Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Thursday

Katy Balls

The People’s Vote campaign isn’t dead yet

It's not been a great week for the People's Vote campaign with several reports of internal rows and splits within the group. Today their attempts to bring about a second referendum hit another stumbling block. A faction of 'People's Vote' backing MPs – including Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston and Labour's Chuka Umunna – announced they are pulling their amendment calling for a second vote. Had they pressed on, there is a chance it would have been selected by the Speaker to be voted on next week. Announcing the decision, Wollaston said: 'With great regret, we will not be laying [an amendment calling for a second referendum] because at this stage, and until we have the leader of the opposition’s backing, it would would not pass.

Steerpike

Why is Chris Grayling spending so much money on telephone bills?

We've all been there - when you open that innocuous looking letter in the post only for your eyes to widen in horror as you see the huge size of the phone bill inside. But while the shocking realisation of a high bill might normally prompt an angry call with the phone company, or a household ban on long-distance calls, for the hapless transport secretary Chris Grayling, it seems only to have been met by a shrug of the shoulders. According to MP expense claims released last week, in August and September last year the transport secretary claimed a massive £958 in telephone bills for his constituency office - including £200 for mobile internet. Fair enough, you might think - that's not too bad for an annual bill.

James Forsyth

Back to the backstop

As the prime minister walks up the main staircase in No. 10, he or she must pass the portrait of every previous occupant of the office. It is the British equivalent of the slave standing behind the Roman general and whispering ‘Remember you are mortal’ because the career of nearly every prime minister, no matter how distinguished, has ended in failure. Theresa May must find two of these portraits particularly haunting. Robert Peel passed the repeal of the corn laws in May 1846 with the backing of the Whigs and others, but was then forced to resign as prime minister the following month as the Tories split.

Martin Vander Weyer

A quiet week in Davos should be a warning to the global elite

Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the Belvedere Hotel proclaiming — incongruously, you might think, given IMF warnings about what a no-deal Brexit might do to global growth — ‘Free trade is great’. My own excuse was that I’m too busy at home rehearsing the role of a wickedly exploitative landlord in a spoof Victorian melodrama called Her Honour for Tenpence.

Wednesday

Ivan Rogers

The futility of the no-deal Brexit bluff

We desperately need clear and honest thinking about our choices - not just for the weeks but for the years, indeed decades, ahead. Our political debate is bedevilled by what, at the time I resigned, I termed “muddled thinking”, and by fantasies and delusions as to what our options really are in the world as it is - as opposed to several different worlds people on different sides of the debate would prefer to inhabit. These fantasies, which one would have hoped would be dissipating by now in the face of reality, are being propagated on all sides. Denialism is pretty universal. But if we are to take good decisions about our future, it is now genuinely urgent that we get beyond the myth-making. I am not going to speculate pointlessly about the votes next week.

Andrew Willshire

How Germany helped shape the conditions for Brexit

German political leaders, industrialists, artists and sportspeople wrote to the Times last week urging Brits to reconsider and stay in the EU. The letter was a mixture of gratitude that Britain had been willing to let Germany rejoin the ranks of civilised nations after the horrors of war, and a rather patronising list of the oh-so-adorable British quirks and foibles: our black humour, our curious habit of drinking tea with milk, drinking ale, driving on the left and pantomimes. But what really struck me was that, for all the warm words, there was no recognition that modern German politics might have played a role in Brexit, let alone a hint of contrition.

Steerpike

Labour MP’s academies double standards

From an outside view, one could be forgiven for thinking now is a good time for academies in the UK. Figures show more than half of England’s children are now educated in academies – state schools run by independent charitable trusts but funded and overseen by central government – while one such academy Brampton Manor, in east London, recently made headlines thanks to 41 of its students winning offers from Oxbridge. However, not everyone agrees. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party is dead set against academies – its official policy is to halt the creation of any new academies or free schools should the party takes power.

Lloyd Evans

Isn’t James Dyson supposed to be a Brexiteer?

History will remember Sir James Dyson as the pioneer of the bagless vacuum-cleaner. Thanks to his genius, we are now able to interrupt our chores and stare in amazement at mini-tornados of dust and filth swirling around in a transparent cylinder. This void of rubbish has been exported all over the world – not unlike our parliamentary system. But its knighted creator made an error this week when he announced that Singapore is to be the new home of his world HQ. This looks like an endorsement of the EU which has just struck a trade-deal with Singapore. The Bagless Wonder is supposed be a Brexiteer. Tory backbencher James Gray leapt to his defence. The suavely-dressed and sad-voiced MP reminded the house that Sir James has splurged cash all over the place.

Katy Balls

Michel Barnier confirms Brexiteer fears

When Eurosceptic MPs voted down Theresa May's Brexit deal last week, the hope was that this would send a strong signal both to the Prime Minister and Brussels that strong changes were needed if it were to have any hope of passing. The problem is that the scale of the defeat – by 230 votes – means that the changes Leave MPs want to see are not the changes that the EU has in mind. In an interview with the Luxembourg Times, chief negotiator Michel Barnier says that he does not believe the troubled backstop is 'the central issue'.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Why relations between the EU and US are about to get worse | 22 January 2019

If you thought the last two years of transatlantic relations were bad, things are about to get even worse. Donald Trump and his hard-charging secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have scheduled a Middle East security conference for February 13th and 14th. Poland, perhaps the only country in Europe that looks fondly upon Trump as a world leader, will be hosting the two-day affair. Normally, this is the kind of multilateral event European heads-of-state are more than happy to participate in. Not so this one. Trump plan to elevate Iran’s destabilising actions in the region as a principle – perhaps the principle – topic during the conference is giving senior European officials cold feet about turning up.

James Kirkup

Brexit is making Tories unforgivably careless about the union

On Saturday, a car bomb went off in the UK. In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to be exact. It was the latest in a long, long list of terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland, many of them carried out by men who wish to unite the island of Ireland in one state. Today, the European Commission stated, more bluntly than it ever has before, that Britain leaving the EU without a deal will mean a hard border between the EU (Ireland) and the UK (Northern Ireland). That means checkpoints and men in uniform policing the physical division of the island of Ireland. Let us, if such a thing is possible, set aside questions of whether that hard border is truly inevitable in a no-deal exit. Let us also set aside any questions of blame for the prospect of that hard border.

Steerpike

Anna Soubry: people have had enough of 62-year-old Tory women

While several members of the ERG announced that they were voting against Theresa May in the Conservative leadership vote of no confidence last year, those on the Remain side of the Tory Party have generally been much more supportive of the PM, especially when it comes to public displays of loyalty. Chief Remainer Anna Soubry for one has routinely given interviews in support of May and sent this message on social media ahead of her confidence vote last year: 'We don’t need to change PM but the PM must change course. Get the vote back next week. And when it’s lost take this matter back to the people. It’s the only way out of #BrexitChaos & only way PM stays.' But could this loyalty be on the wane?

Nick Cohen

Snobs and mobs agree on the cost of a second referendum | 22 January 2019

Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that if you want to get on in Thames Valley society. Rather the Prime Minister issued her warning in the careful language of a bureaucrat. ‘There has not yet been enough recognition of the way that a second referendum could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy,’ she said. You would have missed her intent behind this seemingly bland statement unless you had been paying attention to the noise that surrounds her.

Ross Clark

Is Dyson’s Singapore move anything to do with Brexit?

Brexit has become the inverse of a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. It is the lens through which all negative economic news has come to be interpreted – and magnified. Yesterday, the IMF published its latest forecasts for global economic growth. One might well ask what use this material is, given the IMF’s past record at economic forecasting. But whether these forecasts are of any value or not, they have, predictably enough, been jumped on by the Remain-supporting media in order to scribble yet another chapter of anti-Brexit narrative. Indeed, according to this narrative, it is not just Britain which seems to be suffering now from the moronic, misinformed decision of the UK public to vote to leave the EU in 2016 – it is the entire world.

James Forsyth

Jeremy Hunt proposes a plan to make the backstop time-limited

Cabinet today was not as dramatic as some had expected. No one argued for ministers being allowed a free vote on the Cooper / Boles amendment. Indeed, I’m told the Chief Whip’s plea for ministers to stick to collective responsibility went unchallenged. Perhaps, the two most interesting contributions came from Jeremy Hunt and David Gauke. Gauke questioned the government’s new approach. He said he was worried that even if the government did get something on the backstop, there still wouldn’t be enough Tory MPs backing the deal for it to pass. While Hunt argued that the best thing for the government to do was to get parliamentary support for a plan on time-limiting the backstop.

Rod Liddle

In defence of Diane Abbott

The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: “Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?” But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. “The latter, I think,” is the response I have heard time and time again, both from Labour supporters and Tories. For the entire day before Abbott’s appearance on Question Time, in which she thinks she was treated badly on account of the colour of her skin and her gender, my wife had been bouncing around the house in a state of enormous excitement, looking forward to the car crash which would inevitably occur that evening on the TV. It always does with Diane.

Steerpike

Watch: David Blunkett despairs at Chris Williamson’s Brexit stance

David Blunkett once ruled the roost in the Labour party but under Jeremy Corbyn, Blair's old acolytes are mostly ignored within their old party. So it's no surprise that there was little for Blunkett to do other than hold his head in his hands as Corbynista favourite Chris Williamson spelled out his views on Brexit today. Appearing on the BBC's Politics Live, Williamson said he wasn't that bothered by a no deal Brexit because the 'key thing' for a future government to focus on is 'redistributing income and wealth'. Williamson admitted that economic growth might not be quite as fast if Britain did leave the EU without a deal, but that it would be worth it to lift more people out of poverty. Unfortunately, Blunkett did not agree. He described Williamson's position as 'risible'.

Monday

Katy Balls

Did Corbyn really just move closer to backing a second referendum?

After Theresa May appeared before the Commons to reveal that her Brexit Plan B looks an awful lot like her Brexit Plan A, MPs now have a chance to try and force the Prime Minister to change path. Next week, MPs will vote on May's Brexit motion – along with a series of amendments submitted by MPs. A range of amendments have so far been submitted, with Labour's Yvette Cooper attempting to take No Deal off the table (meaning Article 50 would be extended until a deal had been agreed upon) and Hilary Benn calling for indicative votes on four Brexit options. However, the amendment that has caused the most excitement this evening has been tabled by Labour.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May is using Jeremy Corbyn to avoid blame for her Brexit mess

The Commons has grown rather used to Theresa May giving an update on Brexit each Monday afternoon, and still more used to the Prime Minister offering precious little in the way of new information each time she does so. Today's statement was a little different, in that May is now asking MPs for more information, rather than MPs turning on her and accusing her of not telling them anything. She laboured rather heavily on the point that Jeremy Corbyn has so far refused to attend the cross-party talks designed to work out an agreement that the Commons can stomach, introducing it early in her statement, and returning to the point again after the Labour leader had finished talking.

Steerpike

Dominic Grieve’s constitutional crisis

Backbench MP and arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve shocked political observers this weekend, when it was revealed that he is planning to take control of the parliamentary timetable to allow a coalition of 300 MPs (less than a majority) to introduce legislation to block a no-deal Brexit. If he succeeds, the former Attorney General will overturn centuries of precedent and completely upend Britain's unwritten constitution which says that whoever wins an election, gets control over introducing legislation in the Commons. Speaking on Radio 4, Grieve defended his plot by saying that his controversial amendment still required a majority to pass into law: 'No business of the House can be decided without a majority.