Politics

Theresa May has made her latest Brexit deal pitch – and it isn't going down well with Tory MPs. The Prime Minister used a speech this afternoon to say Parliament will get a vote on whether to hold a second referendum if it backs the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill. But Simon Clarke – a Tory MP who supported the PM's deal the last time around – has changed his mind and vowed to vote the deal down. Here is what he said: And Simon Clarke wasn't the only Tory MP to vent his fury at the PM in the aftermath of her speech. Owen Paterson said the offer is a 'direct insult to 17.

Thirty years ago, protests, riots and murders followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Three decades later, we recognise the Satanic Verses controversy as the opening act in Europe’s crisis of immigration, Islam, and identity politics. Daniel Pipes, my guest in 'The Green Room' this week, is an historian, the president of the Middle East Forum, and an analyst of Islam in Europe. We talk about how Europe got to where it is, what’s going on now among the new nationalist parties in Europe, and what might happen next. Pipes calls Europe's new nationalist parties 'Civilisationists'. These parties come from various backgrounds, and not all of them are on the right. Many of them have backgrounds chequered by Europe’s violent twentieth century.

Yes, Eurovision is political - but for 20 years now, this fact has been used as an excuse to explain why Britain bombs. Everyone hates us, runs the complaint, the system is rigged, there's nothing we can do. But as we digest the latest embarrassment (we just finished last - again) it’s hard to escape a simple point. The UK entry does badly because it tends not to be as good as the others. If the English-singing Duncan Laurence (pictured, above) had been singing for the UK instead of The Netherlands, he'd still have won. We are guaranteed a place straight into the final, as the UK pays so much money to the European Broadcasting Union. This has made us lazy, fielding songs that would never have made it through the semi-finals - a gauntlet most other countries have to run.

On Thursday, voters will deliver a wake-up call to this parliament. They’ll vote in numbers for a party that was only launched last month and has no MPs. As I say in the Sun this morning, the Brexit Party’s success will be a sign of how frustrated voters are that Brexit hasn’t happened yet. But there’s no sign that parliament is going to heed this wake-up call. The collapse of the Labour Tory talks is a sign of that. Next, the Commons will almost certainly vote down the withdrawal agreement bill at second reading. This would leave Brexit in great danger. If Britain looked set to leave the EU without a deal, then the parliamentary majority against no deal would try and stop it. Already, 191 MPs have voted to simply revoke Article 50 to avoid no deal.