Eu

Boris Johnson has written to European Council president Donald Tusk, setting out key aspects of his government’s approach to Brexit. The four-page letter has a number of positive points but also some worrying ones. The good bits: The letter condemns the Irish backstop as undemocratic and inconsistent with both UK sovereignty and the Good Friday Agreement. It also rightly notes that the backstop would lock the UK into a customs union with the EU indefinitely with no means of escape. The letter also states that the UK government cannot continue to endorse the commitment its predecessor made in the Joint Report of December 2017 to ‘full alignment’ with wide areas of

One thing on which Remainers and Brexiteers can agree is that Brexit delayed is Brexit denied. The government continues to proclaim that the UK will leave the EU on 31 October with or without a deal. But No. 10 is acutely sensitive to the possibility of a parliamentary manoeuvre designed to compel the executive, through legislation, to seek a further extension of Article 50 to delay Brexit yet again. But Boris Johnson should keep calm about this prospect, for an unlikely saviour – the president of France, Emmanuel Macron – could come to his rescue. Whatever Brexit extension legislation Parliament might push through, any further extension of Article 50 requires unanimous

Italy is preparing to go back to the polls and this time Matteo Salvini looks set to return as the undisputed king of Italian politics. His Lega party (formerly the Northern League) has split with its coalition partner, the Five Star movement. For Salvini, the appeal of a general election is obvious: Five Star’s popularity has slumped during the 14-month government, but Lega’s has soared. It now boasts of being the biggest party not only in the north of Italy but — previously unimaginably — in the south. So Salvini can now ditch his coalition partner and seek his own majority. If he succeeds, this will cause fresh headaches for

In the run-up to the referendum, a common argument against Brexit went like this:  “We should not leave the EU, because if we try, the EU will be capricious and irrational, it will not prioritise the welfare of its people, it will instead punish us, we must be afraid of that wrath, forget any merit, we must be prudent”. A similar argument is often discussed at length by Sir Ivan Rogers, and repeatedly published in The Spectator. It is both right and wrong. The people who believe it are not ‘Remoaners’, as some might claim: they are patriots. But I disagree. And for me, this argument is why I voted to

The local election results showed that both main parties are paying a price for the Brexit impasse. This, as I say in The Sun this morning, means that the cross-party talks have a better chance of succeeding than they did. Those in the talks are more optimistic than they have been about getting some kind of agreement, if not a full-blown deal. But they know that things could change very quickly. I understand that the compromise being drawn up goes as follows. The UK would initially enter into a ‘comprehensive customs arrangement’ with the European Union. This would be very similar to a customs union. But the two parties would

The European Union’s official goal — an ever-closer union of people — remains its single most attractive feature. Our continent is marked by its diversity: nowhere can you find a greater range of languages, histories and cultures. Closer co-operation is within everyone’s interests, and the EU has done much to facilitating this. Its mistake was a lack of respect for the democratic traditions of its member states, and when it sought to impose a fixed set of rules over the most culturally and economically diverse club of nations it became a source of instability in Europe. The rise of populist parties in Europe is the most visible sign of the over-reach.

Pretty much everyone I meet says they want all the Brexit uncertainty to end, one way or another. But that is now impossible: even agreement – which seems remote – on some version of the PM’s deal to take us out of the EU would only be a beginning of a sort, not an end, with so much left to decide on what kind of future relationship we need and deserve with the EU. And if there is no backing from MPs for the Withdrawal Agreement that is the divorce from the EU, then we are into a series of choices whose consequences would be to lead to various forms

Management books often repeat the dictum: ‘If there’s one thing worse than making mistakes, it’s not learning from them.’ So let’s apply that smug little idea to Brexit. Before I start, a couple of housekeeping points. I voted Remain, but believe we must leave the EU and honour the referendum result. Second, as a former Brexit minister, writing this is a form of therapy for me. Failure no. 1 — from which many other failures flow — was a lack of honesty. Brexit is the biggest challenge we’ve faced since 1939. It’s complex, existential and will take years. It demands a sense of national endeavour, of ‘let us go forward together’.

After weeks of speculation, Michel Barnier has finally revealed the concession Brussels is willing to grant Theresa May on the backstop. The only problem is one could argue it’s not actually a concession. Instead, it’s the Northern Ireland-only backstop the UK negotiating team previously vetoed. This afternoon the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator told ambassadors the EU is willing to give Britain a unilateral exit from the UK-wide parts of the backstop plan for Northern Ireland. He has since taken to social media to set out exactly what the EU is offering: 4/5 EU commits to give UK the option to exit the Single Customs Territory unilaterally, while the other elements of the

What can the EU do to help the Britons out of their Brexit quagmire? Until very recently, the answer would have been ‘little, if anything’. There is a deal on the table, which Theresa May herself pronounced to be non-negotiable. Well, parliament directed her — and by implication, the EU — to think again and to reconsider the vexed question of the Irish backstop. Does anybody on either side of the channel really want to wreck the future relationship between the UK and the EU over the unsolved issue of the Irish border, as well as risk creating renewed enmity along it? God forbid. The EU’s reluctance to come forward