Brexit

Regardless of who leads it, the Conservative Party now has the opportunity to cling to office, possibly even for the rest of this five-year Parliament. They're the biggest party and a deal with the DUP is the basis for forming a new government. But that's only the start. To remain in office, the Conservatives are going to have to accept a lot of compromises. They're going to have to compromise on Brexit, and thus on immigration. They're going to have to compromise on economic policy (spend more, cut less) and markets (intervene more). They're going to have to compromise with the Scottish voters who threw them a parliamentary lifeline by endorsing Ruth Davidson's humane, moderate Conservatism.

On this week's episode, we discuss the relationship between Islam and violence, question why Brexit hasn’t been a factor in this election, and ask you to embrace the darkness. First up: in this week’s cover story, Tom Holland considers why Theresa May was wrong to dismiss the London Bridge terror attack as ‘a perversion of Islam’ rather than interrogating its roots in the history of the religion. He joined the podcast along with Christopher de Bellaigue, author of The Islamic Enlightenment. As Tom writes: "Last Saturday night, religiously motivated killing returned to London Bridge.

From Brexit and Grexit to Trump and Scottish (near) independence, the way we think about our place in the world is changing. In the UK and further afield these issues have shone a light on the fact that we live in a global, multicultural melting pot - with ties to friends, family and colleagues around the planet. The way we manage our money is changing, too. Regulation, rebuilding trust, teenage hackers and woefully outdated technology have kept our favourite high street banks busy recently. You probably haven’t ditched your current account yet or tried out a new alternative like Starling or Atom Bank, but you might soon. After no new banks for 100 years, dozens have appeared since 2010.

Theresa May turned in what, I think, was her best TV performance of the election tonight. May engaged with the questions more than she has in previous TV events, and was more confident and fluent than she had been on Monday night. After a prolonged Tory wobble, her performance will have steadied jangling Tory nerves. May pitched hard for the Brexit vote. She said that she had called the election ‘for Brexit’ and that if you voted Leave, you needed to make sure you got it. When she was accused of calling the election for political gain, she hit back saying that she had had the balls to call an election rather than just serving out the term the Tories had won in 2015. Her deliberate use of the word balls was very Thatcheresque, deliberately flipping the language of gender.

Recently, The Spectator held a roundtable discussion on the digital economy, featuring Matt Hancock, minister for digital and culture, Garrett Ilg, President EMEA, Adobe; Pete Cummings (Adobe), Vicky Ford MEP, George Freeman MP, Richard Fuller MP, Chris Green MP, Isabel Hardman (The Spectator), Charlotte Holloway (Tech UK), Stephen Metcalf MP, Valerie Mocker (Nesta), and Charlie Pickles (Reform). This is what resulted. Britain is one of the most digitally engaged countries in the world. We don’t have a Google, we don’t have Silicon Valley, but our industry is highly innovative in using technology to transform its operations. As consumers, too, we are strong participants in the digital economy.

Can we trust the pollsters? Bruised by Brexit and caught out by Trump, the psephologists claim they’ve finally learnt their lesson. If so, that’s a big problem for the Tories: today’s YouGov poll predicts that the party is on course for an electoral upset which could see them lose their majority. YouGov have been busy defending the numbers behind the headline this morning, and the company's Joe Twyman has been doing just that on the Spectator's Coffee House Shots podcast. So, given YouGov failed to get it right in 2015, why should we believe them this time? And will the pollsters end up tweaking their assumptions? Here's Joe Twyman: 'We are confident in the power of our data and the smart of our data scientists, that we have something that works.

Angela Merkel has never been a showboating politician. Public speaking isn’t her forte – she prefers to work behind the scenes. That’s why her latest speech has made such big waves, on both sides of the Atlantic. The Washington Post said it marked the beginning of a ‘new chapter in US-European relations.’ The New York Times called it a ‘potentially seismic shift.’ Seasoned US diplomat Richard Haas described it as ‘a watershed’ in America’s relationship with Europe. So what did Merkel say? What did she mean by it? And what are the implications for Germany, and for Britain?

Inflation is rising. Real wages are stagnant, and GDP is being revised downwards, putting us down there with the likes of Italy. If Theresa May had a script for the final fortnight of the election campaign it probably didn’t include figures like those. Today’s revision of the quarterly GDP number, down to a sluggish-looking 0.2 percent, from the initial 0.3 percent, will no doubt be seized upon by critics of the government, and by the increasingly battle-weary battalions of hardcore Remainers, as evidence that the wheels are finally coming off the economy, and the impact of a ‘hard Tory Brexit’ is finally being felt. In fact, however, it tells us something quite different. The UK is certainly slowing down in the first half of this year.

Last year's Austrian presidential election looked like a turning point for the European Union. Alexander Van der Bellen, a soft left Eurofederalist (narrowly) defeated Eurosceptic Norbert Hofer, of the hard right Austrian Freedom Party, and Continental Europhiles went into 2017 with fresh hope that they might halt the tidal wave of Brexit, before it engulfed the EU. Sure enough, this year France and Holland have both returned Europhile candidates, and Germany looks set to follow suit. The tide had turned, the pundits said. 2016 had been the high water mark of Populism. 2017 would be the year the EU fought back.

That the Tories would enjoy this general election campaign and Labour would spend it alternating between abject misery and total panic was a given from the moment Theresa May announced she wanted to go to the polls. More of a surprise has been how uncomfortable the Liberal Democrats have looked so far. Tim Farron has spent far too much time defending and then apparently recanting various unpopular beliefs. The party is averaging nine per cent in the polls. One analysis suggests they could end up with fewer than the nine seats they currently hold. What’s going wrong? Aside from Farron’s awkward media encounters over his religious beliefs, the party may also have made a mistake with its anti-Brexit strategy.

Unemployment is down. Retail sales are still strong. House prices are stable. Even the Great British Peso, the currency formerly known as the pound, has recovered much of its losses of the past year. After the vote to leave the EU, the UK economy has been remarkably strong. Even triggering Article 50, which some said would be the point when the whole pack of cards collapsed, doesn’t seem to have made any difference. With that wind in behind the UK’s sails, it is easy to understand why the Conservative party is feeling fairly secure about the state of the economy. And that may help explain why there is remarkably little in the manifesto to strengthen the competitiveness of the country. Sure, the commitment to reduce corporation tax to 17percent is maintained, and that is great.

It’s now a tradition for an ­incoming French president to make his first ­foreign trip a visit to Berlin. Yet even by past standards, Emmanuel Macron’s dash to meet Angela Merkel on the day after he was inaugurated seemed indecently quick. The lightning meeting at the German ­Chancellery was a statement of intent by the pair that the European Union is not only far from ­finished but that they intend to carry on with an even deeper union. Macron says he wants no less than a ­‘historic reconstruction’ of Europe, with a single finance minister to cover the ­eurozone.

Can we please stop pretending this is a normal election? Everyone’s at it. Gabbing about NHS funding, arguing over energy price caps. Everyone’s acting as if it’s 2015, or 2010, or any other election year of the modern period, when mildly right-wing parties and mildly left-wing parties argued the toss over fairly technical matters and voters decided which was most trustworthy. It’s pantomime, a performance of normalcy in an era that’s anything but normal. Because we all know, somewhere in the attic of our minds, that this is an election like no other, and that it’s about one issue and one issue only. You don’t even have to name it. It hangs in the air, a perfume of liberty to those of us who like it, a foul stench to those who hate it.

I see that the UK’s Lucie Jones has blamed her Eurovision Song Contest failure upon Brexit. Lucie actually came fifteenth, which was substantially higher than either she or the song deserved. Her song, 'Never Gonna Give Up On You', or some such egregious, banal, tripe, was a hugely boring ballad without even the redemption of an interesting chorus. That’s why it came fifteenth – that and the fact that we chose a failure from that anti-musical jamboree, X Factor, to sing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl1GYTg4GmA Lucie is just the latest in a long line of people to blame Brexit for being utterly useless. I might use the Brexit get-out next time I can’t get an erection. 'Sorry love, I just feel bad about us leaving the European Union.