Politics Archives

Friday

2 August 2019

The Spectator Podcast: will the EU compromise for Boris?

As the UK government ramps up its no deal Brexit planning, is there any chance of a compromise with the EU on a deal? In this week’s magazine, James Forsyth looks at how seriously Brussels is taking Boris Johnson’s threats. He suggests that until parliament signals it can pass a deal, the EU is ready to hold out. On the podcast, Katy Balls talks to James and Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a Senior Research Fellow for the Centre for European Reform. Agata tells us that the EU is adamant about its united position. Negotiations are about: 'standing behind Dublin, sending the message to smaller and newer states that if they were in need, they could expect similar solidarity from other member states.

Roger Awan-Scully

The Liberal Democrats win the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election

Were there a Most Beautiful Parliamentary Constituency in the UK award, Brecon and Radnorshire would be a very plausible contender. But Conservatives may be struggling to appreciate the aesthetic appeal of this large chunk of rural mid-Wales today. The by-election there overnight has reduced Prime Minister Johnson’s effective parliamentary majority – that is, including the DUP – to a single seat. A difficult parliamentary situation for the government just got ever-so-slightly worse. So much for the honeymoon period… In truth, the by-election result should not have been much of a shock. Brecon and Radnor has not, historically, been particularly fertile territory for the Conservative party.

Lynn Barber

A life apart: an interview with Frank Field

Frank Field has announced today that he is forming the 'Birkenhead Social Justice Party' to stand at the next election. Field resigned from the Labour whip in July last year. In December he spoke to Lynn Barber and explained why he's used to doing things differently: Frank Field was given a standing ovation when he won The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year award two weeks ago. Normally there’s polite applause, but he is the hero of the current clash between the Corbynistas and what used to be the Labour party.

Katy Balls

The Brecon by-election result raises difficult questions for the Tories

As expected, the Liberal Democrats have won the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election – thereby reducing Boris Johnson's majority to one. The news ought not to come as much of a surprise. Ahead of the vote, the Tories appeared to be doing everything they could to lose it. The by-election itself was triggered following a recall petition after Tory MP Chris Davies was found guilty of submitting a false expenses claim. Despite this, Davies was chosen to stand again rather than a new Conservative candidate. While some Tories have been campaigning in the area, it could hardly be described as all hands on deck in the lead up to the election.

Madsen Pirie

A global, free trading Britain should back freeports

Boris’s new government abounds with good people and good ideas to boost business – and we are already reaping the rewards. Liz Truss, as the new President of the Board of Trade has announced today that once we leave the European Union, the UK will be a global free trader, with freeports and safe harbours to help this aim along. Freeports are areas next to shipping ports or airports that we designate as effectively foreign territory. That doesn’t mean they are owned by foreigners; it simply means that for tax and regulation purposes, they are treated as if they were outside the UK. They’re areas where HMRC has no right of entry or the authority to pick pockets. In particular, it means that goods coming into them are not subject to UK tariffs, taxes or regulations.

Thursday

1 August 2019

Peter Jones

Persia’s lessons for the PM

Stanley Johnson suggests his son, the PM, will easily deal with Iran because he is well acquainted with Persian history and knows all about kings such as Darius and Xerxes. But talking ancient history with Ayatollahs could have its problems. Here, for example, is what Herodotus (d. c. 425 bc) had to say about Darius. Distantly related to the royal family, he served loyally under King Cambyses, at whose death in 522 bc a usurper took power. Darius plotted with six others to dethrone him, suggesting they should lie their way into the palace and kill him: ‘Where a lie must be told, tell it. Those who lie and those who tell the truth all have a similar objective, to gain advantage: same end, different means.

The Spectator

Sterling effort

In his first week as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has shocked those who had assumed that he is a joker incapable of making any more progress than his predecessor. During his leadership campaign, he said that he would not settle for a modified version of the Brexit deal that Theresa May agreed and Parliament rejected three times. In office, he has been as good as his word and is refusing to start negotiations until the EU says it is willing to compromise. If it doesn’t, then we leave without a deal on 31 October. If many politicians are still in denial about this, the currency markets are not. A no-deal Brexit would put the UK economy in transition from being part of a European bloc into one governed by yet-to-be-signed free trade agreements, under World Trade Organisation rules.

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 August 2019

In his very long letter to Jeremy Corbyn about why, after all, he will stay out of the Labour party instead of fighting his expulsion, Alastair Campbell complains that Britain has been the victim of a ‘right-wing coup’. Boris Johnson’s government has no ‘real democratic mandate’, he says, and Mr Corbyn should be fighting it much harder. You hear this argument a lot — we have a new prime minister and so we must have a general election. In my lifetime (born 1956), seven prime ministers — Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Callaghan, Major, Brown, May and Johnson — have come into office without a general election before or immediately ensuing; in that sense, without a democratic mandate.

Laurence Wilkinson

Can Jo Johnson save free speech on campus?

Last week Boris Johnson's younger brother Jo was appointed universities and science minister, recapturing the brief he held from 2015 to 2018. His appointment raised some eyebrows, mainly because only eight months ago he resigned from May’s government so he could back a second referendum, and issued a stark warning about the ‘untold damage’ that no deal would inflict on the country. Boris’s elevation to Number 10 seems to have resulted in his change of heart. But while Brexit is likely to take up a significant amount of the new universities minister's time, Jo faces an equally important struggle to restore universities to their intended function as bastions of free speech.

Katy Balls

European Research Group divisions over Boris Johnson’s Brexit tactics

With Boris Johnson currently refusing to meet with any EU leaders for Brexit talks unless they agree to abolish the 'undemocratic' backstop, speculation is rising that the UK is on course to leave the EU without a deal. However, should the new Prime Minister manage to silence his critics and win a concession from Brussels to replace the backstop with alternative arrangements, Johnson ought not expect all members of his party to celebrate. In an interview with the Telegraph, arch-Brexiteer Marc Francois – one of 28 Tory MPs who refused to vote for May’s deal on any occasion – has said that even were the backstop to go from the withdrawal agreement, he and dozens of colleagues would still refuse to vote for it.

Steerpike

The NYT’s pound-foolish Brexit coverage

It seems the New York Times has decided to continue its bizarre crusade against Britain, which culminated in last year's outlandish claim that the nation lives on a diet of mutton and oatmeal (although, given current reports that the government is considering buying up Welsh lamb in the event of a no-deal exit, this strange claim could turn out to have been an unwitting prediction). The latest pronouncement comes from the NYT's European economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman on the front page of today's international edition. In it Goodman writes: 'The British pound has long possessed a mystique that transcends its marginal role in the global economy, conjuring memories of its dominance in the imperial age.

Christopher Caldwell

View from the EU

The conviction has been spreading among French people in recent days that les Britanniques have just elected Donald Trump. The papers are filled with meditations on British anxieties over lost empire, descriptions of Boris Johnson’s hair and the wildest speculations about what he might do as Prime Minister. Every squib about European overregulation that Johnson wrote during his stint as a Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph in the 1980s and 1990s has by now been vetted, stripped of its humorous intent and found wanting. Johnson exaggerated the threat of European regulations to prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps! Nowhere did he cite a single EU directive banning the large-sized condoms that an Englishman requires!

James Forsyth

Who’ll blink first?

On Sunday, Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers were summoned to a conference call for an update on his Brexit strategy. The EU had not yet indicated any shift in its position, he said, but that should in no way deter the government from its current course. He was confident, he told his cabinet, that if he stuck to his guns the EU would move eventually. This, then, is the new government’s position. The Prime Minister told ministers that he does not think no deal is the most likely outcome — but if the government is not prepared for it, nothing will change. Is he right? Will the EU blink first? Many in the EU are unwilling to give ground. They don’t think the UK can possibly get ready to leave the EU with no deal by 31 October.

Julie Burchill

The diverse party

I’ve never voted Conservative and I never will. Having been raised in a working-class home, I can’t get past the fact that had the Labour party not come into being, the Tories would have kept my people serfs for as long as inhumanly possible. But I’m also an extreme Brexiteer; far from the past three years being boring (anyone who says this reveals themselves as such a monumental dullard that we should remove their right to vote), I consider that this nation spent the four decades up to 23 June 2016 sleepwalking into the shadowlands of EU dreariness — and disaster. Only a halfwit could fail to comprehend that the whole repulsive gravy--train is set to run into the buffers very soon and that it makes sense for us to pull the communication cord and hop off ASAP.

Rod Liddle

Boris may end up delivering Corbyn

Alastair Campbell has written a longish ‘open’ letter to Jeremy Corbyn, helpfully explaining why he has decided not to contest his expulsion from the Labour party. The remarkable thing is that Alastair believes there is anyone of importance in the party, or indeed outside of it, who gives a monkey’s one way or the other. For all of Jeremy Corbyn’s myriad faults, he has not visited upon this country the two greatest crises, foreign and domestic, that the UK has endured since the second world war (by which I mean the Iraq war and unconfined immigration). Nor has Magic Grandpa lied to the British public and parliament with quite the same level of barefacedness as Mr Campbell; nor used the death of a government scientist to settle a personal vendetta with a journalist.

Wednesday

31 July 2019

Daniel DePetris

Warren and Sanders were the big winners of the latest Democratic debate

Beto O’Rourke needed a wing and a prayer. The second Democratic presidential debate was an opportunity for the 46-year old Texas congressman to shut down the naysayers and speculators who were doubting his candidacy after a less-than-optimal fundraising stretch and a 2.8 per cent ranking in the polls. The game-plan for the former boy wonder of the Democratic Party was to finally find his footing as a national political candidate. O’Rourke and his campaign team will put a happy face on the effort Tuesday night, but he likely went back to his hotel room wondering if his performance was any better than the first.

Steven Fielding

The myth behind Corbyn’s plan to transform Britain

This week, The Sun instructed Remain Conservative MPs to unite behind Boris Johnson or see Jeremy Corbyn’s desire to ‘turn Britain into an experiment in 21st century Marxism’ become reality. It need not have bothered: the threat of a ‘Marxist’ Corbyn government is one of the few things about which all Conservatives agree. But what kind of a threat does Corbyn really pose? Keen supporters of the Labour leader speak of their hopes for a ‘transformative’ Corbyn-led government, one that will eventually lead to socialism. This government will permanently change Britain because, they say, it will disperse power to the people.

Douglas Murray

Any type of Brexit is better than no Brexit at all

It’s a strange beast, the internet. On Monday night, I was slightly reluctantly dragged onto Newsnight to discuss Brexit. Attentive readers will know that I very rarely write or speak about the subject. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that I said most of what I had to say three years ago when I cast a vote in a referendum. Another reason – I must admit – is that I have wanted little to no part in the bile-fest of the last three years. I would like us still to have a country after this, and there seems very little chance of that if both halves of it continue to spit at each other.

Steerpike

From the archives: Boris Johnson – ‘My appeal to the masses may be very limited’

Boris Johnson's senior adviser Dominic Cummings has found himself in the news today after a video clip emerged of him suggesting most Conservative MPs 'do not care' about 'poorer people' or the NHS. Now in No. 10, Cummings appears to be on a mission to change that – with a focus on applying the Johnson ethos of boosterism to healthcare. But what of Johnson's old comments? A search of Cambridge's student newspaper archive reveals that BoJo too has made some comments which could now be deemed off-message. In a 2000 interview with Varsity, the then editor of The Spectator discussed his decision to stand as the Conservative candidate for Henley.

Julie Burchill

It’s time for David Lammy to join the Tories

I’ve never voted Conservative and I never will. Having been raised in a working-class home, I can’t get past the fact that had the Labour party not come into being, the Tories would have kept my people serfs for as long as inhumanly possible. But I’m also an extreme Brexiteer; far from the past three years being boring (anyone who says this reveals themselves as such a monumental dullard that we should remove their right to vote), I consider that this nation spent the four decades up to 23 June 2016 sleepwalking into the shadowlands of EU dreariness — and disaster. Only a halfwit could fail to comprehend that the whole repulsive gravy-train is set to run into the buffers very soon and that it makes sense for us to pull the communication cord and hop off ASAP.