Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Wednesday

Katy Balls

What Corbyn’s Brexit policy means for a general election

Jeremy Corbyn has dashed the hopes of certain members of his shadow cabinet this morning with a Guardian op-ed in which he sets out his party's Brexit position in any forthcoming general election. Rather than explicitly back remaining in the EU, Corbyn says a Labour government would pursue a softer Brexit deal with Brussels before letting the public decide between that deal and Remain in a second referendum. He goes on to say: 'We would then put that to a public vote alongside Remain. I will pledge to carry out whatever the people decide, as a Labour prime minister.' This is being read as Corbyn saying he personally would not take a side in that referendum.

Tuesday

Jo Swinson

Jo Swinson: why we must block Brexit

Jo Swinson has just delivered her first conference speech as Liberal Democrat leader. Here is her speech below. 21 years on from my first Liberal Democrat conference, I am thrilled to stand before you today as your leader. I’m delighted to see so many old friends who have kept the torch of liberalism burning bright through troubled times. And I’m excited to welcome thousands of new members to our cause, flocking to the Liberal Democrats as the clear rallying point for a movement to create an open, fair, inclusive society. Over the summer, we showed the others how it’s done. We had an energetic and positive leadership contest where many thousands of you engaged. I want to say a huge thank you to my friend Ed Davey.

Isabel Hardman

Jo Swinson is enjoying herself. But how long will it last?

Jo Swinson is quite obviously the only party leader enjoying what’s going on right now. This is, of course, partly because what’s going on for her is that she is regularly welcoming MPs from other parties into the Liberal Democrats. As she said in her speech to the party’s conference this afternoon, ‘I can’t be the only one losing count of our many newly-elected representatives’.  There are plenty of questions about some of those new MPs. Are they really Lib Dems, or are they just seeking refuge in the party because they have nowhere else to go and need funding in order to survive the next general election? Has the party welcomed any old waif and stray, regardless of their views on matters such as gay marriage?

Robert Peston

Why the Supreme Court’s Brexit case is so crucial

The opening session of the epic Supreme Court hearing into whether Boris Johnson misled the Queen and broke the law when proroguing parliament did not disappoint. Because Lord Pannick, for one of the plaintiffs Gina Miller, captured with the clinical precision of a brain surgeon quite what is at stake. Summing up, he asked the law ladies and lords to consider that if they were to conclude there is no case for the PM to answer, a future PM might well feel licensed to suspend parliament for six months or a year, as and when MPs become bothersome, rather than “just” the five weeks Johnson has chosen to shut down parliament? What is at stake, Pannick implied, is the role and power of the courts to prevent a PM choosing to become an elected dictator.

Steerpike

Caption contest: The beached Lib Dems

It's the last day of the Liberal Democrat conference today, which means that leader Jo Swinson will deliver her keynote speech to excited delegates at the seaside town of Bournemouth. Normally, political parties arrange for a photoshoot ahead of the final speech of conference, so that various MPs and bigwigs are snapped walking triumphantly into the main auditorium to a chorus of cheers from their supporters. But the Lib Dems decided to ditch tradition this morning. Eschewing the normal 'arrival' photos, the party's MPs decided instead to arrange a photoshoot of the group walking along the Bournemouth beach, with leader Jo Swinson even picking up her shoes for her stroll in the sand. Captions in the comments below...

Monday

Robert Peston

What Jean-Claude Juncker learned from Boris Johnson

I am told Jean-Claude Juncker learned just one thing from Boris Johnson on Monday in Luxembourg. In the words of one of his colleagues there was "confirmation that the UK (under Johnson) wants more of a border on the island of Ireland than the previous government". Which is the nutshell of the whole of what the PM seeks qua new deal and what the EU’s 27 leaders need to evaluate either as deft compromise or as brutal betrayal of Dublin and the Good Friday Agreement. This dispute harks back to the December 2017 joint agreement between the UK and EU which pledges to prevent the creation of "a hard border including any physical infrastructure or related checks and controls".

Steerpike

David Cameron makes life awkward for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Oh dear. Relations between Boris Johnson and Michael Gove could become a bit awkward this week after an extract from David Cameron’s memoirs published today in the Times revealed that the current PM asked Cameron whether Gove was “a bit cracked”. Johnson apparently inquired about the mental wellbeing of his now close cabinet colleague after Gove jumped ship and decided to mount his own leadership campaign following Cameron’s resignation in 2016. Cameron has not held back in targeting his former friends and colleagues in his autobiography which will be published later this week.

Steerpike

Watch: Boris Johnson booed in Luxembourg

Boris Johnson has just cancelled a press conference after being booed in Luxembourg, but was the Prime Minister set up? Luxembourg's leader Xavier Bettel took a dig at Boris Johnson as he gave a short speech next to an empty lectern. Bettel said he 'wanted to thank Boris Johnson' as he pointed into thin air: https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1173600589864820736?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw But Mr S. thinks it is hard to blame Boris Johnson for refusing to go ahead when he is likely to have been drowned out by the noise from protesters outside. The BBC's Laura Kuenssberg now reports that No.10 asked for the conference to be moved indoors so that the two leaders could be heard, only for the request to be rejected. So why weren't the podiums moved inside?

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson’s frosty reception in Luxembourg

Is Boris Johnson approaching a Brexit breakthrough? That's the question being asked among Conservative MPs after there appeared to be movement last week from the government and DUP that could help to secure a deal with the EU. Today the Prime Minister met with EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker in Luxembourg to discuss the prospect, over a lunch of pollock and risotto. On the conclusion of the meeting, a No. 10 spokesman said the pair had agreed to step up discussions and for Michel Barnier and Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay to hold talks on a political level: 'The leaders agreed that the discussions needed to intensify and that meetings would soon take place on a daily basis.

James Kirkup

The Lib Dems’ Brexit unicorn

Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth is proving to be a jolly affair so far. I’m writing this in the garden of the Highcliff hotel, looking out over the Channel that divides the UK from France and, perhaps one day, the European Union. It’s Brexit that’s making the Lib Dems happy as they bustle by. Parties are generally happy when they feel they have a clear line on big issues, and the Lib Dem line on Brexit is now crystal-clear: cancel it. Partly because they expect a big Labour shift towards a clear Remain position, the Lib Dems are now, in headline terms, committed to revoking the Article 50 notification and thus returning UK membership of the EU to its previous permanent status.

Steerpike

Watch: Jo Swinson’s Brexit referendum muddle

Jo Swinson has said she will never forgive David Cameron for calling the EU referendum in 2016. 'I think so many of the problems that we are facing right now stem from David Cameron’s shocking misjudgement in putting the interests of the Conservative party ahead of the national interest,' the Lib Dem leader told her party's conference in Bournemouth. But Mr S. notes that Swinson hasn't always thought that way about a referendum. Back in 2008, Swinson told the Commons that she backed “a referendum on the major issue of in or out. It’s on the issue of in or out of Europe”. https://twitter.com/adam_heilbron/status/1173398729304543239?

Isabel Hardman

Can the next Speaker put parliament back together again?

MPs who aren’t in the process of defecting to the Liberal Democrats are using their conference recess to phone around their colleagues canvassing for the next Commons Speaker. Lindsay Hoyle is, according to YouGov, the favourite to win, but Harriet Harman and Chris Bryant are also running strong campaigns, along with Meg Hillier. Then there are the Tory candidates: Eleanor Laing, Sir Henry Bellingham, Shailesh Vara and Sir Edward Leigh. All of them are promising to stand up for parliament, albeit in rather different ways.

Brendan O’Neill

Lib Dems are the real Brexit extremists

The Lib Dems are now the most extremist party in the UK. They might not look like extremists, being made up of mostly nice, middle-class people from the leafier bits of the nation. But they have just adopted a policy that is arguably more extreme, more corrosive of British values, more counter to the great traditions of this nation, than any other party policy of recent decades.  Yes, this is the new Lib Dem policy to cancel Brexit. At their party conference in Bournemouth the Lib Dems voted overwhelmingly in favour of a policy of ‘stopping Brexit altogether’, in Jo Swinson’s words.

Robert Peston

Is Jeremy Corbyn preparing to purge moderate Labour MPs?

Ahead of the looming general election, moderate Labour MPs are understandably upset by an instruction they say the party has given to suspend the selection of new candidates in seats where the serving MP is retiring or has defected. They've been told the reason is to 'concentrate on the trigger ballot processes' – or the deselection of usually moderate MPs who have alienated activists. See the below email by a Labour official for detail. What moderate MPs fear is that there is tacit support from Labour’s leadership for a purge of MPs from the right of the party.

Steerpike

Johnson family saga: Amelia Gentleman on Boris’s response to Windrush

When Jo Johnson quit government, reports began to circulate that his wife Amelia Gentleman – the Guardian journalist – had put pressure on him to leave frontline politics and thereby not serve in his brother Boris Johnson's government. The Sun reported that Gentleman had grown tired of 'seeing Boris presiding over an increasingly fractured government, threatening to break the law and promising to drag the country out of the EU or die in a ditch' and told Jo he had to choose between her and his brother. Now Gentleman has offered an insight into her relationship with her husband's brother.

Sunday

Lionel Shriver

Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t | 15 September 2019

American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK, these two phenomena are perceived as identical twin expressions of an alarming ‘populism’, whereby the animals take over the zoo. I’m one of the curiously few political voyeurs who think the American electorate’s preference for an incompetent president and the British electorate’s preference for leaving a power-hungry erstwhile trading bloc have little in common. Dizzying events in the UK this month bring out one vital distinction in relief.

Steerpike

Listen: Lib Dem candidate’s excruciating Brexit interview

There are plenty of ways to go about winning an election if you're fighting to become an MP, from coming up with a winning electoral strategy, to tapping into a burning local issue. The one thing you probably shouldn't do though is start off by insulting your local constituents. The North Devon Liberal Democrat candidate Kirsten Johnson learned that the hard way this lunchtime when she appeared on Radio 4's World at One. Asked by the presenter why Leave was so popular in her local area in 2016, Johnson began the interview by suggesting that North Devon voted to Leave because no ethnic minorities lived there, and her constituents didn't travel very much: 'Demographically it's 98 per cent white. We don't have a lot of ethnic minorities living in North Devon.

Steerpike

Watch: Guy Verhofstadt on the world’s ‘empires’

Supporters of Brexit are often accused by their political opponents of having an unhealthy obsession with the past, and wanting to take the country back to an age when the British Empire spanned a quarter of the globe. But, if the Liberal Democrat conference is anything to go by, it appears to Mr S that it might be those on the Remainer side of the political spectrum who have an unhealthy interest in empires across the world. Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian MEP and Europhile certainly gave that impression yesterday, when he gave a speech at the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth. In his speech, the MEP launched into an unprecedented rant about the state of the world, which he argued was dominated by 'empires'.

Steerpike

Listen: Jo Swinson heckled at Lib Dem conference

So far, things have gone very smoothly for Jo Swinson since she was elected leader of the Liberal Democrats. The party has managed to increase its numbers in parliament and coalesced around a new hardline Remain position of revoking Article 50. Yet, there were signs today that all is not well with some Liberal Democrat members, when Swinson led a question and answer session at party conference. While most of the questions lobbed at the new leader were remarkably friendly, one woman took issue with Swinson's decision to allow the former Tory MP, Phillip Lee, to join the party. The defection, while swelling the Lib Dem ranks, has gone down like a lead balloon with many members, due to Lee's failure to back same-sex marriage in the past.