Boris johnson

Thursday

Katy Balls

The torture chamber: how opposition MPs plan to humiliate Boris

When Jeremy Corbyn declared at Labour conference that his party would only allow an election once no deal had been taken off the table, MPs began to wonder if it could be put off until the new year. The Prime Minister’s tormentors can’t agree when exactly they would like to go to the country, but all agree that there are plenty of ways to torture Boris Johnson. It’s as good a way as any to pass the time. The Tories no longer have a working majority, so these opposition MPs — aided by activist Speaker John Bercow — now hold the power. What will they do? Well, the Conservatives are meant to be gathering in Manchester this weekend for their annual meeting. However, opposition MPs plan to vote against any conference recess.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson has shown a worrying lack of emotional intelligence

The House of Commons has just turned very ugly indeed, after Boris Johnson dismissed a Labour MP who was complaining about the abuse and threats she and other colleagues are receiving as 'humbug'. Paula Sherriff – who has had a particularly sustained campaign of abuse against her, including swastikas being left at her office – made an angry appeal to the Prime Minister to consider his language, and referred to the murder of her colleague Jo Cox as she did.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn clash spectacularly in the Commons

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have just clashed spectacularly in the House of Commons. Boris Johnson repeatedly goaded Jeremy Corbyn over his refusal to go for an election now.  This was not a Prime Minister acting like one who had been chastened by the Supreme Court’s decision, but one determined to set himself up as the man determined to deliver Brexit against a parliament that was trying to stop him. One of the most striking features of his speech was how frequently he declared that the public could tell what was really going on, that MPs were trying to block Brexit. In response, Jeremy Corbyn was not at his best. He failed to forensically examine the government’s position.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can New York give the Brexit negotiations some momentum?

Three events will dominate next week. The Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of prorogation, Labour conference and the UN General Assembly. As I say in The Sun this morning, Boris Johnson’s address in New York will be more ‘Green Giant’ than ‘Incredible Hulk’. He’ll stress the UK’s environmental credentials; announcing a new biodiversity fund designed to help save the African elephant, the black rhino and the pangolin. But more important than the speech he’ll make is the meetings that will take place in the margins. He’ll see most of the key players in the Brexit talks in New York, including a meeting with the Irish leader Leo Varadkar on Monday.

Thursday

Toby Young

David Cameron is more authentic than Boris Johnson

I don’t recall exactly when I first met David Cameron, but it must have been in Oxford in 1985 shortly after the beginning of Michaelmas term. I was a third year at Brasenose studying PPE and he was a first year, also doing PPE. I remember him being friendly and down to earth and canny enough to keep his political views to himself. At the time, Brasenose was dominated by a group calling itself the ‘left caucus’ and while it wasn’t social suicide to be identified as a Tory, it was a bit infra dig. After Cameron twigged that we were both ‘in the closet’, so to speak, he confessed to me that he was a Thatcherite. ‘Dry as dust,’ he whispered.

James Forsyth

Why there’s still a chance of a deal

One of the reasons why Boris Johnson is Prime Minister is that he is an optimist. After the negativity of the May years, the Tory party yearned for some can-do spirit, which he was able to provide. But his relentless positivity has made it difficult to assess how realistic a Brexit deal is. At cabinet on Tuesday he made very bullish noises about the prospects of an agreement being reached. How realistic is this, though? Johnson told the assembled ministers that he’d had a ‘good lunch’ with Jean-Claude Juncker. There were chuckles. More seriously, he pointed out that the EU had shifted from its prior position, which was that the withdrawal agreement could not possibly be reopened and that only the political declaration could be changed.

Robin Oakley

My puppy-training advice for Boris Johnson

President Harry Truman once observed: ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister in the unfriendliest era British politics has known, and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds have taken on a Jack Russell puppy called Dilyn. They and I are therefore among the 24 per cent of UK citizens who are dog-owners, with nearly nine million animals in our national ownership. Taking on a puppy in retirement, said our friends, was madness — especially in a house full of antiques and with a carefully tended garden. Certainly, the game has changed since we last raised a puppy 40 years ago. So have the overheads.

Tuesday

Monday

Steerpike

David Cameron makes life awkward for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Oh dear. Relations between Boris Johnson and Michael Gove could become a bit awkward this week after an extract from David Cameron’s memoirs published today in the Times revealed that the current PM asked Cameron whether Gove was “a bit cracked”. Johnson apparently inquired about the mental wellbeing of his now close cabinet colleague after Gove jumped ship and decided to mount his own leadership campaign following Cameron’s resignation in 2016. Cameron has not held back in targeting his former friends and colleagues in his autobiography which will be published later this week.

Sunday

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...

Thursday

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.

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.

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.

Peter Jones

Pericles for PM: Boris should forget Augustus and stay focused on his hero

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.

Lionel Shriver

Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t

American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK, these two phenomena are perceived as identical twin expressions of an alarming ‘populism’, whereby the animals take over the zoo. I’m one of the curiously few political voyeurs who think the American electorate’s preference for an incompetent president and the British electorate’s preference for leaving a power-hungry erstwhile trading bloc have little in common. Dizzying events in the UK this month bring out one vital distinction in relief.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Boris tells Cabinet, ‘I’m the most liberal Conservative PM in decades’

Anyone expecting today’s Cabinet to have been a bust-up following Amber Rudd’s resignation will have been disappointed. From what I’m hearing, it was a strikingly harmonious meeting. Perhaps this was because most of the meeting was focused on the government’s domestic agenda. On Brexit, I’m told that Boris Johnson said his policy remains unchanged—that he still wanted the UK to leave on October 31st with a deal if possible, but without one if needs be. He said that what he’ll do on 19 October, the day on which the Prime Minister is required by the Benn Bill to request an extension if there’s no deal, will only become clearer nearer the time.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

How much collateral damage can the Tory party take?

Amber Rudd’s resignation has clearly been a blow to the government, but it wasn’t a huge surprise that she went after a week in which many of her closest political allies were booted out of the Tory party. What is more of a surprise is that she accepted a cabinet job with Boris Johnson in the first place. MPs who were being offered jobs when the Prime Minister took over had conversations with Johnson’s top aide Dominic Cummings in which he warned that there would be what he termed ‘collateral damage’ to the Conservative party as a result of his efforts to get Brexit sorted. They can’t believe Rudd didn’t take a step back and think about what that damage would entail. That said, there are nerves about how much more damage the party can take.

Gavin Mortimer

Does Macron grasp what Corbyn would mean for France?

I had supper on Saturday with an old friend. She's a committed French socialist, a schoolteacher in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, the most impoverished department in France. She's relatively new to the profession, having decided in her late thirties that teaching was her calling. So she went back to university and upon qualifying she asked to be sent to the most challenging suburb in France. Earlier this year I accepted her invitation to address her pupils on the subject of writing and journalism. It was a good day out. I went not knowing what to expect but left having met two classes of teenagers who were attentive and appreciative.