Brexit

Sunday

Steerpike

The New York Times continues its doom and gloom Brexit coverage

When it comes to Brexit, the New York Times has a track record in prophesying doom and gloom. Last year, the paper’s coverage included the suggestion that everyone in London was eating boiled mutton and porridge until a few years ago and that nervous citizens are stockpiling food for a Brexit emergency, Mr S. is saddened but not surprised to report that the Times is still at it. And this week, the paper hit new heights of fantasy. ‘Roads gridlocked with trucks. Empty supermarket shelves. An economy thrown into paralysis,’ a would-be novelist named Scott Reyburn wrote earlier this week. His story, ‘As Brexit Looms, the Art World Prepares for the Fallout’, was recycled as

Saturday

James Forsyth

What will the Commons do to Brexit next week?

Brexit is back in the Commons next week. As I write in The Sun this morning, two of the big questions are: what will Eurosceptic Tories accept in terms of changes to the backstop and will the Cooper amendment pass. A document circulating among Tory Eurosceptics sets out what MPs should and shouldn’t regard as a meaningful change to the backstop. It warns that assurances from the EU Council would be ‘worthless’ and that changes to the political declaration would be ‘not legally binding’. It says that an interpretative instrument would have, ‘Some legal value’ but ‘would be a face-saver that would be legally pretty meaningless.’ Interestingly, though, it suggests

Friday

Steerpike

Andrew Adonis’s case for a second referendum falls flat

It’s Andrew Adonis’s birthday and how better for him to mark the occasion than with a tweet about Brexit? Adonis, who has busied himself as chief cheerleader for the campaign to stop Brexit, took to Twitter today to deliver his verdict on how he thought momentum towards a second referendum had grown beyond all doubt: But Mr S. isn’t convinced that the example he used really helped advance his cause. In the 2016 referendum, Islington was one of the top five strongholds for Remain in the entire country, with 75.2 per cent of voters opting for Britain to stay put in the EU. It seems that in the years since,

The Spectator

In normal times, the government would be boasting of falling unemployment

At any other time, news that Honda intends to close its Swindon plant in two years’ time with the loss of 3,500 jobs would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy for those affected, their families and businesses it supports. But the story was used by both sides in the Brexit wars to prove their point. Certain Remainers saw it as proof of what leaving the EU will bring, while some Leavers were almost callous in the way they shrugged off the closure. When news like this is being exaggerated for effect, it’s hard to form a clear view of what’s going on. But through the fog, a

Stephen Daisley

Ian Austin’s refusal to join the Independent Group shows the party is Continuity Remain

Ian Austin has become the ninth MP to quit Labour, blaming the party’s culture of anti-Semitism. He tells the Express and Star: ‘The Labour Party has been my life, so this has been the hardest decision I have ever had to take, but I have to be honest and the truth is that I have become ashamed of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.’ He continues: ‘I am appalled at the offence and distress Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have caused to Jewish people. It is terrible that a culture of extremism, anti-Semitism and intolerance is driving out good MPs and decent people who have committed their life to mainstream

Thursday

The Spectator

Britain is working

At any other time, news that Honda intends to close its Swindon plant in two years’ time with the loss of 3,500 jobs would have been seen for what it is: a tragedy for those affected, their families and businesses it supports. But the story was used by both sides in the Brexit wars to prove their point. Certain Remainers saw it as proof of what leaving the EU will bring, while some Leavers were almost callous in the way they shrugged off the closure. When news like this is being exaggerated for effect, it’s hard to form a clear view of what’s going on. But through the fog, a

Richard Madeley

Diary – 21 February 2019

A choppy week sitting in for Piers Morgan again on Good Morning Britain. One nude studio guest, a sprinkling of prevaricating politicians and an interview with the delightfully direct Dolly Parton. That’s breakfast telly for you. And I love Dolly. Who doesn’t? I’ve met her a few times and she’s as sharp as a tack. Once, mid-interview, she stretched out her legs and considered her shoes. I laughed. ‘You’ve got really tiny feet, haven’t you, Dolly?’ She nodded, adjusting her embonpoint with both hands. ‘Nothing grows in the shade, honey.’ I remember my first interview with a naked person. (You don’t forget that kind of thing.) I was the local paper’s

Johannes de Jong

For the Dutch, Brexit is a mistake – and a big opportunity

An advert in the Netherlands features a hairy beast warning about the looming departure of Britain from the EU. Move over Project Fear, this is Project Fur: a campaign aimed at urging businesses to brace themselves for a no-deal Brexit. So what do the Dutch make of the big blue Brexit monster? While the British media has been busy laughing at photos of the muppet-like creature straddling a desk as the Dutch foreign minister watches on, the truth is that this campaign has actually passed many people by. This is a shame: there are good reasons for Dutch folk to worry about the impact of an acrimonious Brexit. Such an outcome would

James Forsyth

Tories must temper their Brexit passions – or pay the price

There is a great opportunity in front of the Tories. As I say in the magazine this week, there’s 12 more years in power for the taking for them because of the split in the Labour party. But seizing this opportunity will require the Tories to temper their passions on Brexit. There are two Brexit outcomes that would be electorally disastrous for the Tories: no Brexit and no deal. No Brexit would be catastrophic because the Tories would have failed to deliver on the referendum result. The last two and a bit years would have been for naught and a pro-Brexit party would take huge chunks out of the Tories’

Robert Peston

The nine ministers who could quit if May doesn’t rule out no deal

On my show last night, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid captured why nine of his ministerial colleagues have told the Prime Minister they may have to resign next week (though he won’t be joining them). Javid said that a no-deal Brexit would be damaging for the UK, that he didn’t want it, that the risk of it had increased but that there was no way to stop it. Well four cabinet ministers and five junior ministers agree on everything but that last point. In two separate meetings with the PM on Monday, they told her that either she has to agree to ask the EU to delay Brexit, if it

Martin Vander Weyer

The UK car industry is reversing back to the 1970s

When I wrote a fortnight ago, in the context of Nissan’s decision not to build its new X-Trail model at Sunderland, that ‘British carmaking as a whole is on course to shrink back to the 1970s’, I was expecting the next bulletin of doom from US-owned Ford, whose bosses — I’d heard from an insider — were ‘hair-on-fire apoplectic’ at the government’s failure to provide Brexit clarity. Subsequent indications that Ford may shift some production out of the UK were taken by industry watchers as a mild warning of serious cutbacks to come — but meanwhile, news of Honda’s factory closure at Swindon knocked everything else off the headlines. Honda’s

James Delingpole

The story behind my naked video

It was a bright Sunday afternoon and I was harmlessly at my desk, minding my own business, when from the other end of the house I heard the screech of a thousand cats being boiled alive in oil. ‘Why did he do it? WHY??’ a female teenage voice wailed, half plaintive, half accusing, all righteous fury. It was my daughter’s — and evidently I’d been rumbled. So why exactly had the poor girl’s embarrassing father chosen to film a naked video of himself and then post it up on YouTube for the entire world to see? Well the main one, fairly obviously, was as a satirical response to Victoria Bateman,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Is the Independent Group already heading for a split?

The three Conservative defectors to the Independent Group gave a notably upbeat press conference this lunchtime. It was quite a contrast to the sorrowful tone struck by the seven Labour MPs who announced they were leaving on Monday. Heidi Allen claimed that she was ‘so excited and in a way that I haven’t felt since I was first elected’. She also cracked jokes about the three amigos as she opened the event.  It has never been fully clear why Allen joined the Conservative party over any other, but Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston both argued that the organisation had been transformed in the years since they were first elected. Like

Monday

Alex Massie

In praise of the Labour splitters | 18 February 2019

The first thing to note is that it’s not about policy. The not-so secret seven MPs who left the Labour party this morning have not changed their policy preferences. They have not become Tories. Nor have they even become liberals. They could, with little difficulty, endorse much of the Labour party’s 2017 manifesto without compromising themselves in the slightest.  Because this break, this rebellion, this journey into exile, is not about policy. It is about character and values and so many of the other things the Labour party believes it holds dear to the extent it often behaves as though it thinks it owns a monopoly on these things. And

James Forsyth

Will any Tory MPs join the Independent Group?

Is this a split in the Labour party or something more? At today’s launch, Chuka Umunna was clear that the Independent Group want to attract MPs from parties other than Labour. Tory party sources admit that they ‘would not be surprised’ if some Tory MPs were to join this new group. Right now, the values of this group seem fairly—for want of a better word—Blairite. The addition of any Tory MPs would make this group more ideological heterodox; and show if it can carve out a distinctive intellectual position. Politically, it would also mean that it was not just Labour who are split. But given the way that the Tory

Steerpike

Watch: Luciana Berger’s damning verdict on Labour

Luciana Berger and six other Labour MPs have just quit the Labour party. Explaining her reasons for quitting Corbyn’s party, Berger said she had come to the conclusion that Labour is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’. She said she was ’embarrassed’ to stay put in Labour. Here is her damning verdict on the party: I have become embarrassed and ashamed to remain in the Labour party. I have not changed. The values which I hold really dear, and which led me to join the Labour party as a student almost 20 years ago, remain who I am. And yet these values have been consistently and constantly violated, undermined and attacked as the Labour

Saturday

James Forsyth

What can May now get on the backstop?

When Theresa May goes to Brussels next week to bat for changes to the backstop, she’ll do so with a large crack in her bat—I say in The Sun this morning. The symbolic defeat that MPs inflicted on her Brexit plan on Thursday night has significantly weakened her negotiating position. The EU doesn’t want to make significant changes to the backstop. When the Brady amendment passed the House of Commons, saying parliament would accept the deal if the backstop was replaced, the EU responded by saying that they didn’t think this parliament majority was ‘stable’. Thursday night’s vote helps them make that argument. I understand that when the Brexit Secretary

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 14 February 2019

Places in Hell President Donald Tusk said there must be a ‘special place in Hell reserved for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan of how to carry it out safely’. Yet there are a number of places, as defined by Dante, where many on either side of the Brexit debate could be accommodated. Some groups who have space reserved in the Inferno, in descending order: Opportunists; Hoarders and wasters; Wrathful and sullen; Fortune Tellers; Hypocrites; Evil Counsellors; Sowers of Discord; Falsifiers. Lost planes The wreckage of a plane was discovered off the Channel Islands and the body of the footballer Emiliano Sala recovered. How many

The Spectator

Break point

Even the most fervent Brexiteer would have to admit to being impressed at the cohesion and chutzpah of the European Union negotiating team. Michel Barnier talks as if it is the UK that most needs a deal, while the rest of the EU could carry on just as well as before, or better, without one, given that it would be able to attract business and investment away from us. For the EU to concede a trade deal, therefore, would seem to be little more than an act of kindness towards a fallen friend. As a diplomatic bluff, it is strikingly successful. But the economic reality is rather different. A free-trade

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 February 2019

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, returned from a trip to Brussels and Dublin and hurried to the Commons to ask for more time to do something or other about the Irish backstop. The much-kicked Brexit can was expected to land in the parliamentary road again on 27 February, though the government envisaged no ‘meaningful vote’ until March. Oliver Robbins, Britain’s chief Brexit negotiator, was overheard in a bar saying that the choice might be between Mrs May’s deal or a delay to Brexit, to which the EU would agree. Brexit had taken an eschatological turn after Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, said at a press conference: