Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Sunday

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.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: A Lib Dem government would revoke Article 50, says Jo Swinson

Steve Barclay - Boris Johnson 'believes in Brexit' David Cameron's memoirs are due to be released this Thursday, with some of the more explosive highlights already seeing serialisation. The Sunday Times has published an extract today that argues that Boris Johnson did not believe in Brexit, and only backed the Leave campaign to win over the Conservative rank and file. The Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay joined Sophy Ridge and immediately refuted the former Prime Minister's claims: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1173139451788320768 SR: Does Boris Johnson really believe in Brexit? SB: He does! He led the campaign... and the Remain side was expected to win, so the more prudent thing, if someone was looking purely at their career, would have been to back Remain. Boris Johnson...

John Connolly

The Lib Dems back revoking Article 50

The Liberal Democrats have cemented their credentials as a fully-fledged Remain party this afternoon, after members at their conference in Bournemouth voted to make revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit their official party policy. The overwhelming majority of Lib Dem members at the conference voted to pass a motion, which called for the party to immediately revoke Article 50 if they win a majority at the next election. The motion reaffirms the party's support for a second referendum, but also adds a pledge to stop Brexit altogether, committing to: 'Revoke Article 50 if the House of Commons has not passed a resolution approving the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement one week ahead of the date on which the UK is due to leave the EU.

Saturday

Alexandra Phillips

Why Boris should sign a non-aggression pact with the Brexit party

Remember that mildly cringeworthy gag when Boris won the Tory leadership contest, and he promised to 'Deliver Brexit, Unite the Country and Defeat Jeremy Corbyn'? He joked that Defeat, Unite and Deliver made the rather unfortunate acronym of ‘dud’. Throw in 'energise', and he claimed that he would be the 'dude' to save the UK from its Brexistential crisis. Dad jokes aside, Boris now needs to take a NAP if he’s serious about Brexit. He is making the biggest blunder of his political career by dismissing Nigel Farage’s offer of a Non-Aggression Pact with the Brexit party. The only way now to deliver on the 2016 referendum result is to have a major clear-out of the democracy-denying Brexit blockers currently occupying the Commons' green benches.

James Forsyth

Why the UK hasn’t presented any specific backstop proposal to the EU

The EU side regularly points out that the UK government hasn’t presented any detailed proposals on what it wants to replace the backstop with. At a Cabinet committee meeting this week, the Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay set about explaining to ministerial colleagues why this was. As I report in The Sun this morning, He told the Committee that the EU had set three tests for any new proposal. First, it must avoid any infrastructure on the border that would be incompatible with the Good Friday Agreement. Second, it must protect the integrity of the EU’s single market. Third, it mustn’t involve any checks on the island of Ireland. Barclay said that the UK could meet the first two of these tests, but not the third.

Stephen Daisley

Corbyn is the only unthinkable outcome in this political crisis

For something that has yet to and may never happen, Brexit has reordered the fundamentals of British politics in just three years. The Tories have shifted decisively from post-Thatcher ambivalence about their role as upholders of the prevailing order to a right-wing radicalism that views Parliament, the legal establishment, and captains of industry as threats to, rather than pillars of, British freedom. Electoral reformers who once downplayed the time-honoured link between constituent and parliamentarian now laud MPs who spurn a national result in deference to local opinion. Cultural identity has replaced austerity as the motor of progressive antagonism towards the Tories, who in turn have lost all interest in fiscal prudence and economic growth.

Peter Jones

Pericles for PM: Boris should forget Augustus and stay focused on his hero | 14 September 2019

Boris Johnson is a gung-ho classicist. He has supported the subject throughout his journalistic and political career, is a generous donor to the charity Classics for All, and has a bust of his hero Pericles in his study. Indeed, he says his reading of Pericles’s famous funeral speech (431 bc) when he was 12 or 13 had a powerful effect on him, especially Pericles’s statement that ‘Athens is called a demokratia because it runs its house in the interests not of the few but of the majority’. Last week, however, he turned into the Roman emperor Augustus to explain his sacking of 21 rebel MPs. Augustus, emerging as victor in 31 bc in the civil war against Antony and Cleopatra,  did just this, killing potential rivals and ushering in a long and peaceful reign.

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: John Bercow on Boris the bank robber

It's only been four days since John Bercow announced that he will retire as Speaker of the House of Commons, yet it seems that the bellicose MP is showing no sign that he'll spend the rest of his tenure keeping quiet, or defending the impartiality of his role. Last night, the Speaker had a break from his usual surroundings in the Commons' Chamber to give the sixth annual Bingham Lecture to an audience of lawyers at Middle Temple in London. There, he used his pulpit once again to have a dig at Boris Johnson, comparing the PM's alleged attempt to avoid extending Article 50 to robbing a bank.   He told the audience that: 'Not obeying the law must surely be a non starter. Period.

Steerpike

Sparks fly in Tory Women WhatsApp group

Oh dear. Boris Johnson's decision to withdraw the whip from the Tory Brexit rebels continues to send ripples through Westminster. While Chief Whip Mark Spencer has laid out the appeals process to the rebels, many of their colleagues remain unhappy about the decision to remove them from the party. Now things have taken a turn for the worse in the Tory Women in Parliament WhatsApp group. Originally, the group was used to share events and ideas amongst Tory women in the vote100 year, it was set up at the height of the Westminster bullying scandal and has since been used on occasion for Conservative women's policy updates.

Thursday

Toby Young

How John Bercow saved me from Short Man Syndrome

I think my colleagues on the pro-Brexit side of the aisle have been a little unkind in their response to John Bercow’s announcement that he’ll be standing down as chief referee in the House of Commons. Yes, he’s clearly done everything in his power to make life as difficult as possible for those MPs who want to implement the result of the 2016 referendum. Yes, his attitude to parliamentary precedent has been completely inconsistent, citing obscure, supposedly binding conventions to obstruct Brexiters one minute, then casually disregarding longstanding constitutional conventions the next. And, yes, the language he uses to express his contempt for any Conservative MP who so much as grimaces at one of his nakedly partisan rulings is unparliamentary, to put it mildly.

The Spectator

Does the outcome of the Ashes dictate who wins a general election?

Party speak Should the next Speaker of the House of Commons be a Labour MP on the basis that John Bercow was a Conservative before taking the chair? There has been a tradition in recent decades that the two main parties alternate in filling the role. But it doesn’t go back far — Michael Martin, Labour MP for Glasgow Springburn, succeeded Betty Boothroyd, also Labour, in 2000, not least because the Conservatives had only 165 MPs at the time and didn’t want to lose one. Between 1928 and 1965 a succession of four Speakers had been Conservative MPs. Between 1835 and 1905, by contrast, the Commons had two Whigs followed by four Liberals. Prior to that, four Conservatives were elevated to the Speaker’s chair between 1789 and 1835.

George Osborne

George Osborne: I tried to swap jobs with William Hague

I could be that rare thing: a former chancellor who is still a member of the Conservative party. Philip Hammond has lost the whip and will be expelled if he stands for election again. Ditto Ken Clarke. How times change. I remember a time when we were desperate to get Ken into the tent, not kick him out. Back in 2008, we wanted him to join our shadow cabinet. Tory wars had consigned us to opposition and we needed to end them. The negotiations were conducted in secret in case he said ‘no’, so we agreed to meet at my house rather than Westminster. It was all very cloak and dagger, or supposed to be. But then Ken didn’t show up. After a while, I went out on the street to look for him.

Adam Cherry

The Spectator Podcast: how long can the Remain alliance last?

A general election is looming. With no working majority, Boris Johnson found himself cornered last week by an unlikely alliance bent on stopping a no-deal Brexit. The alliance share a common enemy for now, but how long can this coalition last? For one, there’s no love lost between Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson; and the SNP are gunning for a clean sweep in Scotland, with the odds looking good. With an election in sight, the Remain alliance may find their differences are too deep to bear. In this week’s cover piece, Katy Balls looks at the likely challenges that will test the alliance's unity. Will they form an electoral pact? Could Swinson accept Corbyn as a caretaker prime minister? Would the Liberal Democrats prop up a minority Labour government?

Ian Acheson

The Yellowhammer report is nothing like a real contingency plan

The latest Operation Yellowhammer disclosures put me in mind of a book I read a few years ago describing an unsettlingly plausible zombie outbreak in Britain. When the streets were too full of undead shamblers for the government to ignore, the Home Secretary asked officials who were barricaded in his office for the contingency plan to deal with this apocalypse. He was handed one sheet of A4 on which was simply written, ‘run away screaming.’ I wonder whether Michael Gove had anything much more coherent to rely on when he took up the reins at the Cabinet Office at the back end of July and asked for the latest no-deal arrangements?

Pieter Cleppe

What can the UK expect from Phil Hogan, the EU’s new trade negotiator?

For the second time, Ireland's Phil Hogan will serve as an EU Commissioner in Brussels, after his appointment was announced on Tuesday by the next President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Whereas Hogan didn't receive a lot of attention in his previous post – even though he was responsible for the biggest spending role in the EU budget, agriculture – that is certainly about to change. Hogan is about to become responsible for the EU's trade portfolio, which includes supervising future trade talks between the UK and the EU. What can we expect from him? In his job as Agriculture Commissioner, Hogan didn't upset the status quo very much at all.

Fintan O’Toole

For the first time since 1171, Ireland has more power than England

Watching Boris Johnson in Dublin, where he came to ask Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to get him out of a hole, I am struck again by how disorienting Brexit has been. Everything we are used to in Anglo-Irish relations has been reversed. For the first time since Henry II invaded in 1171, Ireland has more power than England. Ireland has always been the weaker party: smaller, poorer, less influential in the wider world. Most Brexiters, if they thought about the Irish aspect of their project at all, relied on an eternal truth: Dublin would simply have to play by London’s rules. It is hard to blame them — a habit of mind formed over 800 years is hard to shake off.

Isabel Hardman

Boris has more in common with Corbyn than he thinks

Boris Johnson’s opponents love to accuse him of using the ‘Trump playbook’. Some on the left have become so obsessed with this comparison that they’ve even demanded that the Prime Minister be impeached. But over the past few weeks, Johnson’s behaviour has borne a far closer resemblance to a man he claims to look down on: Jeremy Corbyn. Both men stand on an anti-politics, anti-establishment platform. When Corbyn became leader he promised a ‘kinder, gentler politics’, and eschewed many of the traditions of the Commons. His advisers still believe that he is going to be the man-of-the-people candidate in the looming election, arguing that attacks from the media only bolster his anti-establishment credentials.

Katy Balls

The rebel alliance has taken control of parliament – and Brexit. What happens next?

Every Monday, a group of unlikely bedfellows meet in Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary office. Jo Swinson, Liberal Democrat leader; Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader; Caroline Lucas, the Green party’s sole MP; and Liz Saville Roberts from Plaid Cymru all gather to discuss their common aim — preventing a no-deal Brexit. This rebel alliance is more than just a group therapy session: last week, they succeeded in taking control of parliament and immediately started to give instructions to the Prime Minister. So their Monday club is now a kind of remote-control government, with plenty to discuss. While parliament is suspended, they’ve promised to keep in touch.

James Forsyth

Why is Nigel Farage being so emollient to the Tories?

In verbal ding dongs Nigel Farage usually gives as good as he gets. But he has been oddly restrained in his response to the Tories ruling out any kind of electoral pact with him on the grounds that he is not a ‘fit and proper person’. On the Andrew Neil show last night, Farage was strikingly emollient. He said that he didn’t want any role in government in exchange for a pact and downplayed the criticism of him, saying it was just a ‘junior press officer’ sounding off. He argued that a pact was needed because if there was a Labour-led government ‘we’re not going to get a meaningful Brexit of any kind at all’. On this point, I think Farage is right.

James Forsyth

Will turning the Tories into the pro-Leave party pay off for Boris?

An election might still be months away, but the parties have already made their big strategic choices. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are betting that Brexit is the defining issue of our times and that its pull is strong enough to dissolve longstanding party allegiances. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, is planning on fighting a much more traditional left vs right campaign. His second-referendum policy is almost an attempt to quarantine the issue of Brexit. Since becoming leader, Boris Johnson has reshaped the Tory party in an attempt to make it fit for purpose in an era when politics is defined by Brexit. He has abandoned Theresa May’s tolerance of dissent on this issue.