Boris johnson

Theresa May’s Brexit challenge is truly Herculean. Every time she believes she has done enough to finally move the Brexit process on, she is told that there is something else she must do. And each time, her tasks become more difficult. The problem is compounded by the fact that May is weakening her own hand. The Monday misstep has harmed the UK’s position. As one Tory insider laments, ‘Things with the EU are bad. It shows Theresa can’t really deliver.’ Even a senior figure at the Department for Exiting the European Union admits that the ‘handling was poor’. The UK is also coming up against hardball negotiating tactics.

After the DUP took issue with government's handling of the Irish border question on Monday, Theresa May had to return home from her lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker empty-handed. What's more, there's no indication that a solution is in sight anytime soon. The DUP worry that the wording in the draft text – promising regulatory alignment in relation to the Good Friday agreement – could see Northern Ireland treated differently than the rest of the UK – and result in an Irish sea border. Meanwhile, some Brexiteers worry that agreeing regulatory alignment between the UK and Ireland could mean an end to the clean Brexit they envisaged. So, one could be forgiven for thinking Tuesday's Cabinet meeting must have been a tense affair.

It is Remembrance Sunday, and the party leaders put their politics aside this morning as they gathered around the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and honour those who lost their lives in times of war. However, in the TV studios, the political debate still carries on with as much vigour as before: Sadiq Khan - Boris Johnson has 'got to go' The Mayor of London joined Andrew Marr today and within minutes Khan had called for Boris Johnson to be dismissed from his post as Foreign Secretary. Marr raised the subject of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British national who is currently serving a five year jail sentence in an Iranian prison.

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’.

The latest competition called for a safe poem that Boris Johnson could have on hand to quote from when out in the field. The kerfuffle caused by the Foreign Secretary’s murmured quotation of a few lines from Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ during a recent visit to Shwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar led me to wonder whether it might be wise, given an ever-increasing number of no-go areas subject matter-wise, to challenge you to fashion an all-purpose poem unlikely to offend. Barbara Jones’s Blakean-flavoured entry — ‘And did my feet in foreign clime/ Trample on sensitivities?’ — caught my attention, as did Tim Raikes’s patter song. But they were outflanked by the winners below who take £25 each. The extra fiver is D.A. Prince’s.

If proof was needed that deference is dead in Parliament, look no further than the interview Tom Tugendhat has given to The House magazine. The new chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee uses his first interview since winning the coveted position to make clear he's ready and willing to be Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary should his services be required. However, the part that caught Mr S's eye relates to the current occupant of the Foreign Office. Tugendhat – who was elected to Parliament in 2015 – appears to launch an attack on Boris Johnson's modus operandi: 'He’s certainly got a lot of passion for the United Kingdom and has a way of expressing himself which certainly carries a lot of noise.

I used to long for mid-October when I could say goodbye to the hot rooms, cold buffets, and warm white wine of party conference season. But ever since I swapped politics for the world of museums, I have happily rediscovered those autumnal weeks of blackberries, spider webs and London returning to life after summer. At the V&A, we opened our new opera exhibition, tracing the art form’s development from Monteverdi’s Venice to Shostakovich’s Moscow. At the British Museum, the Scythians have been reviving the art of ancient Siberia. And around the capital, Frieze Art Fair has been drawing the world’s aesthetes to London. What we don’t yet know is how Brexit will affect this cultural leadership.

Good news in Downing Street: Theresa May has survived the weekend. After the Shapps plot failed to take off, the new consensus is that the beleaguered Prime Minister should re-assert her authority on an increasingly unruly Tory party by reshuffling her Cabinet. Had the speech gone better, there was talk that she could have done this last week. The Sunday Times reports that a shuffle is now likely to occur after the European Council meeting in two weeks' time. If May does oblige, there are calls from within the party for her to use a reshuffle to promote younger talent – and to sack the Foreign Secretary. The latter still looks unlikely.

By the simple expedients of being cheerful and attacking Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson scored a deserved hit at the Tory conference on Tuesday. It is right not to be shy about questioning Mr Corbyn’s record. But while it is true that Mr Corbyn has never wavered, over 40 years, in his extreme socialist views, it is also worth noting that he has recently changed his tone a lot. It reminds me of how Ian Paisley, without ever recanting his anti-Popery, dropped his noisy and lurid 1970s expressions of it, and adopted a more modern political voice. In his speech in Brighton last week, Mr Corbyn almost completely left out one of his deepest convictions — the need for a return of trade union power.

It's safe to say that Theresa May's conference speech has not gone to plan after the Prime Minister came down with a bad cough – and a heckler presented her with a P45. Happily she has her Cabinet on her side. Or one Cabinet minister at least. Amber Rudd was caught on camera jumping to her feet to give May a standing ovation to help her during an awkward moment in the speech. The Home Secretary then appeared to order Boris Johnson to do the same: https://twitter.com/hansmollman/status/915536471418900480 1-0 to Rudd...

Boris Johnson's speech to Conservative Party conference was disloyal to the Prime Minister in the sense that unlike Theresa May, the Foreign Secretary finds it easy to be upbeat and persuasive about the benefits of Conservatism. As this morning's round of interviews showed, the Prime Minister's definition of ‘upbeat’ is talking faster. Johnson, meanwhile, uses his command of the English language and confidence in public speaking to cheer up party members who were so desperate for something to take their minds off their current general misery that they were queuing in long lines to get into the conference hall. But members already love Johnson.

Will Tory MPs unite behind Theresa May? That's the big question at this year's party conference - but for Boris Johnson, there is also another pressing issue: can Cyprus reunite? The Foreign Secretary arrived in Manchester – and immediately joined a welcome reception for the Conservative friends of Cyprus. He revealed to the audience the talks he has been privy to over the past year: We have not in the last 12 months achieved quite what I wanted to do. And there was a meeting in the Swiss resort called Crans Montana where we all tried to get together to resolve the Cyprus problem and we all went up to about 15,000 metres above sea level, roughly speaking, and we could see the summit figuratively, and indeed, literally.