Brexit

Even David Davis’s loudest critics would concede one thing about the Brexit secretary: he is nothing if not breezily confident. His performance on the media rounds this morning was no exception; and his message following Theresa May’s now-famously frosty Downing Street dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker could not have been clearer: keep calm and carry on – there’s nothing to worry about. Davis dismissed talk in the papers this morning that Theresa May will be sidelined by other EU leaders when thrashing out the terms of the Brexit deal. Instead, the Brexit secretary said that the PM will be front and centre of talks. Davis was also quick to dismiss discussion

Jean-Claude Juncker: what a nasty piece of work. There aren’t many politicians I’d say that about. Even most of those I disagree with strike me as being pretty decent people. Theresa May might be a petty authoritarian, but she isn’t sinister. Jeremy Corbyn is wrong about everything, and stuck politically and sartorially in 1983, but he seems a nice enough guy. But Juncker — it is still rare that such a noxious character, such a scheming operator, such an arrogant arse, such a jumped-up, poundshop Machiavelli, darkens the corridors of politics. He’s the worst. All of Juncker’s awful traits were on display at the weekend, in the spat over his

With Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen through to the final in France, people of a conservative disposition might feel themselves spoilt for choice. You can have either the believer in free markets and open societies or the upholder of sovereignty and national identity. In both cases, the left doesn’t get a look-in. But what if it isn’t like that at all? What if Macron, far from opposing the big state, is just a more technocratic version of the usual dirigiste from ENA? What if Le Pen, far from wanting a nation’s genius expressed in its vigorous parliamentary democracy, is just a spokesman for joyless resentment, looking for handouts for

Is Keir Starmer Labour’s great hope? That’s what some longing for the day that Jeremy Corbyn calls it a day have said. The shadow Brexit secretary was centre stage yesterday as he spelled out the party’s plan for leaving the EU. But for those pinning their hopes on Starmer, today’s newspaper editorials make miserable reading. Labour’s plan for Brexit ‘is a joke’, says the Sun, which blasts the shadow Brexit secretary for his ‘waffle and wishful thinking’ yesterday. The paper says that Starmer’s argument that we should return to the negotiating table in Brussels if MPs reject the Brexit deal would give the ‘EU licence to play hardball for years’. Starmer

Theresa May is playing it safe during this election cycle and doing her best to leave the blunders to Labour. With the likes of Dawn Butler touring the airwaves, it’s a strategy that appears to be working wonders for the Prime Minister. But even a supposedly safe pair of hands like May isn’t immune to making a mistake. On a campaign trip to Wales today, the PM has been attempting to convince voters to back the Tories ahead of the snap general election. She’s also been talking up Britain’s prospects after Brexit. All was going well. Or at least it was until May appeared to suggest that her plan for

Exaggeration is the political pundits’ stock in trade: nobody built a loyal readership on equivocation. But Matthew Parris’ recent commentary about the Conservative Party’s direction under Theresa May borders on the hysterical. A few weeks ago he used his Times column to hyperventilate about a Conservative Party ‘paralysed in the headlights of a dangerous surge of reckless populism and in thrall to its own right wing’. Last Saturday, he returned to the theme and wrote of a ‘deep, deep shift under way in our party…leaving anyone once attracted to the strong strand of tolerance and moderation we found powerful in the Conservative tradition feeling cowed, discouraged’. You would have thought

Brexit is often said to be driven by English nationalism. In recent decades England has certainly become a less shy country, made aware of itself thanks to the growth of Scottish and Welsh national consciousness and the banal fact that we now talk about the English NHS, English schools, and so on, in a way that we never used to prior to devolution. Yet on today’s English national day I saw not a single flag of St George flying on the train journey from London to Cambridge and back (travelling through Essex, supposedly one of the heartlands of English nationalism). And when I opened my Sunday papers I found no

Thirty billion? Fifty billion? Eighty billion, and we have to cover the cost of Jean-Claude Juncker’s martinis for the next decades, plus pick up the dry cleaning for every member of the European Parliament. The debate over Britain’s final exit bill for leaving the EU looks set to be among the most acrimonious issues as we negotiate our departure. But hold on. The first-class brains over in Brussels have made a slip. They are demanding that all the bills be settled in euros, rather than pounds. And yet they seem to have forgotten that their currency remains uniquely vulnerable to a catastrophic collapse. In fact, Philip Hammond should take that

We are coming to the end of the first week of an election campaign that few were expecting when this week began. The parties are drawing their battle lines: the Tories are warning of a happy Vladimir Putin and a ‘coalition of chaos’ involving the SNP, Labour and the Lib Dems, while Labour is making this an anti-establishment election (though what precisely the Establishment is up to and which naughty coffee chains it involves remains vague, even for the party’s MPs promoting that message on the airwaves). The Lib Dems, meanwhile, had long worked out their pitch as the anti-Brexit party. Of course, not all Labour MPs are talking about