Brexit

It’s not been a great week for the People’s Vote campaign with several reports of internal rows and splits within the group. Today their attempts to bring about a second referendum hit another stumbling block. A faction of ‘People’s Vote’ backing MPs – including Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston and Labour’s Chuka Umunna – announced they are pulling their amendment calling for a second vote. Had they pressed on, there is a chance it would have been selected by the Speaker to be voted on next week. Announcing the decision, Wollaston said: ‘With great regret, we will not be laying [an amendment calling for a second referendum] because at this stage,

We desperately need clear and honest thinking about our choices – not just for the weeks but for the years, indeed decades, ahead. Our political debate is bedevilled by what, at the time I resigned, I termed “muddled thinking”, and by fantasies and delusions as to what our options really are in the world as it is – as opposed to several different worlds people on different sides of the debate would prefer to inhabit. These fantasies, which one would have hoped would be dissipating by now in the face of reality, are being propagated on all sides. Denialism is pretty universal. But if we are to take good decisions

On Saturday, a car bomb went off in the UK. In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to be exact. It was the latest in a long, long list of terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland, many of them carried out by men who wish to unite the island of Ireland in one state. Today, the European Commission stated, more bluntly than it ever has before, that Britain leaving the EU without a deal will mean a hard border between the EU (Ireland) and the UK (Northern Ireland). That means checkpoints and men in uniform policing the physical division of the island of Ireland. Let us, if such a thing is possible, set aside questions

The Commons has grown rather used to Theresa May giving an update on Brexit each Monday afternoon, and still more used to the Prime Minister offering precious little in the way of new information each time she does so. Today’s statement was a little different, in that May is now asking MPs for more information, rather than MPs turning on her and accusing her of not telling them anything. She laboured rather heavily on the point that Jeremy Corbyn has so far refused to attend the cross-party talks designed to work out an agreement that the Commons can stomach, introducing it early in her statement, and returning to the point

Today’s Cabinet conference call was more illuminating in terms of direction of travel than the details of what Theresa May is actually going to do. It is now clear that May’s approach is to try and put the Tory DUP alliance back together by getting something on the backstop rather than trying to find some cross party consensus. One of the reasons for this is that the Labour leadership’s reluctance to play ball makes it very hard to get the numbers for any compromise deal. I am told that David Lidington, who had been leading the cross party talks, reluctantly acknowledged this point. As one Cabinet Minister put it to

Immediately after the government’s crushing defeat on Tuesday night, a slew of Cabinet Ministers thought that it was inevitable that Theresa May would have to make some kind of concession on the customs union to get a deal through parliament. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, this option has run into two obstacles. First, Corbyn and McDonnell aren’t playing ball. Without their blessing, there is no way you could get 116 Labour MPs to vote with a Tory PM. Secondly, it has become clear that agreeing to a customs union would not only split the Tory party, lead to at least one Cabinet resignation, but would also—according

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That was the message of Boris Johnson’s speech this morning at a JCB factory in Staffordshire. He admitted this week that he regretted bottling his leadership bid in 2016. This time is his last chance to have a go at swiping the ultimate prize – the keys to Downing Street – a prize he’s coveted since he was a boy. Boris’s earliest known quotation is when, asked by his sister Rachel as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “World King.” He’s thinner and more smartly dressed than he’s been for years. That might have been influenced by the