Brexit

In my Daily Telegraph column yesterday, I asked where Boris Johnson had gone. We never hear from him now, I said, unless there’s been some tragedy overseas or some risqué joke backfiring in Bratislava. Since becoming Foreign Secretary, the most gifted communicator in the Tory party had been mute – a baffling waste of talent. While he sulked, Brexit was being defined by its enemies. The narrative has become one of tedious negotiations and no one in government seemed able (or even interested) in saying what the point of Brexit was. Boris helped inspired a nation to vote for Brexit, and gave a wonderful, liberal and globally-minded definition of it

House prices are in freefall. Unemployment is rising relentlessly. The pound is plunging on the markets, and companies are re-locating to Paris and Frankfurt in droves. In the parallel universe Mark Carney increasingly seems to live in, that is a pretty accurate description of the British economy. In this universe, however, the picture is very different. The economy is doing just fine – and that is making it increasingly hard to understand why interest rates are being held at ‘emergency’ levels to cope with the ‘catastrophe’ of leaving the European Union. At a meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee yesterday, the Bank left rates on hold at 0.25 percent, while

The choice which faced us at the EU referendum has often been presented as lying between the status quo and the unknown, between security and uncertainty. Until the early hours of 24 June last year I was convinced that this would be the clincher: that the British public, though heavily Eurosceptic, would not quite have the balls to overcome their native conservatism and take what many would see as a leap in the dark. Yet Jean-Claude Juncker’s ‘state of the union’ speech today dispels the notion that voting Remain would have been a vote to keep things as they are. Remaining in the EU as it now is was not

The EU Withdrawal Bill is undoubtedly an important piece of legislation. But I suspect that the bickering over Henry VIII clauses and affirmative statutory instruments passes most voters by. This is why it’s imperative that Theresa May keeps reminding voters of what the point of Brexit is, of what it will enable this country to do. One of the many problems with the Tory general election campaign was that it turned Brexit into a process story. May talked endlessly about the need to strengthen her hand in the negotiations. But as Andrea Leadsom complained in the political Cabinet’s post-mortem of the election campaign, May never said what Brexit was actually

Up to now, Labour have managed to have their cake and eat it on Brexit. At the election, Labour MPs in Brexit-backing seats could say their party didn’t oppose leaving the EU and had voted for Article 50. At the same time, Labour hoovered up votes elsewhere in the country from those angry at Brexit. Remarkably, 39 percent of Financial Times readers voted for the party despite Jeremy Corbyn’s hostility to high earners and the City. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, Labour are threatening this coalition by voting against the EU withdrawal bill. Already, Tory MPs are excited at the prospect of being able to attack