Theresa may

Theresa May's announcement that she plans to serve as Prime Minister for 'the long term' has come as rather a surprise to her party. Cabinet ministers and senior backbenchers had hoped that all the talk of her sell-by-date and a leadership contest would have faded in time for the autumn, but this has stirred it up again. There are two schools of thought in the party as to whether the Prime Minister went into her interview yesterday intending to give a stronger line on whether or not she was going to leave. By and large those who are most unimpressed by the way she has led up to this point think that it was a deliberate move to show authority. Even those who think she was bounced into it believe that the Prime Minister was trying to quash speculation about having a precise leaving date.

‘Mayism’, whether it left you in admiration or despair, at least seemed like an identifiable philosophy. It was concerned with social justice, but it wasn’t socialist: it was better described as post-liberal. Mayism was sceptical of free markets, which were prey to ‘selfish individualism’ (as the manifesto put it), but it didn’t see big government as the answer. It preferred to spread economic power, by clamping down on corporate malpractice and giving new rights to workers. And the symbol of this – until yesterday when the Tories pretty much dropped the proposal – was the idea of putting workers on company boards. To be exact, the idea has not been entirely dropped.

In any deal, says the Sun, ‘no party should agree to the rules being set by the other side’. So the Prime Minister is ‘reassuringly spot on’ to insist we cut ‘direct ties with the European Court of Justice’. Whatever some might say, ‘make no mistake..’ the ECJ is no independent institution’, argues the paper - and instead, the court has been the ‘hothouse' for the 'ever-growing superstate’ of the European Union. Theresa May’s decision to turn Britain away from the court should be welcomed; and the terms the government put forward in its position paper, which it published yesterday, ‘strikes a decent balance’.

A key question in the Brexit talks is how any deal between the EU and UK will be upheld. The government has begun to address this today, publishing a paper on enforcement and dispute resolution. One thing is clear: ministers are committed to extricating the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In fact, the main point of the paper could be summed up as spelling out why Britain cannot agree to the ECJ being the arbiter of any Brexit deal. The government is entirely right about this. Sovereign states do not and should not enter into agreements in which the meaning and effect of the agreement is settled by the courts of the other party. The reason is obvious: one party would be at the mercy of the other.

Election day polling by Michael Ashcroft showed a Britain divided not so much by class or region as age. The 45-54 age group split almost evenly between the two main parties. Older voters went for the Conservatives; younger ones for Labour. Among 18-24 year olds, only 18 per cent voted Tory, while 67 per cent supported Labour. Among 24-35 year olds, that first figure rose to only 22 per cent and the second dropped to only 58 per cent.

Theresa May is back from holiday and the Brexit work continues in earnest. Over the next few days, two key papers - spelling out detail on the customs union and the Irish border - will be published. There’s no doubt, says the Times, that this ‘is a crucial week for Brexit’. ‘After more than a year of disagreement and drift’, there are now some ‘encouraging signs’ that things are slowly being put in order: the joint article written by Philip Hammond and Liam Fox and which was published yesterday advocating a transition period, is one such sign. The publication of reports ‘to flesh out the banal slogans’ touted so frequently so far, will also help matters, suggests the Times.