Uk politics

Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell took to social media last week to lament the loss of reasonable discourse in politics. After speaking on Iain Dale’s LBC radio show he praised the host, saying: https://twitter.com/campbellclaret/status/1025417273811652608 So has the earnest Remainer been taking his own advice when it comes to the merits of sensible conversation? Mr Steerpike thinks not. The timely intervention for more decorum came only one day after he unleashed a Twitter broadside against Brexiteer Arron Banks. Apparently not keen to engage with the substance of the debate, Campbell quickly descended into personal jibes, attacking Banks’ weight and drawing attention to his ‘moobs’ (man boobs). https://twitter.

Boris Johnson caused a stir this morning with an article in the Daily Telegraph. The former foreign secretary used his weekly column to argue that the Danish government were wrong to bring in a burka ban. Johnson said that although he thought that it was frankly 'absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes', he was uncomfortable with the idea of the state telling a 'free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear, in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business'. Critics were quick to go on the offensive over his decision to compare Muslim women dressed in full veils to postboxes and 'bank robbers'. The Muslim Council of Britain issued a statement condemning Johnson's 'regrettable' comments.

I completely agree with David Harris. Like him a Remain voter and a Londoner, I was utterly shocked by the result of the referendum, spending some hours trawling the online results in an attempt to understand what had happened. It was a salutary experience, yielding many surprises (Sevenoaks voted out!) and forced me to reappraise my initial generalised assumptions about the vote. We on the Remain side lost, and fairly. Since then I have been so angered and repelled by the behaviour of Messrs Juncker and Barnier that should we be obliged to vote again I will vote to Leave.

As I’m writing this, I can’t stop thinking about my sixteen year old self: a naïve, optimistic teenager who had just joined the Labour party, sure that Ed Miliband was going to put the country to rights, and that being one of the party members who would help him do that was an honour and a duty. How times have changed. In the wake of Labour's anti-Semitism scandal, I've now left the party. Here's why. I should start by saying I’m Jewish. When I was growing up, I thought that that meant that I belonged to the religion of Judaism, and that I couldn’t eat bacon.

This morning a number of reports in the papers prompted talk of a small breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations. Among them, the Financial Times – a paper not known for always seeing the sunny side of the referendum result – reported that the mood in Brussels was changing with the EU now more willing to ‘fudge’ certain aspects of the negotiations in order to avoid no deal. With Theresa May en route to visit Emmanuel Macron at his holiday retreat tomorrow in the south of France, things appeared to be looking up for No 10. So, perhaps it should come as little surprise that right on cue the rigid European Commission have popped up to pour cold water on any such claims.