Uk politics

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

How May, Macron and Merkel failed to tame Trump

To conclude that relations between the United States and the Europeans are in quite a chaotic and unpredictable state is like saying German Chancellor Angela Merkel misses the good old days of Barack Obama and John Kerry. It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need repeating. There are a whole slew of foreign policy and economic issues that have shaken the U.S.-European relationship out of its traditional complacency. Steel and aluminum tariffs, Europe’s anaemic defense spending, the Iran nuclear deal, Brexit, trade imbalances, and Trump’s style of undiplomatic diplomacy have all thrown the continent for a loop.

Rod Liddle

I was wrong about Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson – an apology. His speech today was a very fine one and correct in each and every aspect. A week back, I took a shot at Johnson for what seemed to me the self-serving nature of his political manoeuvrings. They may still be intrinsically self-serving, I suppose. But it is nonetheless laudable that the hive of dead bees, the Conservative Party in Parliament, should hear a few home truths. Boris’s best speech of his career, by some margin. Hats off to him.

Steerpike

Jacob Rees-Mogg backs Boris

Boris Johnson's resignation speech wasn't the Geoffrey Howe moment some had built it up to be. But the former Foreign Secretary's critique of Theresa May's Brexit policy certainly gave Tory MPs food for thought. Johnson made clear he thought the policy amounted to Brexit in name only – and pushed for a change of course. Given that the Prime Minister shows no sign of backing down and is adamant hers is the right way, this presents the Brexiteers with a problem. Despite their insistence they would rather May stay in office, will this position be tenable in two months time if nothing has changed? And who could they turn to should they need someone to step up and challenge May? Perhaps a clue can be found in Jacob Rees-Mogg's endorsement of Johnson's speech.

Lloyd Evans

Jeremy Corbyn gives Theresa May another easy ride at PMQs

There is something horrible and unnatural about seeing Theresa May in trouble. Her aloof and grandmotherly face becomes a canvas on which all kinds of dreadful emotions are drawn. It’s almost too much to watch, really, it’s like seeing Miss Marple on a shoplifting charge. She arrived early at PMQs with a gravestone pallor. It was the same grimace she wore on election night when she realised she’d blown her majority. Lips tightly pursed. Small eyes held in a rigid squint. Fear and remorse etched in every powdered wrinkle. She sipped at her water and fussed with a Kleenex. Then she hunched in her seat, neither resting against the leather back nor leaning fully forward. The posture of the murderer awaiting sentence. The first question came from Brexiteer, Andrea Jenkyns.

Stephen Daisley

Labour members must pick a side in the fight against anti-Semitism

Snap. It was a long time coming but it was always coming. Jeremy Corbyn, who has traded on an image of saintly anti-racism for his entire career, was finally confronted by someone who sees through it. Yesterday, Labour's national executive committee adopted a new policy that rejected the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. Rabbis from across the spectrum had urged Labour to accept this definition; Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis warned that failing to do so would send an unprecedented 'message of contempt to the Jewish community'. Of course, that was the point.

James Forsyth

Boris’s speech makes it harder for May to sell her Chequers plan

Boris Johnson did not launch a full-on attack on Theresa May in his resignation speech. But he was brutally critical of the Chequers plan, saying that in crucial respects it was ‘Brexit in name only’. He complained that since the Lancaster House speech ‘a fog of self-doubt has descended’ and that the UK never even attempted to turn that speech into a negotiating position. He said that ‘18 months of stealthy retreat’ had led the UK to its current predicament. In a speech shorn of his usual jokes, the former Foreign Secretary urged Theresa May to change course, to return to Lancaster House. He said that there was ‘still time to save Brexit’.

Brendan O’Neill

In praise of Labour’s Brexit rebels

So this is what a principled politician looks like. They can be hard to spot these days, but last night, in parliament, we saw four of them in action. Kate Hoey, Frank Field, John Mann and Graham Stringer. Four Labour MPs who, despite knowing they would get flak from both Corbynistas and centrists, despite knowing the Stalinist sections of left-wing Twitter would shriek for their deselection, despite knowing they would be paraded online as ‘Tory stooges’ whom all good Labourites have a duty to despise, nonetheless voted with their consciences and rejected an amendment to Theresa May’s trade bill that could have kept Brexit Britain entangled in a customs union with the EU They are being credited with saving May’s bacon.

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson’s resignation speech, full text

Thank you Mr Speaker for granting me the opportunity to pay tribute to the men and women of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who have done an outstanding job over the last two years, and I am very proud that we have rallied the world against Russia’s barbaric use of chemical weapons with an unprecedented 28 countries joining together to expel 153 spies in protest at what happened in Salisbury. We have rejuvenated the Commonwealth with a superb summit that saw Zimbabwe back on the path to membership and Angola now wanting to join. And as I leave we are leading global campaigns against illegal wildlife trade and in favour of 12 years of quality education for every girl.

Katy Balls

Theresa May’s premiership enters ‘last days of Rome’ mode

'I used to worry that something bad would happen, now I worry that something catastrophic will happen.' This is how a Cabinet minister sums up the new political crisis facing the Conservative party – and soon the country. Last night one such catastrophe was narrowly avoided. The government managed to defeat the Tory rebel amendment calling for a customs union if frictionless trade was not agreed by January. Had they lost it, Theresa May's Brexit strategy would be dead in the water and the Whips allege that a confidence vote would have been brought – and an early election loom. The reason May avoided this fate? Labour rebels came to her rescue.

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Government’s not so cunning plan for an early summer break is scrapped

The government suffered a defeat in the Commons this evening. The good news for Theresa May is that it wasn't the one No 10 were so worried about. Although Philip Lee's amendment for European medicines regulatory network partnership succeeded, the Tory rebel amendment calling for the government to join a customs union if it does not agree a free-trade deal with the EU was narrowly defeated, at 307 to 301. This means the government can breathe a little easier for now. They can still claim to agitated Brexiteers that they are negotiating a deal which would allow them to strike international trade deals.

Steerpike

‘I’m literally a communist’ T-shirt – literally free market economics

Last week, the left-wing blogger Ash Sarkar told Piers Morgan she was 'literally a communist' after the pair got into a heated debate over her decision to protest Donald Trump's visit to the UK when she hadn't done the same for Barack Obama. Since then, the clip has gone viral and Sarkar – who works for Novara Media – has been rebranded as a liberal champion – with Teen Vogue even chipping in. Now Novara Media is keen to cash in. The blog has released a new t-shirt to its online shop emblazoned 'I'm literally a communist'. Only rather than, say, practise communism and dispensing them 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' – the site appears to have opted to follow free market principles on this occasion.

Steerpike

Blue on Blue: Nadine Dorries attacks Anna Soubry – ‘they’ve lost the plot’

Oh dear. As No 10 attempt to stop more Commons rebellions today on the customs bill, relations between Tory Remain rebels and Tory Brexiteers have hit an all-time low – and that's saying something. Appearing on the Daily Politics, Nadine Dorries launched a broadside against Anna Soubry over her comments in the Chamber on Monday – when the Tory MP accused her Brexiteer colleagues with a 'gold-plated pension and inherited wealth' of backing Brexit to the detriment of people's jobs. One such Brexiteer colleague's response? Dorries just described it as 'one of the worst moments that we have ever seen or witnessed in the chamber'. https://twitter.

Alex Massie

Michael Gove’s Brexit regret is much too little, much too late

Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial to its essential success.  If Boris Johnson gave the Leave campaign a popular - and populist - presence in the nation’s television studios, Michael Gove gave it a certain intellectual credibility amongst the - admittedly small - percentage of the electorate that worries about such things. And with good reason: Gove’s intelligence, if not always his judgement, has never been in doubt.

Monday

Steerpike

Theresa May’s big problem? Her ‘passion for what’s workable,’ says Tory MP

Andrea Jenkyns is regarded by many Tory MPs as a Brexit champion – after the Conservative MP for Morley pre-emptively quit last month as a PPS to fight for Brexit. Since then Jenkyns has become one of the loudest voices calling for a new tack from No 10 in the negotiations. However, Mr S can't help but wonder whether Jenkyn's latest intervention didn't land quite as she had intended. In an interview with the Telegraph, the Tory MP attempts to criticise the Prime Minister for not being a true Brexiteer – not because she's a Remainer but because her passion is... 'what's workable' 'It is time for her to go. I don't think she has passion for either Remain or Brexit, I think she has a passion for what's workable.

Sunday

Katy Balls

Will Theresa May make it to the summer recess?

Will Theresa May make it to the summer recess? It's just over a week until Parliament breaks up for the long summer break yet the obstacles the Prime Minister must overcome before then are rapidly increasing in size. After May finally showed her Brexit hand, she has seen a growing Eurosceptic rebellion which shows no signs of letting up anytime soon. Over the weekend, her former minister Steve Baker accused No 10 of being part of a secret plot to render the Brexit department a 'Potemkin structure to [distract from] what the Cabinet Office Europe unit was doing for the prime minister'. Meanwhile, Jacob Rees-Mogg offered a memorable soundbite – telling the Sunday Politics that May was a 'Remainer who has remained a Remainer'.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Theresa May’s hard-headed Brexit

Theresa May: People voted from the heart, but I must be hard-headed After an outbreak of discontent in the Conservative party over her Chequers Brexit plan, the Prime Minister took to the Andrew Marr Show to defend her policy. The plan led to David Davis and Boris Johnson quitting the cabinet, and there are rumours that more ministers could follow in the coming days. There is also the possibility that May could face a vote of no confidence in her leadership at any point. Marr asked her if the Chequers Agreement was letting her party and the country down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Rp6DcB59I AM: There are an awful lot of Conservatives...

Katy Balls

Theresa May fights for her premiership – and reveals Trump’s advice

Theresa May appeared on the Andrew Marr sofa with her premiership at its most vulnerable point since the disastrous snap election. After a week of frontbench resignations, a US Presidential visit that resulted in humiliation, a growing eurosceptic rebellion and a downturn in the polls, May belatedly tried to sell her Brexit blueprint to the public. The Prime Minister began by attempting some honesty – she told Marr that she did accept that the position agreed at Chequers last Friday was different to what was set out in her Lancaster House speech. However, she insisted that the change was minimal and that competitive free trade deals were still possible – she refused to explicitly say that the common rulebook would make trade deals harder to forge.

Charles Moore

The irreplaceable Lord Carrington

Lord Carrington, who has just died, may well have been longer in public life than any non-royal person ever. He took his seat in the House of Lords in 1946 (having already won the MC at Nijmegen in 1944), and never really retired until ill health confined him 70 years later. Hereditary privilege, I suppose, put him in; but what kept him there, giving him office under six prime ministers, as well as making him high commissioner to Australia, secretary-general of Nato etc? The obvious answer would be that, as someone who could not be elected, he was like the eunuch in the seraglio. Certainly prime ministers were disposed to trust him, in part because they knew he couldn’t have their job. Certainly, too, he had a strong sense of public service.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Three things that Theresa May can do to try and avert a political disaster

If Theresa May gets a Brexit deal and it can’t get through parliament, then we are heading towards the most dangerous political crisis in living memory, I say in The Sun this morning. For I very much doubt that the 80 percent of MPs who are opposed to no deal, would let Britain leave without an agreement. But disregarding the result of the referendum—either by abandoning Brexit or leaving only to make Britain, effectively, a non-voting member of the EU—would cause a democratic shock. 17.4 million voters would be, understandably, furious about having their vote ignored. So, what can Mrs May do to avert this disaster? Well, I think there are three things she should do. First, she should start treating voters and her own MPs like adults.

Charles Moore

On Brexit, the Germans are against us

Why do the British turn to the Germans in their moments of European trouble? It never works. When Jacques Delors conceived his single currency plans, Mrs Thatcher over-relied on Karl Otto Pöhl at the Bundesbank to squash them. Dr Pöhl preferred to side with Helmut Kohl. When Britain was struggling to stay in the ERM in the late summer of 1992, the Major government put faith in what they thought were German promises to help them out. These failed to materialise. When David Cameron sought a new EU deal which would win him the 2016 referendum, he placed his greatest hopes in Angela Merkel, who offered him concessions so feeble that even he quickly gave up trying to sell them. Last week, Mrs May flew to Berlin.