Uk politics

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: NHS preparing for a no deal Brexit

Simon Stevens: the NHS is making ‘significant preparations’ for no deal Brexit This morning Andrew Marr sat down for an interview with the Chief Executive of NHS England. With the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the NHS approaching this week, Marr asked Simon Stevens about the implications of a no deal Brexit on the health service, and whether he was making appropriate preparations for such an event: https://twitter.com/MarrShow/status/1013347688086061056 AM: ...When you were talking to MPs last autumn, you said that you hadn't been asked by government to plan for no deal. Has that changed? SS: There is now significant planning going on around all the scenarios, including medicine supply scenarios... AM: Really?

Katy Balls

Tory tensions rise as decision day looms for Theresa May

'It’s not just backbench Conservative MPs who expect ministers to pull together behind May: the great swathe of the electorate which either voted Leave, or voted Remain but recognises that a united team will achieve a better trading relationship for the future than a divided one, expects it too.' This is the warning Graham Brady issued to badly behaved Tory ministers over the weekend. Writing in the Guardian, the chair of the all-powerful 1922 committee of backbench Tory MPs, presented the feuding Cabinet with a choice: get behind May or prepare for a Corbyn victory at the next election similar to 1997. This isn't the first time Brady has had to speak out in a bid to get his party to take a minute to breathe before going into self-destruct mode.

Sarah Sands

Is the weather the Brexiteers’ best argument?

We have reached peak summer, literally. And the weather is probably the Brexiteers’ best argument, since it would be madness to go abroad. This is the great week of summer parties in London, including the US Embassy and the FT. Last week was the V&A summer party, described to its director Tristram Hunt by one disbelieving guest as Civilisation set on Love Island. The reason was that millennials prefer pink carpets to red ones and drink slightly less than their elders, and worse. I am not saying there is a London/country divide, but we take our pleasures differently in Norfolk. Our neighbours were busy organising their stall for the village fête last weekend, with its celebrated attraction: hammer the nail into the log.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Erdogan, Trump and other fragile egos: Theresa May’s unenviable foreign policy dilemmas

Given the way her Cabinet ministers are behaving at the moment, Theresa May is really rather used to dealing with fragile egos. This will come in handy over the next month when the Prime Minister has to go from what promises to be an extremely tricky Nato summit straight into Donald Trump's visit to the UK. As James says in his politics column this week, the challenges of these events, along with the ongoing problems both in the Cabinet and Parliament over Brexit, will make July one of the hardest months of May's premiership to date. But trying to tell her warring ministers to shut up seems easy compared to the foreign policy challenges that the Prime Minister is facing. They would not be easy for any leader.

Steerpike

US ambassador’s Independence Day party: special relationship ‘alive and well’

To the American ambassador's (early) independence day party. Despite the ambassador now possessing a shiny new embassy in south London – an off-location according to one @realDonaldTrump – guests were invited to Woody Johnson's personal residence Winfield House, north west London. Gavin Williamson and Liz Truss were both in attendance though Mr S understands that the tricky topic of the government spending review did not come up as party chat. Other politicians there included Greg Clark, Tobias Elwood and Thérèse Coffey. In his speech to guests – who munched on hot dogs and Krispy Kreme doughnuts – Johnson said the special relationship was 'alive and well'.

Brendan O’Neill

Danny Dyer is wrong about Brexit

Oh so you all love Danny Dyer now? The turnaround in Dyer’s fortunes over the past 12 hours has been extraordinary. He’s gone from being the butt of posh tweeters’ jokes to a celebrated political sage. From a ridiculous uber-lad whose cosying up to football’s hard men and promiscuous use of words like ‘slags’ and ‘twats’ provoked laughter and/ or horror among the chattering classes, to the Twitterati’s favourite working-class person. What changed? He dissed Brexit. And if you diss Brexit, they love you.

Steerpike

Osborne at a loss over Evening Standard

Evening Standard editor, Kissinger Fellow, Honorary Economics Professor, Blackrock Advisor and Stanford Visiting fellow George Osborne is a skilled man at many things – namely job applications. However, as Chancellor Osborne struggled with deficit reduction, repeatedly missing his targets. He seems to now be experiencing economic turbulence in one of his new jobs, as editor of the London Evening Standard. BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan reports that in the space of a year the Standard has gone from a two million pound profit to a ten million pound loss. The paper will post a loss of £10m for the year ending in September 2017. Osborne started at the paper as editor in May 2017. What ever could be the problem?

Fraser Nelson

Why Danny Dyer has a point about David Cameron

As an admirer of David Cameron, I was appalled when he broke his word and resigned on the morning of the Brexit vote two years ago. Not for the first time, I was thrown because I had taken him at his word and believed him when he said that he’d stay no matter what the result. His decision to ban Whitehall from preparing for a ‘no’ result denied crucial preparation time with consequences still being felt today. So I had a certain sympathy with Danny Dyer who had a few things to say about Cameron on ITV’s Good Evening Britain last night.  https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon/status/1012439971188310017?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw As I say in my Telegraph column today, the UK government still has no Brexit strategy with just nine months to go.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Jeremy Hunt tells Tories that a ‘low taxes at all costs’ party would lose the next election

In conversation with Andrew Neil at a Spectator event this evening, Jeremy Hunt defended the principle of increasing taxes to pay for more spending on the NHS. He warned Tories unhappy with the idea that if in an election you offer voters a choice between a low taxes at all costs party and decent public services, they’ll vote for decent public services. He said that this extra money for the NHS was needed to deal with a ‘once in a generation change in demography’ and that it was important that the Tories show the public they are on the right side of this argument. In language reminiscent of David Cameron, Hunt declared that ‘as a Conservative I want to say it is not a choice between lower taxes and decent public services: you can have both’.

Steerpike

Breaking: FT backs Brussels

In a way, tonight's England vs Belgium football match ought to be win-win. If England beats Belgium there will be mass celebrations – but even if they lose they're still though and a bad performance could take them into an easier route to the final. Yet Mr S suspects that this isn't the reason a number of non-Belgiums will be cheering on the other team. Jeremy Corbyn’s man in Brussels Richard Corbett and Leo Varadkar have said they will be cheering on Belgium. Now the Financial Times's Peter Spiegel has been revealed to be cheering the other side – he even has the scarf to prove it: https://twitter.com/lionelbarber/status/1012352911987404810 Well, at least you can't call the American a citizen of nowhere...

Steerpike

Matt Hancock’s World Cup struggle

Ahead of England’s crunch World Cup game against Belgium tonight, you might expect that support for the Three Lions is reaching fever pitch in the cabinet. Not so, Mr S is sad to report. Theresa May is more of a cricket fan, while Boris has been busy talking down England’s chances. It seems that culture secretary, Matt Hancock, is also failing to get excited about the football. At a party organised by the department for culture, media and sport for England’s opening game against Tunisia, Hancock seemed more interested in fiddling with a virtual reality set than paying attention to the game, Steerpike hears. “He’s more of a cricket man” a source close to Hancock said, when asked about his ambivalence towards the beautiful game.

James Forsyth

Nato’s Trump trouble is music to Putin’s ears

Is the Nato summit going to precipitate the greatest crisis for the Western alliance since 1966? Senior figures in the British government fear it will, as I reveal in the magazine this week. Trans-Atlantic relations are already at their lowest ebb in decades, as the US and the EU fight over trade. This­ summit will, as Fraser pointed out recently, give Trump the chance to open another front in this war. He’ll be able to berate — with some justification — Germany, and all but three of Nato’s EU members, for not spending the alliance minimum of two per cent of GDP on defence last year.

Steerpike

Brexit football chant competition: ‘He’s here, he’s there! He’s a citizen of nowhere: Barnier, Barnier!’

Congratulations to Radio 4’s Today programme for the amusing item on Brexit football chants. Very good. Radio 4 being Radio 4, however, there was a slight Remain bias to their chants. Also they lacked something of the sweet nihilism that all the best football chants have. So here, in the interests of balance and free speech, are a few we came up with in The Spectator office yesterday. We just about resisted the natural urge to rhyme with Jean-Claude Juncker, and now we dare to dream that one of them will be sung at the Kaliningrad stadium tonight for England’s match against Belgium. Please send your own chants (preferably with audio file) to editor@spectator.co.uk and put Brexit Football Chant Competition in the subject field.

Matthew Lynn

Businesses should try and shape Brexit – not fight it

Airbus will abandon the UK. The car factories will all be closed down. Trade will grind to a halt, we will run out of food and medicines, and Harry Kane will be sold to Real Madrid and made captain of Spain instead of England. Okay, I made that last one up, but all the others are among the dire warnings that big business have issued over Brexit in the last few weeks. Project Fear III, or IV, or possibly XXVII by now, keeps coming back. Right now, it seems to have as many sequels as Jurassic World, and with plot-lines that are about as original. That, however, is a mistake, and potentially a serious one. Sure, industry has plenty of legitimate concerns about our departure from the EU. But it should be trying to shape Brexit, not just re-run a failed referendum strategy.

Wednesday

Lucy Harris

How I was called a racist for having a pro-Brexit bag

My commute to work yesterday was just like any other, until I was interrupted from my thoughts by a fellow passenger: “I don’t like your bag,” he said. Looking down, I remembered that I was carrying a tote bag emblazoned with the words: “The EU is not my bag”. I thought for a moment it was the colour – a vivid magenta – that had offended him. Then it dawned on me: the EU was, in fact, his bag. “That’s OK, you don’t have to,” I replied. My response seemed to infuriate him further.  “I don’t know whether you’re racist or stupid – or even both,” he said.

Roger Scully

What does Andrew RT Davies’ resignation mean for Welsh Tories?

Politicians in Wales sometimes complain, at least in private, about the lack of media and public attention they receive. But Andrew RT Davies' resignation as leader of the Conservatives in the Welsh Assembly, means that Welsh politics is back in the spotlight. With the prospect of simultaneous leadership elections running over the summer for all four Assembly parties, this looks set to continue. The announcement in April that First Minister Carwyn Jones would stand down as Welsh Labour leader by the end of the year was followed last week by Ukip in Wales declaring that they would ballot their membership over who should lead their fractious National Assembly group.

Steerpike

Love Island fever sweeps the Labour backbenches

Recess is fast approaching and many MPs are looking for a hobby to occupy them over the long summer break. Happily, a group of Labour MPs have hit upon the perfect thing to keep them busy: Love Island. Mr S hears that Lucy Powell, Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy have even set up a WhatsApp group to discuss the ITV2 show. A Labour source said: "It’s well known that Lucy, Jess and Stella have a Love Island WhatsApp group to debrief on each episode and to coordinate voting, with Lucy usually whipping. Their overwhelmingly favourite couple this year is Jack and Dani, and they are in total agreement that Adam is a rat.” It seems the trio aren’t the only ones on the Labour benches with a fondness for Love Island.

Lloyd Evans

John Bercow is outstaying his own welcome

Some of Britain’s top Berc-ologists met recently to discuss a letter sent by John Bercow to MPs nearly a decade ago. He was advertising his suitability as a successor to Speaker Martin and he promised to serve ‘no more than nine years in total,’ if he were to win the election on June 22 2009. ‘Any Speaker should be able to make a mark in that time,’ he added, setting himself an idiosyncratic goal. To make a mark. As if parliament were a concrete bridge and the Speaker were a hoodie with a spray-can. Today, nine years and a bit later, is the first PMQs since Bercow outstayed his own welcome. His presence is therefore an affront to the house. He has defied the Chair. He has ignored the Speaker’s ruling.

James Forsyth

Jeremy Corbyn and Jacob Rees-Mogg clash at PMQs

Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t short of material to work with at PMQs. But it ended up not being as bad for Theresa May as one would have predicted. In purely parliamentary terms, Corbyn’s mistake was to try and blend policy into his criticisms of the divisions in government. This enabled Theresa May to mock Corbyn’s attempt to present himself as the person listening to businesses’ concerns. He would have been better off playing the whole thing for laughs. Perhaps the most interesting part of PMQs came straight after the session. Jacob Rees-Mogg got up to object to what Corbyn had said about him. Rees-Mogg complained that, contrary to what Corbyn had claimed, he hadn’t moved a hedge fund to Dublin.

Alex Massie

Sturgeon’s cabinet reshuffle marks the beginning of the end

Greater love, as wags responded to Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” reshuffle, hath no man than that he lay down his friends for his political life. Well, Nicola Sturgeon’s political life is not threatened just yet but, even so, there was a whiff of this as she reshuffled her cabinet this week. If it wasn’t quite a night of long knives, it was certainly an afternoon of wee dirks.  The headline was the departure of Shona Robison, the health secretary, and one of the first minister’s closest political friends. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have repeatedly called for Robison’s resignation; yesterday they were given their prize.