Brexit

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: loss of a confidence vote

Liam Fox - Parliament could have a free vote on Brexit The International Trade Secretary joined Andrew Marr this morning to discuss Brexit's next steps following a turbulent week which saw the Prime Minister win a vote of confidence by 200 votes to 117. With the date for Parliament's 'meaningful vote' on the Brexit deal now pushed back until mid-January, Liam Fox entertained a potential course of action still open to the government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OuCktv1INE AM: Shouldn’t Tory MPs... be allowed a free vote? LF: Well that’s not something that we have considered.

Saturday

Ivan Rogers

The nine lessons of Brexit

The stakes could not be higher now. We face the biggest political crisis for at least a couple of generations. The risks are now both a democratic crisis and an economic one. We just cannot go on as we have been: evading and obfuscating choices – indeed frequently denying, against all evidence, that there are unavoidable choices. And the public will understandably not, for a very long time, forgive a political class which on all sides of the divide fails to level with it on the choices being made. This feels a rather unseasonal theme but as we are approaching Christmas I thought I would therefore talk about nine lessons we need to draw from the last two and a half years, if the next two and a half – indeed the next decade – are not to be even more painful.

James Forsyth

Where does May go from here?

How does Theresa May break the Brexit logjam? Well, as I write in the Sun this morning, there are three ways to do this being discussed by Cabinet Ministers—the situation is now such that ministers don’t feel there’s anything disloyal about discussing contingency plans. The first option would see the government back an amendment to May’s deal when it comes to the Commons for a vote in January. The government would accept an amendment that added a sunset clause to the backstop, this would mean that it would expire after a defined period of time unless parliament voted to keep it going. With that change, May’s deal would have a fighting chance of passing the Commons. Some in government think that this might just be enough to win over the DUP.

Ross Clark

The simple solution to Theresa May’s Brexit dilemma

For once, I think Jean Claude-Juncker might have a point. “Nebulous” was a pretty good description of Theresa May’s mission to Brussels. What, exactly, was she expecting from EU leaders that was also going to please her own backbenchers? She must have known the EU would stonewall her over the backstop. She seemed merely to be asking for ‘reassurances’ rather than a legal guarantee that Britain could not be trapped in the backstop – in spite of knowing full well that reassurances are not going to be enough to win over her Commons critics. To adapt Winston Churchill, May’s strategy has become a nebula trapped inside a smog, hidden within a miasma.  Yet there is such as easy way out of the mess.

Friday

Robert Peston

Theresa May now faces a humiliating choice over Brexit

Here is the measure of Theresa May’s failure last night, according to an observer of her request to EU leaders for “assurances” that UK membership of the EU backstop would be finite and of short duration. They were ready to help. They assumed a process of officials agreeing a text over coming week would start today, to give her the necessary words that would persuade Tory and DUP critics of her deal to ultimately support it. But it was during the course of questioning her that they concluded such a process – such an extension of talks – would be a total waste of time. Why? Well according to one observer of the conversation between May and the EU27 leaders, “she could not say what would actually deliver a majority in parliament for her”.

Matthew Lynn

The myth of the Brexit cliff edge

The ports will be clogged up with lorries. The shelves at Tesco will be empty. Doctors will be rationing antibiotics, and the army will be called out to deliver food. As we approach the deadline for our departure from the European Union, as the Prime Minister returns empty handed yet again from yet another catastrophic round of negotiations in Brussels, and as the cliff-edge gets closer and closer, the conventional wisdom is that the pressure on Britain to agree to something – anything! – becomes more and more intense. And yet, as so often in the through-the-looking glass world of Brexit, that conventional wisdom is a bit off target. And not just by a little as it happens, but by 180 degrees.

Robert Peston

Theresa May’s catastrophic night in Brussels

It has been a catastrophic night for the Prime Minister here in Brussels. She was rebuffed by EU leaders in her request for a few weeks of fresh work by officials to formulate words of what she called “reassurance”, such that Tory Brexiter and DUP MPs could be confident that the backstop they hate would only ever be short lived if implemented. “We do not want the UK to think there can be any form of renegotiation whatsoever” said EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. This means that the PM knows that, as and when she puts her Brexit plan to the Commons for a vote, more than 100 of her MPs will vote against it, plus the DUP and the opposition parties. She would lose by a colossal and humiliating margin of more than 200 votes.

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 13 December 2018

Crisis at Christmas MPs were warned that they might have to give up part of their holidays to deal with Brexit. Here are some other political crises from Christmases past: 1066 William I was crowned on 25 December. Trouble was expected from the English so the streets of Westminster were lined two deep with soldiers. The service was interrupted by a boisterous crowd and houses near the abbey were set alight. 1974 Embarrassment for Harold Wilson on Christmas Eve — his former postmaster general John Stonehouse turned up in Australia, having faked his own death. 1989 Deposed Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena had their festive season curtailed by a brief trial, after which they were shot.

The Spectator

Portrait of the year | 13 December 2018

January Four young men were stabbed to death in London as the New Year began. The Crown Prosecution Service was to review rape cases, after several prosecutions collapsed when evidence was not disclosed to the defence. Carillion went into liquidation. London Zoo delayed its annual stock take after a fire killed an aardvark called Misha. Turkish forces shelled the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. The supreme court of Iceland upheld an import tariff on potato chips of 76 per cent. The Grand Mufti of Egypt said that bitcoin was forbidden by Islam. California legalised recreational cannabis. February The Charity Commission launched an inquiry into Oxfam staff paying for prostitutes in Haiti in 2011.

Boris Johnson

Diary – 13 December 2018

The nice French doctor looked beadily at the screen. There were the results of my tests, in irrefutable detail. They had taken my blood; they had beeped in my ears; they had covered me in painful hair-pulling electrodes, and now there was no use bluffing. I tried to draw her attention to what I conceived was my Hulk-like strength, the blast furnace super bellows of my lung capacity. She wasn’t having any of it. There was the key piece of data — blinking like a Geiger counter. I have really known it, or suspected it, for decades. In the past few months I have had the joy of being back on my bike, and the reality of my physique has been obvious to all the people who have overtaken me; and when I say all, I mean all.

Robert Peston

Theresa May’s Brexit aim is no longer Mission Impossible

Politics is all about words, which only sometimes mean what they seem to say. So if you took what the DUP leader in Westminster said on my show last night you would think that just maybe there is a route through the current parliamentary chaos for the PM towards a Brexit deal that MPs could approve. The DUP’s Nigel Dodds told me: “Well I think that the Prime Minister if I may say so maybe is extending a bit of an olive branch to us in the sense that she is now sitting down with us, acknowledging that we have an issue, acknowledging that it’s not just an issue we have but many in her party are now saying that she’s listening and she’s now prepared to go out she says to get those legal changes that are necessary.

John Osullivan

Theresa May has won but at the price of boxing herself in

Theresa May’s victory in the 1922 committee confidence vote is one of those boxing matches that leaves both sides preparing for an early rematch—with the challengers somewhat more eager for one than the champion. The defeated Noes got 37 per cent of the vote, according to the numerate Tim Stanley, of an electorate that provided a 100 per cent turnout of Tory MPs. That’s seventeen votes short of a two-thirds majority for the Prime Minister compared to John Major’s achievement of getting four votes more than that traditionally decisive margin in 1995. Her critics got about the same percentage of the non-payroll vote.

Matthew Parris

Never trust the people

It was late, and a friend and I were left to talk Brexit. He’s a keen and convinced Tory Brexiteer MP but to stay friends we have tended to steer off the topic. This, however, felt like a moment to talk. The conversation taught me nothing about Brexit, something about him, and a lot about myself and the strain of Conservatism I now realise I’m part of — and which is part of me. Oddly, then, this column is not really about Brexit, but about trusting the people. I don’t. Never have and never will. Our conversation forced me to confront the fact. My friend knows well enough why I’m a Remainer, but guessed correctly that I’ve puzzled about why he isn’t. I had not quite expected what I heard.

Mary Wakefield

The imitation game

Imagine looking at a photo of a stranger and feeling in response, quite naturally, the sort of happy affection you might feel towards a spouse. Well, it’s weird. In July this year, when Benedict Cumberbatch was filming Channel 4’s upcoming Brexit film (Brexit: The Uncivil War) a friend sent me some photos by text message, tabloid snaps from the set. Benedict plays my husband Dominic Cummings, director of the Leave campaign, and the shots were long-lens and hazy: Ben/Dom pushing his son on a swing; Ben/Dom kissing his wife. The real son-of-Dom and I were halfway through our Rice Krispies when the photos came through and I remember how taken aback I was. It’s not that they look alike. ‘We have different shaped heads,’ Cumberbatch tells me later.

William Boyd

Writer’s Notebook

Just back from a few days in Rome — the perfect small metropolis for ‘street-haunting’, as Cyril Connolly described his love of strolling through cities. I first went to Rome in 1976, aiming to interview — for my university magazine — three of the writers who lived there or thereabouts at the time. I duly wrote to Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. All of them politely turned me down but I went anyway and have revisited the city many times. In fact, in the way life sometimes arranges these things, I later met all three writers and even came to know Burgess and Vidal a bit.

Robert Tombs

Beyond Brexit | 13 December 2018

None of us can predict the potential fallout from Brexit, good and bad. What began as a vote of confidence in our institutions has shown them to be dangerously fallible. A country where people usually rub along together is now marked by a cultural and emotional rift. If Brexit does continue to dominate our politics for years, will it mean a reform of our institutions, or a battening down of the hatches by a beleaguered elite? Will the House of Lords, having alienated its natural defenders, at last be seriously reformed? Shall we try to restrain the dangerously capricious powers of prime ministers? Shall we empower local government? Both Brexiteers and Remainers will be in a rather militant mood.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Victory? No, yesterday’s result weakens May’s authority still further

Theresa May has survived the vote, but her authority is weakened still further. More than a third of Tory MPs have voted against her and this is after she pledged not to fight the next election and to get legally enforceable changes to the backstop. If May had kept the number of those voting against her below 100, it would have been a good result for her. If she had kept it to below 80, it would have strengthened her position considerably. But anything over 105 was always going to be tricky for her as that meant a 1/3rd of her MPs didn’t have confidence in her. This became truer as the day went on and May offered concessions to try and win over wavering MPs.

Steerpike

Watch: Anna Soubry rows with fellow Tory MP

Theresa May has survived a vote of confidence but the Tory party is not a happy place. Anna Soubry and Robert Buckland have just had a very public row on Sky News. It's safe to say the two Tory MPs did not see eye-to-eye about what should happen next. Buckland told Soubry that it was 'time to move on'. But Soubry said the PM was just offering more of the same 'empty rhetoric': Soubry: 'Let me finish please' Buckland: 'This is time for compromise not for people taking artificial lines and looking for nirvana' Soubry later appeared to mutter that her colleague's words were 'absolute rubbish'. Oh dear..

Isabel Hardman

After a day of high drama, nothing has changed

Even before the result of the Tory no confidence vote was announced, the mood in Committee Room 14 was rather jovial. Chief Whip Julian Smith appeared minutes before the result, looking both exhausted and happy. Nerves were sufficiently calm for someone to crack a joke in the pause between Sir Graham Brady arriving and him starting to speak. 'Let us pray!' they quipped, sending the room into fits of giggles. In fact, the mood was almost eerily cheery, a bit like someone who has spent all night awake drinking coffee. When Brady announced that the Conservative party does indeed have confidence in Theresa May, the Tory MPs present broke into loud and pointed cheers.

Steerpike

Watch: Jacob Rees-Mogg calls on Theresa May to go

Theresa May has survived the vote of confidence in her leadership, but Jacob Rees-Mogg has insisted the Prime Minister should still quit. The Tory Brexiteer said that the result was 'terrible' for the PM, pointing out that many of those who backed her were 'on the payroll': 'The PM must realise under most constitutional norms she ought to go and see the Queen urgently and resign' May has won a battle, but her critics are determined not to back down just yet...