Brexit

Smooth. Intelligent and articulate. A former finance minister. A European. And perhaps most importantly of all, a mildly irritating potential rival to the prime minister of his own country. In lots of ways, George Osborne ticks all the boxes to replace Christine Lagarde as the managing director of the IMF. Indeed, if you were looking for a perfect replica of the incumbent, minus the pearls and the elegant neck scarfs, you might well settle on the former chancellor. The trouble is, while Osborne’s brand of centrist Conservatism might suit the Fund in easier times, what it needs now is radical change – and the editor of the Evening Standard has

In the forthcoming edition of The Spectator, we have an interview with Boris Johnson. You can read the whole interview with Katy Balls and myself from tomorrow morning, but one bit that particularly struck me was his language on the Irish border. Boris Johnson is returning to the position of challenging the Irish and the EU to put up border posts in the event of no deal. Here’s the exchange Can I ask you about the Irish border, can you foresee any circumstances where you would build …? Boris Johnson: No, no. So there is a lot of confusion about this point and so the only way there will be

Silence has befallen French pronouncements on Brexit. Le Monde’s vitriolic editorial (12 June 2019) on Boris Johnson apart, the scene is remarkably calm. But this isn’t good news. In fact, such silence is often a sign of French anxiety and a presage to trouble, particularly when Britain is concerned. As rationalists, the French are frequently frustrated by the ‘wait and see’ of the empirical British. ‘What is not clear is not French’, said the 18th century French philosopher Antoine de Rivarol. At the height of the 1914 July Crisis, when France desperately sought a British government commitment to side with Paris in the event of war with Germany, the phlegmatic

Who will replace Jean-Claude Juncker? That’s the question being decided at the European Council summit. But so far, things are not going to plan. From Sunday afternoon, leaders – along with Theresa May, who promised to be “constructive” in the debate – have been discussing who should take over the most senior EU jobs, including the successor to Juncker as European Commission president. Now, the meeting has been suspended until tomorrow without any decision made. Whoever takes over will do so at a key time in the Brexit process. The president will handle the Brexit process on the EU side, whether in terms of making changing to the Political Declaration (which

There has been a lot of talk about how Article XXIV of GATT can provide an alternative to the Withdrawal Agreement. But here’s the deal with Article XXIV of GATT: it is a solution to a problem which is not the problem. Let me try to illustrate this with a story. Imagine a couple – let’s call them Joe and Angela – who are going through a divorce. After a long-drawn process, and hundreds of billable hours, their lawyers have at last produced a draft divorce settlement. The successful business that Joe and Angela have built will continue, but Joe will need to make a series of maintenance payments to

This weekend, the most popular political party in Britain will hold a rally in Birmingham to plan its march to Westminster. The Brexit party came first in the European elections but to its supporters, this was just the warm-up. If today’s polls became tomorrow’s election result, then the Tories would be left with just 87 MPs, barely a quarter of their current strength. Nigel Farage would lead an army of 193 MPs, and doing such damage that Jeremy Corbyn would still hang on to a party of 234. It is scenario that is terrifying the Tories – and delighting the Farigistas. In Birmingham tomorrow, the party aims to unveil the

The New York Times’s strange jihad against post-Brexit Britain continues. Some readers may have missed the paper’s insistence that having only just finished eating mutton, the British public are currently stock-piling food and all but preparing to start eating each other (see here, here, and here just for starters).  But yesterday they have returned to the fray with the international edition of the paper carrying a front-page piece declaring ‘Extremists hijacked UK politics’.  The online version of the story is headlined ‘A fanatical sect has hijacked British politics’.  The author of the piece is someone called William Davies, who we are informed (in fact in the circumstances we really do need