Brexit

The female leader of a prominent European country fails to win a majority in an election and then struggles to form a coalition. Meanwhile, her government limps from crisis to crisis and finally negotiations break down, leading to another general election just weeks later. Not Theresa May, obviously, because she had little difficulty in forming a workable coalition with the DUP. But it is the situation in Germany where today Angela Merkel said that she has given up on trying to create a workable government with the Free Democratic Party, the Christian Social Union and the Greens. There will now almost inevitably have to be another general election, with Angela

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP for Tonbridge sometimes called a rising star, finds himself making front page news today as a ‘Brexit mutineer’. That strikes me as a novel term for a man who spent several years in the British Army fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but such are the terms of British political debate these days, I suppose. The MP hasn’t responded to that headline, but used a question at PMQs to talk about something else, which I think is worth a little more attention than the latest round of name-calling over Brexit. Given that Britain’s deficit is well down from crisis levels, and given that gilt auctions are oversubscribed,

‘Take up our quarrel with the foe’, intones John McCrae’s famous In Flanders Fields. ‘To you from failing hands we throw, the torch’. For the millions of us marking Remembrance Sunday today, that quarrel is a solemn reminder of past sacrifice. It refers, somewhat euphemistically, to one of the bloodiest, most tragic conflicts in history. For some activists in and around the European Union, however, a more contemporary quarrel comes to mind. Obsessed with what they perceive as the dark foreboding forces of Brexit, they can’t help raising aloft the torch of EU supranationalism. The most egregious example being a piece in The Independent with the outrageous clickbait headline ‘If you

The latest single of Bertrand Cantat, a French pop singer who murdered his girlfriend and who was present in the house where his ex-wife killed herself, is being heavily played on French pop music stations. This would be of little interest to anyone who isn’t following French pop music or observing the tolerance of the French for men who abuse women, except that his new hit song is about us. L’Angleterre (England) is vaguely an ode to a refugee camped in the jungle on the French side of the Channel, trying to get to England. Mr Cantat advises that this is not a good idea. The times are changing but

Given all the rows in Westminster at the moment, it’s easy to forget that there are Brexit negotiations going on. But those involved in the talks from the EU’s side haven’t, and neither have they neglected to notice that Theresa May’s government is looking remarkably flimsy. Hence Michel Barnier’s warning today that there are only two weeks in which to make sufficient progress on the very important questions of the Brexit divorce bill, the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland and citizens’ rights. Barnier knows that the pressure is mounting on May at home to move on to trade talks, and that a Prime Minister as weak as her can’t