Uk politics

With Boris Johnson looking a shoo-in for No. 10, his supporters are battling it out in a bid to win a top job in his Cabinet. The most coveted position is Chancellor and Sajid Javid, Liz Truss and Matt Hancock are seen as the frontrunners. This afternoon, Truss used her appearance at a Press Gallery lunch to set out her stall. Referring to her rivals, she said of Hancock that she wouldn’t ever feel ‘threatened by someone with fewer than 5,000 instagram followers’. As for Javid, when asked who was better at maths out of the two of them, Truss pointed out that she had a Further Maths A Level.

Like a priest standing before the bronze gates of a temple, the British ambassador to Washington serves as the guardian of one of the great modern myths: the idea, conceived by Winston Churchill, that a special relationship exists between the UK and the US. The impression that British ambassadors can wield disproportionate influence in Washington is a legend successive British governments have been keen to burnish – so much so that it has arguably become the central pillar of UK foreign policy since 1945. But the reality – as Donald Trump’s spectacular defenestration of Sir Kim Darroch shows – is rather different. Perhaps only one ambassador has really ever lived up

I never thought I’d become a politician but Theresa May’s failure to deliver Brexit changed my mind. As a result, I decided to stand as a Brexit party candidate and, in May, I was elected as an MEP for London. For someone with no political experience, the weeks since have been surreal. Yet the strangest moment so far came last week, when my fellow Brexit party members and I travelled to Strasbourg for the inaugural meeting of the European parliament. My experience there has convinced me that Britain is right to leave the EU. Even travelling to Strasbourg seemed slightly strange. After all, what is wrong with the perfectly good parliamentary building in Brussels? This

How damaged are UK/US relations after the Mail on Sunday published leaked diplomatic cables in which the UK’s ambassador suggested Donald Trump was inept? The answer it seems is very bad. This evening the US president took to social media to express his dissatisfaction at the leak – and the UK government. In the tweets, Trump says his team will no longer deal with ambassador Sir Kim Darroch. He says he is ‘very critical’ of Theresa May’s handling of Brexit: ‘What a mess she and her representatives have created’. He then goes on to see the bright side: ‘The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will

Project Fear is back after a seasonal break. Far from resolving anything, Theresa May’s decision to delay Brexit back in the spring simply kicked the can down the road, frustrating companies who invested scarce resources into getting ready for a 31st March departure. Damaging as the decision to delay Brexit was, the silver lining is that seven months’ on, the UK is likely to be in a much better position to cope with the no-deal fall out. You wouldn’t know if it you listened to the CBI who continue to churn out “no-deal” scare stories. Or if you read the civil service memo apparently “leaked” to the media, explaining that

With the ballot papers out, the next few days will be crucial in the Tory leadership election. As I say in The Sun this morning, it is reckoned that 60 percent of party members will have voted by Thursday. The Boris campaign are bullish. One very senior figure in the campaign is privately predicting that they will win by a more than twenty-point margin. The Hunt campaign is adamant that this isn’t right and that the contest is tightening every day. But interestingly, even several of his Cabinet supporters aren’t trying to claim that the race is close. One tells me, ‘Let’s face it, there isn’t must doubt about what

The heady drama when Britain and the EU agreed on a series of Brexit extensions earlier this year is hard to forget. But amidst the chaos, it’s worth asking: did Britain accidentally leave the EU on 1 June? A badly-drafted EU law – which also challenges the idea of EU competence – seems to suggest so. So how did this apparent blunder happen? And why has no one noticed? When Article 50 timed out on 29 March 2019, the UK and the EU agreed to extend to 12 April. When an extension is made it has to be done in both EU law and UK law. On that occasion, it was: both