Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Eight reasons why I know I’m a Conservative

‘Why don’t you just join the Liberal Democrats?’ If I’ve heard that once in the past couple of years I’ve heard it a hundred times. In online posts beneath my Times column, in public debates or private conversations, the question is sometimes a genuinely puzzled enquiry but more often an implied: ‘What the hell are you doing posing as a Tory?’ It’s all about Brexit, of course: the questioner’s assumption being that, strip from a Conservative the ambition that Britain should leave the European Union, and there remains nothing important to distinguish him or her from a Liberal Democrat.

Toby Young

Abolish private schools? Bring it on!

I cannot recall a week in which Britain’s private schools have received better PR. The Labour party has pledged to scrap them because of the huge advantages they confer on their pupils — including ‘lifelong networks for the powerful’, according to Owen Jones. Presumably that’s a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who, thanks to his private school background, has risen to the top of the Labour party in spite of getting two Es at A-level. Laura Parker, the national coordinator for Momentum, welcomed Labour’s new policy on the grounds that ‘every child deserves a world-class education, not only those who are able to pay for it’. In other words, only private schools are able to provide a ‘world-class education’.

Peter Jones

Would the Athenians have held a second referendum?

The Athenians invented the referendum: after debate in the citizens’ assembly, they voted through all political decisions by a show of hands. They could also demand a revote, as happened on a famous occasion in 427 bc, after Athens put down the revolt of the city-state of Mytilene. Does this justify the proposed second Brexit referendum? The Athenian assembly, angered by the revolt, initially voted to execute all adult males and sell the women and children into slavery. A ship was sent to see to it. But next day, as the contemporary historian Thucydides reported, ‘the people began to think how excessively savage it was to destroy everyone, not just the guilty’. So they demanded a revote.

Robert Hardman

Robert Hardman: My private encounter with David Cameron and the Queen

David Cameron’s revelation that he sought ‘a raising of the eyebrow’ from the Queen during the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign has caused conniptions at the Palace. But it has also eclipsed the royal record of the prime minister who did more to reform the monarchy than any of the Queen’s 14 (and counting) British PMs during this reign — Churchill included. It was Mr Cameron and his chancellor who tore up the 250-year-old Civil List, the moth-eaten system for funding the monarchy, and devised an annual grant pegged to Crown Estate revenues. It was also Mr Cameron who rewrote the laws of succession. Since 1979, there had been 13 failed parliamentary attempts to change a system which enshrined male primogeniture and a ban on marrying Catholics.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce

Has the Supreme Court handed Boris Johnson a Brexit escape route?

The Supreme Court's judgement is the latest constitutional perversion after the Benn act. But ironically it may assist the Government in achieving its objective of Britain leaving the EU by 31 October, without having to seek an extension to the Article 50 process. In paragraph 34, the Supreme Court states that its 'proper function' under our constitution is to give effect to the separation of powers (which justifies court intervention in relation to prorogation). Then, in what appears to be an innocuous sentence in paragraph 55, it says that it is to be “remember[ed] always that the actual task of governing is for the executive and not for Parliament or the courts.” Yet the Benn Act manifestly contradicts this principle.

James Forsyth

The Tory party depends on winning over Leave-voting Labour seats

A Prime Minister held in No. 10 against his will. The very notion seems absurd, but this is essentially what is happening right now. Boris Johnson wants a general election, a chance to see whether the public agree with him or parliament on the sanctity of the 31 October deadline for leaving the European Union. The House of Commons won’t give him one. Instead it keeps him in office while the opposition condemn him as unfit to be there. In more normal times, the Supreme Court finding unanimously that the prime minister acted unlawfully in the advice he gave the Queen would lead to either a prime ministerial resignation or a motion of no confidence. But Johnson has no intention of resigning and despite parliament’s return, a motion of no confidence has not been tabled.

Steerpike

Valerie Vaz demands Geoffrey Cox apologise for calling MPs ‘turkeys’

There is no love lost between MPs in the Commons today following last night's fractious debate. But has one Labour MP gone a little too far in calling for her opposite number to say sorry? Shadow Commons leader Valerie Vaz took to her feet this afternoon to ask Geoffrey Cox to ‘come to the House to apologise’. The reason? For ‘calling us turkeys’, Vaz told the Commons. Mr S. remembers hearing worse in the school playground...

Brendan O’Neill

Brexit voters do feel betrayed. So why can’t Boris say so?

Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and making life hell for politicians, they claimed. Their ostentatious offence-taking would be a tad more convincing if they had ever said anything about the bile heaped on Brexit voters these past three years. Where were these people when it became positively vogue to refer to lower middle-class Brexit blokes as ‘gammon’?

Isabel Hardman

Has Boris Johnson ruined his chances of passing a Brexit deal?

Boris Johnson’s behaviour in the Commons last night was clearly part of his strategy to set up a ‘people vs parliament' narrative ahead of an election. We can debate the rights and wrongs of telling MPs that the best way to honour Jo Cox would be to get Brexit done, but there are also political implications of this. The Prime Minister’s team has, over the past few weeks, been making contact with Labour MPs to try to persuade them of the merits of supporting a Brexit deal should one come before the Commons. Many of them have been sympathetic: they regret not supporting Theresa May’s deal and are fearful of a no-deal exit. Tories involved in this operation have been careful to mollify and woo the Labourites they’re talking to.

Douglas Murray

MPs and the outrage game

It was never clear what this Parliament was going to do if it was no longer prorogued. For three years the UK Parliament has been unable to act on the 2016 referendum result. It was never clear what they were hoping to achieve if they got an extra three days, weeks or months. But the Parliament that reassembled yesterday managed to live down to even what low expectations there might have been. The Members appear to have decided, as is the way in modern British politics, to win by playing games of language and offence taking. The signs were clear when the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, at one stage referred to a question as being like a ‘When did you stop beating your wife’ question. Emma Hardy, an MP for Hull, swiftly contrived to squeeze some offence out of that.

Katy Balls

The torture chamber: how opposition MPs plan to humiliate Boris

When Jeremy Corbyn declared at Labour conference that his party would only allow an election once no deal had been taken off the table, MPs began to wonder if it could be put off until the new year. The Prime Minister’s tormentors can’t agree when exactly they would like to go to the country, but all agree that there are plenty of ways to torture Boris Johnson. It’s as good a way as any to pass the time. The Tories no longer have a working majority, so these opposition MPs — aided by activist Speaker John Bercow — now hold the power. What will they do? Well, the Conservatives are meant to be gathering in Manchester this weekend for their annual meeting. However, opposition MPs plan to vote against any conference recess.

Rory Sutherland

Why business is perfectly relaxed about Brexit

It’s difficult to go into the office nowadays, since most of my colleagues are so distraught by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit that they rarely speak. The finance department have painted European flags on their faces for solace, and spend the day staring blankly out of the window sobbing over a tear-stained picture of Guy Verhofstadt. Except, um, no. None of this has happened. In fact, most businesses seem weirdly calm in contemplation of a no-deal Brexit. I have met people from multinationals who are sanguine about Brexit, and those who are worried, but few get emotional about the subject as, say, academics, politicians or journalists do. Brexit has all along been a political problem, not a commercial one.

Fraser Nelson

‘Cameron was a bloody good prime minister’: Michael Gove interviewed

Michael Gove stands in front of an empty throne in the magnificent Cabinet Office room. George III was the last monarch to use it and there it has stayed, beneath his portrait. For a second, it looks like Gove is about to sit in it and grant us an audience, but he’s only leaning over to show off the royal crest. At the other end of the room stands a large television which, a few hours before we meet, was used by Gove and other ministers to watch Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling. From the madness of King George III, to the humiliation of Boris Johnson. As the minister in charge of no-deal planning, it’s Michael Gove’s job to tell everyone that — in spite of everything — Britain really is leaving the European Union on 31 October.

Paul Embery

Paul Embery: Labour is too much Hampstead, not enough Hartlepool

Arrived in Remain-on-sea (also known as Brighton) for Labour party conference. As an old-fashioned trade unionist hailing from a working-class heartland who supports Brexit, opposes mass immigration and doesn’t believe someone with a penis can be a woman, I feel about as welcome as a hedgehog at a nudist colony. The conference centre and fringe mills with the usual throng of delegates and activists. Many are unquestionably decent people fighting for a better world. But it is largely an army of the woke, liberal middle-classes and young toytown revolutionaries — as though the social services department at Camden council and the Labour club at the University of Sussex have arranged a joint charabanc trip to the coast.

Martin Vander Weyer

At least Thomas Cook’s fall allows ministers to look in control

It’s not obvious that the state has a moral obligation to repatriate holidaymakers whenever a tour operator goes bust, as Thomas Cook did on Sunday night. Being briefly stranded in a sangria-fuelled resort is not like being left behind in a war zone, after all. But when large numbers of tourists are involved such situations will swiftly become consular crises if government does nothing to help. So there’s pragmatic reason for ministers to act — as well as political motives that might have been scripted by Armando Iannucci for The Thick of It. Here’s the scenario: a government in chaos under a prime minister who’s all over the Sunday papers for his ‘association’ with a blonde who is neither his wife nor his official mistress. Then: bingo!

Charles Moore

For millennials, pre-Thatcher Britain must seem another — quite mystifying — country

Lymeswold; Hi-de-Hi!; nuclear-free zones; Walkmans; the Metro; Red Robbo; the SDP; Michael Foot’s Cenotaph donkey-jacket; Protest and Survive; Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins; Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett; hunger strikes; Red Ken and Fare’s Fair; ‘On your bike’; Lady Diana; ‘hog-whimpering drunk’; Chariots of Fire; Beefy Botham; ‘The lady’s not for turning’; the Peterborough Effect; Spectrum computers; ‘Gotcha!’; ‘We are not Britain. We are the BBC.’ Councillor Jeremy Corbyn. Merely to repeat these names and phrases, all drawn from this, the fifth in Dominic Sandbrook’s great chronicle of Britain since the 1950s, is to re-enter the period.

Wednesday

Andrew Willshire

Should the Scottish Tories join forces with the Lib Dems?

Scottish politics is stuck. As with Brexit across the wider United Kingdom, the 2014 independence referendum has permanently shifted attitudes of the majority of the population into Yes/No camps, with little room for compromise. The SNP government stumbles from one crisis of service delivery to another yet continues to consistently poll around 40 per cent. In first-past-the-post Westminster elections, this is sufficient to return a clear majority of MPs, and probably to still be returned as the largest party in the Scottish Parliament in the scheduled 2021 election. The problem for Scotland is that the SNP believe this to be a mandate to speak “for Scotland” in broader constitutional matters, like Brexit. Fair enough, you might say.

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson has shown a worrying lack of emotional intelligence

The House of Commons has just turned very ugly indeed, after Boris Johnson dismissed a Labour MP who was complaining about the abuse and threats she and other colleagues are receiving as 'humbug'. Paula Sherriff – who has had a particularly sustained campaign of abuse against her, including swastikas being left at her office – made an angry appeal to the Prime Minister to consider his language, and referred to the murder of her colleague Jo Cox as she did.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn clash spectacularly in the Commons

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have just clashed spectacularly in the House of Commons. Boris Johnson repeatedly goaded Jeremy Corbyn over his refusal to go for an election now.  This was not a Prime Minister acting like one who had been chastened by the Supreme Court’s decision, but one determined to set himself up as the man determined to deliver Brexit against a parliament that was trying to stop him. One of the most striking features of his speech was how frequently he declared that the public could tell what was really going on, that MPs were trying to block Brexit. In response, Jeremy Corbyn was not at his best. He failed to forensically examine the government’s position.

Robert Peston

Why Boris Johnson should request a Brexit delay from the EU

Boris Johnson wants a general election now. Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon both say they want an election but not till after they are sure that the provisions of the Benn Act have been effective and the UK is NOT leaving the EU without a deal on October 31. As far as I can see the only way for Johnson to break the impasse is for him to do precisely the opposite of what he has promised. He should request a Brexit delay from the EU – and for the explicit purpose of fighting an election to determine whether or not the British people would give him a mandate for a no-deal Brexit.