Politics

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Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 4 July 2019

Model hobbies Asked what he did to relax, Boris Johnson claimed that he liked to make model buses. Some others who share his hobby: — Rod Stewart is a keen railway-modeller who claims to have a set the size of a tennis court at his Beverly Hills home. — Jools Holland, Roger Daltrey and Pete Waterman are all into model railways. — Model buses are a more rarefied taste. But if he isn’t already, Boris could consider joining the Model Bus Federation, which has represented the hobby since 1968. Its national show and AGM will be held in Tewkesbury on Saturday 5 October, just after the Conservative party conference.   Who pays? Boris Johnson wants to raise the threshold for the 40 per cent rate of tax from £50,000 to £80,000. How many people pay tax?

Joan Collins

Diary – 4 July 2019

It has been a spring of party madness in London and New York. I was lucky enough to have several birthday parties thrown for me in both cities, including Evgeny Lebedev’s glamorous soirée at which Nigel Farage announced that he was no longer being served at any pub in Brussels, which may explain why he’s cut down on the drinking. There was also the ultra-glam Met Ball in New York: Dame Anna Wintour mingling with a half-naked Lady Gaga; divine Bette Midler in top-to-toe black sequins and a top hat, dancing with the talented Julianne Moore (wearing green sequins) and Cher in ripped jeans and an anorak. Not to be too bitchy (oh, go on!), but I thought Katy Perry dressed as a hamburger was a touch de trop, even for the party’s theme of ‘camp’.

David Bergman

The Orwell prize was wrong to choose Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as a judge

The winner of this year’s Orwell prize for political writing, announced last week, was a book that centres around the disappearance in Belfast of Jean McConville. McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was snatched from her home in December 1972 by a gang of armed men. She was never seen again. What irony then that the person who chaired the panel of judges was none other than Labour MP Tulip Siddiq. Over a number of years, Siddiq has assiduously refused to publicly denounce the responsibility of her very own family, currently ruling Bangladesh, for hundreds of secret detentions, enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings, or indeed even to lobby her family members to help get these men released.

Linden Kemkaran

What is it about Boris Johnson that makes his critics so angry?

When I posted on Facebook a picture of me standing next to Boris Johnson, I expected a few likes and probably a few more harsh comments. What I didn’t anticipate were the hundreds of words of ranting vitriol posted by friends, some of whom I had known since school. My picture was harmless enough: a selfie, quickly snapped when Boris visited my hometown of Sevenoaks on Monday. It wasn't a ringing endorsement, or even an approval of him. And it offered no comment on what he stands for. It was simply a picture of us squinting at the camera with the caption: “kicked off the week with this guy, our next PM to be?” The first few comments were along the lines of “Well, let’s hope your week improves!” and “Oh no, not you as well?

James Forsyth & Katy Balls

A whole new Boris

‘I’m going to stick ruthlessly to script,’ says Boris Johnson. ‘This is not the stage of the campaign when you innovate.’ He’s right to worry about the timing. The new Tory leader won’t be chosen for just over two weeks but the ballot papers go out this weekend. Boris is the odds-on favourite. This is the most important week of the campaign and he’s determined to come across as a serious, game-changing leader, not the loveable yet unreliable joker. The old Boris would mess up his hair before going on television. Today, when we meet in his House of Commons office, he quickly puts on a jacket — as if getting dressed for a job interview. He’s making a sales pitch.

Steerpike

The Spectator summer party, in pictures | 4 July 2019

While the cat's away, the mice will play. Or, while the two leadership finalists take part in a hustings in Yorkshire and Humber, their supporters will find time to position themselves for jobs, plot and drink some Pol Roger. On Thursday evening, former Tory leadership candidates and cabinet ministers all descended on 22 Old Queen Street for this year's Spectator summer party, kindly sponsored by The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). The battle for the position of Chancellor was clearly underway in the Spectator office as two of the main contenders, Liz Truss and Matt Hancock, worked the room and charmed their Conservative colleagues.

Ross Clark

Is the National Trust’s fossil fuel divestment really that ethical?

I often see National Trust vehicles around my way – transporting animals, digging, cutting wood and constructing bridges and the like. They do not appear to me to be electric-powered. I shouldn’t be surprised if, like my car, they are still powered by filthy old diesel. I am sure, like me, the Trust would rather use clean vehicles – it has already announced its ambition to source 50 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by next year. But for the moment the Trust, like the rest of us, would struggle to live on renewable energy alone. That hasn’t, however, stopped the Trust this morning announcing that it will divest the £45 million it has invested in oil and gas companies.

Camilla Swift

Jeremy Hunt has shot himself in the foot with his fox-hunting pledge

I moaned here last week about the lack of attention the two Tory leadership contenders were paying to rural communities in their pitches to the party membership. Funnily enough, as Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson have travelled around the country to various party hustings, their tone has now changed. Finally, they are speaking up for people outside towns and cities. Both of them have promised to speed up the delivery of full-fibre broadband to the countryside. They have also vowed to get the UK out of the Common Agricultural Policy, giving us control over our own agriculture policies.

Matthew Lynn

George Osborne has nothing to offer the IMF

Smooth. Intelligent and articulate. A former finance minister. A European. And perhaps most importantly of all, a mildly irritating potential rival to the prime minister of his own country. In lots of ways, George Osborne ticks all the boxes to replace Christine Lagarde as the managing director of the IMF. Indeed, if you were looking for a perfect replica of the incumbent, minus the pearls and the elegant neck scarfs, you might well settle on the former chancellor. The trouble is, while Osborne’s brand of centrist Conservatism might suit the Fund in easier times, what it needs now is radical change – and the editor of the Evening Standard has never shown much interest in that. There is certainly a case to be made for a British MD of the IMF.

Steerpike

Listen: Jeremy Hunt hunted on fox hunting

A key part of Jeremy Hunt's pitch to be the next prime minister is convincing Tory members that he is more popular with the general public than his opponent, Boris Johnson. It's an effective message, that preys on Conservative members' fears that Johnson is no longer the Heineken candidate of old, but a Marmite figure who is too divisive to win the next election. But if you're going to pursue a strategy which relies on mass public support, it's probably not the best idea to rally behind one of the most controversial issues in the UK, which potentially cost Theresa May the 2017 general election: repealing the ban on fox hunting.

Katy Balls

Hunt’s fox-hunting comments add to the idea that he is continuity May

Is Jeremy Hunt continuity Theresa May? It's an allegation that is repeatedly thrown around by supporters of his leadership rival Boris Johnson. MPs have nicknamed the Foreign Secretary 'Theresa in trousers' owing to the idea that he isn't all that different from the current prime minister. The Hunt campaign have been at pains to fight this idea – in an interview with The Spectator, he told me: 'Don’t confuse continuity for loyalty. I have served two prime ministers completely loyally over the last nine years, but I would be quite different to both.’ The problem is Hunt has made a series of comments which have prompted Tory MPs to worry that he would be a similar type of leader.

Sam Leith

The social politics of Eton

Every prime minister is a sociologist. Theresa May drew a distinction between citizens of somewhere and ‘citizens of nowhere’, a sort of riff on David Goodhart’s distinction between Somewheres (rooted, provincial, less well off) and Anywheres (snooty, international, at home on planes and in the corridors of power). Now Boris Johnson segments the country in a fresh way. He talks about the existence of both rural and ‘oppidan’ Britons feeling ‘under-invested, excluded’ and that ‘their lives and their futures weren’t as important’, and he implicitly opposes them to the elites. Why oppidan? Oppidan is essentially a posh word for ‘townie’ (from the Latin oppidum).

Nick Cohen

Can Tom Watson save Labour?

The phrase ‘existential crisis’ is thrown around too easily. But it is hard to find a better description of the state of the Labour party, whose members and supporters overwhelmingly oppose Brexit but whose leader and advisors cling to the old Communist party line that the EU is a ‘capitalist club’. Previously solid followers of Jeremy Corbyn — Clive Lewis in Norwich, Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Brighton and many leftish London MPs — know that Brexit may cost them their seats. And nothing makes a politician move faster than the prospect of unemployment. Even Labour can’t stagger on like this indefinitely.

Robert Tombs

Fatalist error

When so much of the Brexit debate has consisted of slogans and unexamined assertions (‘cliff edges’, ‘crashing out’ and the rest), it is welcome that a more substantial argument has been made by Sir Ivan Rogers, former UK ambassador to the EU. He has been making a series of well-received speeches, some of which have been so popular that they have been published as a book (and recently, on The Spectator’s website). He has long been pessimistic about the chances of reaching a Brexit settlement any time soon, and resigned in January 2017 when his concerns became public. He deplores the referendum decision but regards it as necessary for it to be carried out. But he is deeply pessimistic about the outcome.

Ian Thomson

Sicily Notebook

Northern Italians often speak of Sicily as a Saracenic darkness — the place where Europe ends. The Arabic influence remains strongest in the Mafia-infiltrated west of the island, where the sirocco blows in hot from the deserts of North Africa. When the Arabs invaded Sicily in 831 they introduced mosques and pink-domed cupolas, as well as the sherbets and jasmine-perfumed ices for which Sicily is renowned. The word ‘Mafia’ is said to derive from the Arabic mahyas, meaning ‘aggressive boasting’: for almost three centuries, until the Norman Conquest began in 1061, Sicily was an Arabo-Islamic emirate.

Rod Liddle

Save us from the civil service and the BBC

I was asked on to the BBC Today programme — my old manor — last week to talk about the Women’s World Cup. The producers had noticed that I’d changed my mind about the event and now thought it all rather good fun, having hitherto been derisively misogynistic. ‘This is the thing,’ I said to them. ‘You only invite social conservatives on when they’ve come around to your way of thinking and stopped being social conservatives. Why don’t you ask me on to talk about banning abortion, deporting all foreigners and sectioning the trannies?’ I agreed to the football chat, a little reluctantly, but told the chap that the item would be dropped approximately 11 minutes before it was due on air.

Wednesday

Hani Mustafa

I appeared in Boris’s campaign video. But I’m now voting for Jeremy Hunt

It’s hard to remember a Conservative leadership election where so much has been at stake. The next few months will determine what happens with Brexit – and the future of the party for the next generation. History will judge Tory party members for the choice we make now. This is why – even though I appeared in one of Boris Johnson's campaign videos – the choice is clear: Jeremy Hunt must be our next prime minister. In the early days of this leadership race, that wasn't my view. Boris is someone who needs no introduction. He was a leading figure in the Brexit campaign and remains one of Britain's most recognisable politicians, here and around the world. I assumed that beneath the fizzing exterior, there was a detailed plan that would be equal to the task ahead.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson on the Irish border

In the forthcoming edition of The Spectator, we have an interview with Boris Johnson. You can read the whole interview with Katy Balls and myself from tomorrow morning, but one bit that particularly struck me was his language on the Irish border. Boris Johnson is returning to the position of challenging the Irish and the EU to put up border posts in the event of no deal. Here’s the exchange Can I ask you about the Irish border, can you foresee any circumstances where you would build …? Boris Johnson: No, no. So there is a lot of confusion about this point and so the only way there will be an Irish border is if the Irish government built it because there are no circumstances in which a British government led by you would ever build infrastructure in that way?

Steerpike

Why did Jeremy Hunt keep a low profile in 2016?

It's hard to go anywhere in Westminster these days without spotting Jeremy Hunt. The Tory leadership contender is popping up in all places, posing for selfies on Twitter and sharing videos of himself out and about on the campaign trail. But while Hunt is doing a good job at stealing the limelight, the same hasn't always been true. On Hunt's Facebook page, there are plenty of pictures of him keeping busy in 2013, 2014 and 2015. And there are lots of pictures from 2017, 2018 and 2019 too. But when Mr S. looked for pictures from 2016, he was left disappointed: there were none on his Facebook page. So what explains the glaring gap in pictures from that year? Surely it has nothing to do with Hunt's support for remain in the referendum campaign?

Melanie McDonagh

In defence of the Evening Standard’s leprechaun cartoon

My colleague at the Evening Standard, the excellent cartoonist, Christian Adams, has been having a bruising time of it since his cartoon in yesterday’s paper was published. It features two leprechauns, Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson, capering around a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow – the pot bearing the legend: “no backstop”. It is quite plainly a jab at the illusory, fantastical and delusional notion – his view – that the Irish backstop can simply be magicked away, as both candidates intimated when they visited Northern Ireland yesterday. Plainly, the people being caricatured were Boris and Jeremy, not the Irish, nor indeed leprechauns. It was an Irish trope used against English politicians and visually striking.