market. From the looks of it, the UK has

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Is there a Brexit deal?

Tonight we are still waiting for confirmation that a Brexit deal has been done. But the noises coming out of both London and Brussels are optimistic — something would have to go wrong for there not to be a deal. However, it currently looks like there will be one more late night in Brussels before Brexit is done. The pace at which things have moved today has been surprising; I was not expecting a deal today last night. But there is now a broad expectation that an agreement will emerge tonight or tomorrow morning. The European Research Group of Tory MPs have announced that they are convening their panel of

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Macron’s no-deal delusion

The Brexit waiting continues. The negotiators are still talking but, according to one of those close to the negotiations on the UK side, things are ‘still pretty stuck.’ There is, as RTE’s Tony Connelly reports, a deadline of Christmas Eve on the EU side. But it would now be a surprise if a deal came today. If these talks end in no-deal, then Johnson could not — politically — go back and accept the same or worse terms The UK offer on fish has not unblocked things as much as hoped. Michel Barnier has described it as ‘totally unacceptable’, which even accounting for diplomatic posturing is not encouraging. There is

Monday

Nick Cohen

Why Boris Johnson can’t solve the UK’s crisis

The Brexit and Covid crises have merged into one. As of today, 21 December, France has blocked trucks from crossing the Channel as fears about a new strain of Covid — ‘the Kent virus’ to coin a phrase — sweep the continent. Perishable food was rotting, approach roads were jammed… it was as if we were living under a wartime blockade. By the time you read this, the French may have shifted from an outright ban to stringent health checks on exports and imports, but the pressure will still be on. In less than a fortnight, on 1 January, we will have the real Brexit. It will be either without

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Smarmy Starmer is not making himself popular with anyone

The verdict of the Twitter jury is in, articulated in a single, now viral tweet by broadcaster Matthew Stadlen:  ‘Keir Starmer would have been – and would be – a far better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson during this pandemic.’ It is a theme that Starmer has naturally been keen to develop, leading him to make excoriating criticisms of Boris Johnson in a press conference at the weekend. The Starmer thesis is that Johnson is so anxious to be liked that he ducks out of taking tough decisions until it is too late. The Labour leader cites examples that include the lateness of the original lockdown, an allegedly late-in-the-day decision

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Covid and Brexit are about to collide

We are back in a full-scale economic crisis. In London and the south east, the richest part of the UK and engine of the economy, normal commerce has been suspended by the imposition of Tier 4. And the decision of much of the EU and a growing number of rich countries to put the whole UK into quarantine is devastating for trade. What are the immediate priorities? Probably the most important one is basic: the creation of a facility to give rapid Covid-19 tests to all lorry drivers leaving the UK so that the transport of freight can be restarted as quickly as possible. Second, to end the cancerous uncertainty for

Friday

James Forsyth

Fishing could sink the Brexit negotiations

Throughout the Brexit talks it has been declared that the deal wouldn’t fall over fish. But that is now looking increasingly likely. The two sides remain far apart on the subject and time is running short. Fishing is not the only issue, there are still some disagreements over the Commission’s desire to exempt itself and the European Investment Bank from the subsidy control provisions of the agreement when the UK would have no such carve out. But fish is the most problematic area. Johnson is prepared to leave without a deal over the fishing issue The EU, as Michel Barnier made clear this morning, are insisting on an fisheries transition

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the year: Coronavirus, falling statues, banned Easter eggs and compulsory Scotch eggs

January Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, signed the EU withdrawal agreement, sent from Brussels by train. Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised ‘an infrastructure revolution’ in the Budget. An American drone killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander, near Baghdad airport. Iran carelessly shot down a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran, killing 176. Bush fires raged in New South Wales. Cases of acute viral pneumonia were noticed in Wuhan in central China. February Eighty-three British evacuees from Wuhan were quarantined on the Wirral. The Department of Health classified Covid-19 as a ‘serious and imminent threat’. In Hubei 68 million people were made to stay at

Taki

It’s been a tough year for socialites

New York Here we go again, the annual holiest of holies is upon us, although to this oldie last Christmas feels as though it was only yesterday. Funny how time never seemed to pass quickly during those lazy days of long ago, but now rolls off like a movie calendar showing the days, months, years flashing by. I wrote my first Christmas column for this magazine 43 years ago, sitting in my dad’s office on Albemarle Street. I remember it well because I used every cliché known to man and then some (patter of little feet… children’s noses pressed against snowy windows). The then editor, Alexander Chancellor, said nothing to

The Spectator

Ring out, wild bells: 2021 will be a year of renewal

Save for those old enough to have lived through the second world war and its immediate austere aftermath, it would be hard to remember a Christmas which felt less festive. Or a new year that brings such foreboding. In spite of the severe restraints on our lives, which have been in place for months now, it seems likely that we will see some sort of third coronavirus wave with a third lockdown also on the cards. And at the same time, Britain will be embarking on a Brexit adventure that many people still see as reckless and unwanted. Yet if we look a little beyond the immediate future, things begin

Petronella Wyatt

Petronella Wyatt: I’m not surprised Michael Gove is a lockdown fanatic

What this government needs is a good dose of the London mob, which at its height in the 18th century would express its displeasure in no uncertain terms. In those days, the political system, as I once observed to Boris when he believed in rights, was one of aristocracy tempered by rioting. The mob, whose members ran from tinkers to duchesses, acted as a curative to despotic politicians, whose carriages would be waylaid and their occupants turned upside down. The word ‘liberty’ was then chalked on their shoes. A bystander in 1770 described an apparently good-humoured riot of ‘half-naked men and women, children, chimney-sweepers, tinkers, Moors and men of letters,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Is Boris’s gay conversion therapy ban enough?

Gay conversion therapy has been heading for a ban for a few years now, with Boris Johnson repeatedly pledging to stop the ‘absolutely abhorrent’ practice. The government is working on the details of such a ban, which is not without its problems, particularly when it comes to therapy for transgender people. But it would be the first time the government has got at all involved in the world of therapy and counselling, which is not currently subject to statutory regulation. Ministers’ current position is that government regulation of the sector would not be ‘proportionate or effective’. It may well be that the current network of organisations with which counsellors and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Keir Starmer’s late criticism of Christmas easing

Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer both assumed that today was the last PMQs before Christmas, suggesting that they don’t expect Parliament to be sitting next Wednesday. Their exchanges were particularly unenlightening this week. Starmer argued that his concerns about the tier system had been justified by the fact that cases are rising in three quarters of tier 2 areas and half of tier 3. Johnson again attacked him for abstaining on the vote on the tier system. Interestingly, Starmer set himself fully against the Christmas easing calling it ‘the next big mistake’ and approvingly quoted the joint Health Service Journal / British Medical Journal editorial, which called for a ban

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris’s Heathrow runway problem returns

It looked like the courts had solved Boris Johnson’s third Heathrow runway problem when they ruled it illegal in February because of the actions the government is committed to on climate change. But this morning, the Supreme Court has overturned the Court of Appeals’ decision. This means that Heathrow can now seek planning permission for a third runway. There’s a long way from seeking planning permission to the bulldozers, which Johnson has promised to lie down in front of, moving in. There will undoubtedly be more legal challenges and court cases before this is finally resolved one way or the other; the government first backed a third runway at Heathrow

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Four-nations Christmas Covid truce hangs in balance

It’s become a regular refrain to hear that Brexit talks have been extended. Now the same applies to negotiations over the Christmas Covid rule relaxation. After various scientific advisers warned the UK government against going ahead with its planned five day relaxation of the rules (which would see three household permitted to gather together), representatives for the four nations discussed the policy on a call this evening. The result? No decision as of yet. As things stand, there has been no agreed change to the rules. Instead one source on the call tells the BBC:  ‘There was broad recognition commitment has been made to people and they will expect us to