Brexit

Thursday

Anthony Horowitz

Diary – 24 January 2019

Will I be allowed to take my dog to Europe after 29 March? A trivial question, you might think, in these feverish times, but one that might be an indicator of what the EU thinks of us and how/if they’re going to make us pay for leaving. I took Boss, my Battersea rescue, across France this Christmas and it couldn’t have been easier. The dog was barely noticed on the way out and given a fast, friendly check on the way back. Why should anything change? A pet on the road doesn’t get extra germs just because of the colour of its passport and yet nobody has any idea what’s

James Landale

Davos Notebook

Somehow I had managed more than a quarter of a century in journalism without ever going to Davos. It had become almost a badge of honour, the one gathering of global nabobs I had been able to dodge year after year. But here I am in the mountains of Switzerland, a new boy amid the pilgrims come to worship at the altar of globalisation. I am international by profession and inclination — could a diplomatic correspondent be anything else? — but I can report that this annual meeting of the world’s great and good makes itself easy to lampoon. One friend, also on his first Davos tour, says it is

James Forsyth

Tory grandees table backstop amendment

One of the most dramatic examples of how Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement had lost the support of her backbenches came when Graham Brady—the elected chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs—walked into the no lobby. Brady has now put down an amendment ahead of Tuesday’s vote which makes clear in what circumstances he would back the agreement. It says the House would support the withdrawal agreement if the government and the EU ‘replace the backstop with alternative arrangements to avoid a hard border’. The amendment is backed by the officers of the 1922 Committee—three of whom voted for May’s deal last week, and three of whom opposed it; the

Katy Balls

The People’s Vote campaign isn’t dead yet

It’s not been a great week for the People’s Vote campaign with several reports of internal rows and splits within the group. Today their attempts to bring about a second referendum hit another stumbling block. A faction of ‘People’s Vote’ backing MPs – including Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston and Labour’s Chuka Umunna – announced they are pulling their amendment calling for a second vote. Had they pressed on, there is a chance it would have been selected by the Speaker to be voted on next week. Announcing the decision, Wollaston said: ‘With great regret, we will not be laying [an amendment calling for a second referendum] because at this stage,

Wednesday

Ivan Rogers

The futility of the no-deal Brexit bluff

We desperately need clear and honest thinking about our choices – not just for the weeks but for the years, indeed decades, ahead. Our political debate is bedevilled by what, at the time I resigned, I termed “muddled thinking”, and by fantasies and delusions as to what our options really are in the world as it is – as opposed to several different worlds people on different sides of the debate would prefer to inhabit. These fantasies, which one would have hoped would be dissipating by now in the face of reality, are being propagated on all sides. Denialism is pretty universal. But if we are to take good decisions

Andrew Willshire

How Germany helped shape the conditions for Brexit

German political leaders, industrialists, artists and sportspeople wrote to the Times last week urging Brits to reconsider and stay in the EU. The letter was a mixture of gratitude that Britain had been willing to let Germany rejoin the ranks of civilised nations after the horrors of war, and a rather patronising list of the oh-so-adorable British quirks and foibles: our black humour, our curious habit of drinking tea with milk, drinking ale, driving on the left and pantomimes. But what really struck me was that, for all the warm words, there was no recognition that modern German politics might have played a role in Brexit, let alone a hint of contrition. In

Lloyd Evans

Isn’t James Dyson supposed to be a Brexiteer?

History will remember Sir James Dyson as the pioneer of the bagless vacuum-cleaner. Thanks to his genius, we are now able to interrupt our chores and stare in amazement at mini-tornados of dust and filth swirling around in a transparent cylinder. This void of rubbish has been exported all over the world – not unlike our parliamentary system. But its knighted creator made an error this week when he announced that Singapore is to be the new home of his world HQ. This looks like an endorsement of the EU which has just struck a trade-deal with Singapore. The Bagless Wonder is supposed be a Brexiteer. Tory backbencher James Gray

Katy Balls

Michel Barnier confirms Brexiteer fears

When Eurosceptic MPs voted down Theresa May’s Brexit deal last week, the hope was that this would send a strong signal both to the Prime Minister and Brussels that strong changes were needed if it were to have any hope of passing. The problem is that the scale of the defeat – by 230 votes – means that the changes Leave MPs want to see are not the changes that the EU has in mind. In an interview with the Luxembourg Times, chief negotiator Michel Barnier says that he does not believe the troubled backstop is ‘the central issue’. Instead, he believes the numbers for a Brexit deal can be

Tuesday

James Kirkup

Brexit is making Tories unforgivably careless about the union

On Saturday, a car bomb went off in the UK. In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to be exact. It was the latest in a long, long list of terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland, many of them carried out by men who wish to unite the island of Ireland in one state. Today, the European Commission stated, more bluntly than it ever has before, that Britain leaving the EU without a deal will mean a hard border between the EU (Ireland) and the UK (Northern Ireland). That means checkpoints and men in uniform policing the physical division of the island of Ireland. Let us, if such a thing is possible, set aside questions

Nick Cohen

Snobs and mobs agree on the cost of a second referendum | 22 January 2019

Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that if you want to get on in Thames Valley society. Rather the Prime Minister issued her warning in the careful language of a bureaucrat. ‘There has not yet been enough recognition of the way that a second referendum could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy,’ she said. You would have missed her intent

James Forsyth

Jeremy Hunt proposes a plan to make the backstop time-limited

Cabinet today was not as dramatic as some had expected. No one argued for ministers being allowed a free vote on the Cooper / Boles amendment. Indeed, I’m told the Chief Whip’s plea for ministers to stick to collective responsibility went unchallenged. Perhaps, the two most interesting contributions came from Jeremy Hunt and David Gauke. Gauke questioned the government’s new approach. He said he was worried that even if the government did get something on the backstop, there still wouldn’t be enough Tory MPs backing the deal for it to pass. While Hunt argued that the best thing for the government to do was to get parliamentary support for a

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May is using Jeremy Corbyn to avoid blame for her Brexit mess

The Commons has grown rather used to Theresa May giving an update on Brexit each Monday afternoon, and still more used to the Prime Minister offering precious little in the way of new information each time she does so. Today’s statement was a little different, in that May is now asking MPs for more information, rather than MPs turning on her and accusing her of not telling them anything. She laboured rather heavily on the point that Jeremy Corbyn has so far refused to attend the cross-party talks designed to work out an agreement that the Commons can stomach, introducing it early in her statement, and returning to the point

Robert Peston

The Prime Minister’s Brexit plans are all the same: run the clock down to 29 March

The Prime Minister’s plans B, C , D and E are all the same: run the clock as close as possible to 29 March, Brexit Day, so that enough of the critics to her Brexit plan blink at the risk of either crashing out with no deal or seeing Brexit cancelled such that it passes at the last. In two words, the Brexit strategy is ‘Tick Tock’. Yesterday’s conference-call cabinet meeting was a masterclass in Theresa May as bulldozer and ministers ‘sitting back’, according to one of them. She outlined as her preferred course the only approach that stands a chance of keeping her party together, which I’ve been reporting

Anthony Browne

The problem with backing out of Brexit

Are we suffering a national humiliation? There has been a lot of commentary – not least from elements of the Remain-supporting press – about how the UK has become an international laughing stock. Papers in other countries have joined in the chuckling. Recent events have not been good for our reputation for stability and sanity. However, the one thing that the UK could do to destroy what international credibility it has left, is to change its mind on Brexit, and go back to the EU asking whether we can stay after all. Our national humiliation would be complete. We would be the employee who stormed out publicly, insisting to everyone

Sunday

James Forsyth

May goes back to the backstop

Today’s Cabinet conference call was more illuminating in terms of direction of travel than the details of what Theresa May is actually going to do. It is now clear that May’s approach is to try and put the Tory DUP alliance back together by getting something on the backstop rather than trying to find some cross party consensus. One of the reasons for this is that the Labour leadership’s reluctance to play ball makes it very hard to get the numbers for any compromise deal. I am told that David Lidington, who had been leading the cross party talks, reluctantly acknowledged this point. As one Cabinet Minister put it to

Saturday

James Forsyth

Why a customs union is looking less likely

Immediately after the government’s crushing defeat on Tuesday night, a slew of Cabinet Ministers thought that it was inevitable that Theresa May would have to make some kind of concession on the customs union to get a deal through parliament. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, this option has run into two obstacles. First, Corbyn and McDonnell aren’t playing ball. Without their blessing, there is no way you could get 116 Labour MPs to vote with a Tory PM. Secondly, it has become clear that agreeing to a customs union would not only split the Tory party, lead to at least one Cabinet resignation, but would also—according

Friday

Harry Mount

Is this finally Boris Johnson’s moment?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That was the message of Boris Johnson’s speech this morning at a JCB factory in Staffordshire. He admitted this week that he regretted bottling his leadership bid in 2016. This time is his last chance to have a go at swiping the ultimate prize – the keys to Downing Street – a prize he’s coveted since he was a boy. Boris’s earliest known quotation is when, asked by his sister Rachel as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “World King.” He’s thinner and more smartly dressed than he’s been for years. That might have been influenced by the

Brendan O’Neill

The cheer on Question Time that will terrify Corbyn’s Labour

How brilliant was that cheer on Question Time last night? Isabel Oakeshott said Theresa May should just walk away from the EU. Fiona Bruce asked her if she meant we should pursue ‘No Deal’. ‘Yes’, said Oakeshott and there it was, instantly, contagiously, the loudest cheer I can remember hearing from a Question Time audience. This was no polite applause or murmur of approval. It was a statement — a noisy, rebellious statement of the people’s continuing and profound attachment to the idea of leaving the European Union, deal or no deal. It was a cheer that should echo through the nation. That will chill the bones of the political establishment. Which

Steerpike

Corbyn gives his verdict on a second Brexit referendum

Jeremy Corbyn is under mounting pressure to back a second referendum. Labour MPs have grouped together to try and persuade their leader to side with the People’s Vote campaign in order to break the Brexit deadlock. But so far, Corbyn doesn’t seem keen on the idea, preferring instead to sit on the fence. The same isn’t quite true of his brother, Piers, who in the early hours of this morning took to Twitter to make his views on a second referendum perfectly clear: Mr S thinks the People’s Vote brigade will be hoping that Jeremy doesn’t turn to Piers for advice on what to do next…

James Forsyth

The Norway v People’s Vote fight

One of the bitterest divides in British politics right now is between advocates of a second referendum and those who favour the Norway option. They both want to be the last alternative standing to no deal; and are happy to trash each other in the process. On Politics Live tonight, Tony Blair, the most prominent advocate of a second referendum, laid into the Norway option. He derided it as a ‘pointless Brexit’, as it would leave the UK following the rules of the single market but with less say in how they are made. Nick Boles, the principal Tory advocate of Norway plus, then hit back in his own interview