Brexit

The European Union does not want ‘no-deal’. Neither do the majority of people or politicians in the UK. Most of us recognise that to leave without a deal would be potentially damaging to both the UK and the EU, a risk to be avoided. But unless Brexit is stopped altogether the only way to prevent ‘no deal’ is to agree a deal. The date of the UK’s departure may now be delayed, but even a short delay would be controversial enough. And delay will only postpone the choice which, sooner or later, must be made. In one sense a deal is tantalisingly close to being agreed. Despite initially rejecting the Withdrawal

  It is playing out just as Olly Robbins – the civil servant negotiating Brexit for the PM – told his mates it would in that Brussels bar, as overheard by my ITV colleague Angus Walker. Because the PM has just said that she will not put a reworked Brexit deal to MPs for a vote till 12 March. Well actually she said “we will ensure that happens by 12 March” – which probably means on 12 March. And that in turn means MPs will face what may be their last chance to decide whether the UK leaves the EU with a deal desperately close to the wire, 17 days

Brexit is back in the Commons next week. As I write in The Sun this morning, two of the big questions are: what will Eurosceptic Tories accept in terms of changes to the backstop and will the Cooper amendment pass. A document circulating among Tory Eurosceptics sets out what MPs should and shouldn’t regard as a meaningful change to the backstop. It warns that assurances from the EU Council would be ‘worthless’ and that changes to the political declaration would be ‘not legally binding’. It says that an interpretative instrument would have, ‘Some legal value’ but ‘would be a face-saver that would be legally pretty meaningless.’ Interestingly, though, it suggests

It’s Andrew Adonis’s birthday and how better for him to mark the occasion than with a tweet about Brexit? Adonis, who has busied himself as chief cheerleader for the campaign to stop Brexit, took to Twitter today to deliver his verdict on how he thought momentum towards a second referendum had grown beyond all doubt: But Mr S. isn’t convinced that the example he used really helped advance his cause. In the 2016 referendum, Islington was one of the top five strongholds for Remain in the entire country, with 75.2 per cent of voters opting for Britain to stay put in the EU. It seems that in the years since,

The three Conservative defectors to the Independent Group gave a notably upbeat press conference this lunchtime. It was quite a contrast to the sorrowful tone struck by the seven Labour MPs who announced they were leaving on Monday. Heidi Allen claimed that she was ‘so excited and in a way that I haven’t felt since I was first elected’. She also cracked jokes about the three amigos as she opened the event.  It has never been fully clear why Allen joined the Conservative party over any other, but Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston both argued that the organisation had been transformed in the years since they were first elected. Like

The first thing to note is that it’s not about policy. The not-so secret seven MPs who left the Labour party this morning have not changed their policy preferences. They have not become Tories. Nor have they even become liberals. They could, with little difficulty, endorse much of the Labour party’s 2017 manifesto without compromising themselves in the slightest.  Because this break, this rebellion, this journey into exile, is not about policy. It is about character and values and so many of the other things the Labour party believes it holds dear to the extent it often behaves as though it thinks it owns a monopoly on these things. And