Theresa may

The second day of the Supreme Court hearing has seen the Government continue to put forward its case for why it should be allowed to pull the Article 50 trigger without the say so of Parliament. And Lord Pannick has been arguing why Parliament must give approval for the start of the process of Brexit. Here's how the day unfolded on our Spectator live blog: 4.30pm: Pannick’s main pitch is about the power of Parliament. He tells the Supreme Court that ‘Parliament is sovereign and only Parliament can remove that which it has incorporated into domestic law’ - meaning that Brexit cannot be started by the Government without the agreement of Parliament.

Last month, word began to spread around Whitehall that the Prime Minister would not take kindly to any 'mansplaining' -- after No 10 took umbrage at male politicians, officials, diplomats and journalists talking over, patronising or failing to listen to May. As the Times revealed, the row was triggered after Sir Mark Lyall Grant, the national security adviser, managed to do at least one of the above during a visit to Downing Street. So, Mr S can't help but wonder how exactly May is going to get on on her upcoming visit to the Gulf region. On her two-day trip to Bahrain, May will become the first female politician to attend the six-nation Gulf Co-operation Council.

For months, now, a hunt has been on for the government’s Brexit strategy. Theresa May has quite rightly refused to disclose it. She knows that the European Union needs to be seen to make Britain suffer. She will have to ask for for a lot, only to back down so the EU can have its pound of British flesh. The hope is that she can then emerge with what she wanted all along. So a game of bluff is under way. This has created a rather unsatisfactory situation where Parliament wants to know where she will draw the line, and she refuses to say. Her every word is scoured for clues. None have been forthcoming.

A rare event at PMQs as Jeremy Corbyn went on the economy. The Labour leader had some well-crafted questions but rather spoiled things by confusing the IMF and the IFS, enabling Theresa May to declare that it is a good job she stands at the government despatch box and he sits on the opposition front bench. May gave little away, as is her wont, but Corbyn again went on social care -- which is, obviously, an area where Labour think they can make political advances. A couple of Tory Eurosceptics asked May about reciprocal rights for UK and EU citizens respectively and the refusal of the EU to engage on this point. May wouldn’t take the bait on this. But she did indicate that she still hopes that this issue can be dealt with soon after Article 50 is invoked.

In recent weeks, Theresa May has attempted to perform a balancing act between looking after the interests of 'just about managing' families and keeping big business on side. On becoming Prime Minister, she gave several speeches suggesting the need for a radical overhaul of the way businesses — and capitalism — work in order to help those left behind by globalisation. Yet May has had to soften her language to appease business leaders — backtracking, in a speech to the CBI, on a pledge to put workers on company boards. Today Greg Clark tried to set out what May's crackdown on corporate greed will actually entail.

The Daily Mail calls those who ‘heaped adulation’ on Fidel Castro over the weekend - including the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell - ‘useful idiots’. The paper says after Castro’s death on Saturday, the Cuban leader's supporters are ignoring the 'poverty he inflicted on his people' as well as his torturing of political opponents and the fact that he ‘failed his people abysmally’. So why, the Mail asks, do those like the Labour leader have such a different view of the former Cuban leader? The paper suggests in its editorial that there is a simple answer: ‘Messrs Corbyn, McDonnell and Co have never grown up since their student days’. Meanwhile, the Mail also takes a pop at Mark Carney.

In the autumn statement, Philip Hammond chose to mock Boris’ failed leadership bid. This wasn’t the first time that one of the Foreign Secretary Cabinet’s colleagues had had a laugh at his expense. At our parliamentarian of the year awards, Theresa May joked that Boris would be put down when he was no longer useful. But Boris and his circle are getting rather fed up with him being the butt of the joke, as I say in The Sun today. Those close to Boris feel that these gibes undercut him on the world stage. 'If they want the UK to be taken seriously, they need to back him not mock him’ one close ally of his tells me.

Theresa May likes to give a kitten-heeled kicking to conference audiences, even when they are police officers or her own party delegates. But at the CBI gathering at Grosvenor House in London on Monday, she was out to make friends with soothing (if essentially hollow) remarks about Brexit, and promises of the lowest corporate tax rates in the G20 and an extra £2 billion a year for research and development to help the UK stay close to the forefront of technology and bioscience. Assembled fat cats may still have been irritated by her commitment to binding annual shareholder votes on executive pay, but at least she backed away from putting workers’ representatives on boards, a threat that contributed to the anti-business tone of her Tory leadership campaign in July.

It is not self-evidently ridiculous that Nigel Farage should be the next British ambassador to the United States. The wishes of the president-elect should not automatically be discounted. John F. Kennedy’s wish that his friend David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) should be ambassador was granted. It is also not true that the post must be filled by a professional, or that the Prime Minister should not appoint a political rival to the post. Churchill gave the job to his main rival, Lord Halifax, from 1940. Certainly Mr Farage is not the conventional idea of a diplomat, but then Mr Trump is not the conventional idea of a president. Although its own leadership emerged from the same global convulsions, our government is slow to grab the advantages offered by this new world.