Uk politics

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Shami Chakrabarti heckles voter over Brexit

Labour's flip-flopping on Brexit means that many Leave supporters simply don't trust the party. So Mr S wonders whether it was really such a wise idea for Shami Chakrabarti to heckle a voter on Question Time last night: Audience member: We're the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We voted to leave so let's pull up anchor and sail away, OK. Shami Chakrabarti: Where you going? ... I mean 'Sail away' is a lovely song but you need to go somewhere. Perhaps it's time for Shami to listen to voters rather than shout at them...

Thursday

James Forsyth

Theresa May gives David Davis a backstop concession

After a morning of high drama in Westminster, the UK government now has a backstop proposal to put to the EU. Last night, the backstop text said that it was time limited but didn’t specify an end date. In two meetings with the Prime Minister this morning, David Davis demanded changes. He has got some concessions: the text now talks about how ‘The UK expects the future arrangement to be in place by December 2021’. But there is no hard cut-off date in the text. Theresa May was acutely aware that if one had been included, the EU would have rejected it out of hand. We now wait to see what the EU says about it. Michel Barnier has already tweeted his three tests for it.

Robert Peston

David Davis stays put – for now

For the past 24 hours, there has been a power struggle between the Prime Minister and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Theresa May – or rather her officials – had been insisting that a backstop plan for keeping open the Ireland border would not be amended, to include a sunset clause and formal end date for the backstop. Davis said he would quit in the absence of an end date. She caved. According to sources close to Davis, 'the backstop paper has been amended and expresses, in much more detail, the time-limited nature of our proposal'. So to be clear, there is now a termination date in May's backstop proposal. That almost certainly means she faces a double defeat – because the EU will reject any plan that includes an end-date.

Wednesday

Gwythian Prins

A Very English Coup d’Etat

They say that the devil is in the detail – and that is certainly the case with the government's Brexit plans on defence and security. On 24 May, Gavin Williamson delivered a major speech on defence at the First Sea Lord’s Seapower Conference. It was a good speech, but then, under cover of the positive news coverage which it attracted, the Department for Exiting the EU slipped out a 'Technical Note'. They must have hoped nobody would notice. Plenty of Brexiteer ministers didn't seem to spot it, although goodness knows why not. But at Veterans for Britain, we did notice. We are on Red Alert. There are key civil servants and ministers who we do not trust and so we keep them under close observation.

Steerpike

Read: Daily Mail editor’s resignation letter

Paul Dacre has just announced that he is to step down as editor of the Daily Mail in November, having edited the newspaper since 1992. Mr S has been passed a copy of his letter to staff announcing the news. Dacre says he now plans to take on 'broader challenges within the company as chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Associated'. Here is the letter: Will it be a case of champagne at the ready at the paper's fiercest rival, also known as the Mail on Sunday?

Lloyd Evans

Are the late nights flogging Labour Live tickets getting to Corbyn?

Odd sights at PMQs today. Theresa May wore a dark blue outfit covered in an outbreak of Pollock-esque dots, as if she’d just arrived from a paintballing contest. Jeremy Corbyn looked angry, knackered and distressed. His scarlet tie was all askew and his eyes appeared shadowed and hollow. Why so fatigued? Yesterday he was in Brighton, he told us, addressing the Fire Brigades Union, ‘who work hard to keep us all safe.’ (Strike-days excluded). It’s rumoured that Corbyn has been up late at night flogging seats for Labour Live, the party’s summer rally on June 16. He’s the headline act. Tickets are £35.

Steerpike

Watch: Labour’s Brexit strategy gets picked apart

Boris Johnson's critics happily queued up to take a pop at the Foreign Secretary when he said his position on Brexit was to 'have our cake and eat it'. Yet it seems the Labour party is determined to take the same approach. Keir Starmer says Labour wants ‘full access to the internal market’ while retaining the ‘benefits of the single market’, even though the party has already ruled out free movement of people – a key EU demand. It fell to shadow transport secretary, Andy McDonald, to attempt to defend Labour's 'have-it-both-ways' attitude to Brexit this morning: Andrew Neil: Why would the EU agree to giving us full access without one of the key conditions, which is free movement of people? Andy McDonald: Well, that’s the negotiation, Andrew.

Brendan O’Neill

Justin Welby’s EU delusion

Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury praise the EU as ‘the greatest dream realised for human beings’ for more than a thousand years, and as the gracious deliverer of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity’ to the peoples of Europe, I felt like reminding him of one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.’ The way Welby yaks about the EU you’d think it was the Kingdom of God, here at last, though attended by corporeal technocrats rather than angels with trumpets. All we needed was for him to prostrate himself on an EU flag and profess his faith in the Word According to Juncker for his conversion to the cult of Brussels to be complete.

James Forsyth

Why the Brexit backstop is causing trouble

The government’s proposal for a UK-wide backstop will not contain an end date. This, as the Times' Sam Coates points out, is bound to be controversial. For if the backstop contains no end date, it could end up running indefinitely. Indeed, with the UK in a customs union and having to follow EU rules on goods and agriculture, it is hard to see what incentive the EU would have to discuss a trade deal. After all, what would be left to discuss would be services: where the UK has a £92 billion surplus. There is a meeting of the Brexit inner Cabinet tomorrow. But as Tom Newton Dunn and Harry Cole point out in this morning’s Sun, this is not meant to be discussing the backstop but tidying up other issues related to the withdrawal agreement.

Tuesday

Charles Moore

Richard Madeley was wrong to ‘terminate’ Gavin Williamson

Richard Madeley pulled the plug on his interview with Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, last week because Mr Williamson kept avoiding his question. Madeley’s decision seems to have been popular. He did what he did ‘on behalf of the viewers’. There is a false assumption here, which runs deep in our culture and gives interviewers a massive advantage over their subjects. If someone asks us a question, we think it is rude or evasive to refuse to answer. Sometimes it is (and Mr Williamson certainly was evasive), but we do not subject the questioner to the same scrutiny. Why has he picked that particular question? What right has he to set the entire agenda of the encounter? Is his editor whispering in his ear that he must try to ‘get’ X on the subject of Y?

Ross Clark

The battle for Heathrow was over long ago | 5 June 2018

Whatever happened to the political squall that was Heathrow’s third runway? For several years it looked as if the issue could deeply harm the Conservatives. After all, hadn’t David Cameron ruled out a third runway – “no ifs, no buts” – in 2010. It was deeply embarrassing for him to do an about turn two years later and say well, maybe – even if he did attempt to wriggle out of the charge of hypocrisy by trying to outsource the decision to Sir Howard Davies. West London Tory MPs threatened to rebel, splitting his party. Like John Major on Maastricht, Cameron thought that by endlessly putting off the day of decision everything would come out alright in the end.   And in a sense he was right.

Steerpike

Labour’s ‘JezFest’ giveaway backfires

Poor old Jeremy Corbyn. You couldn’t blame the Labour leader for harbouring hopes that the upcoming Labour Live event would enable him to emulate the wild adulation he received on stage at last year’s Glastonbury. But whereas tens of thousands of festival goers chanted Corbyn’s name back then, it seems more likely that Jez will be appearing on stage in north London next Saturday in front of one man and his dog – if he's lucky. In a desperate bid to drum up numbers, tickets – and free coach travel – are apparently being given away for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this news is going down badly with those who made the mistake of buying their tickets early.

Robert Peston

Theresa May’s Brexit bill gamble

Theresa May is arguably the most cautious and methodical politician of this generation or perhaps any generation. So it more than beggars belief that today she announced she would be rolling the dice in the biggest parliamentary gamble I can recall being taken by any PM of modern times, by announcing that next Tuesday she will ask MPs to vote a staggering 15 times, on amendments to that important EU Withdrawal Bill which is so central to the UK’s future outside the European Union. At stake is whether she and her ministers are in charge of Brexit, or whether MPs and Lords will determine our Brexit future.

Monday

James Forsyth

Can the EU withdrawal bill survive its return to the Commons?

Put June 12th in your diary, for that’s when the EU withdrawal bill will return to the House of Commons. Julian Smith, the chief whip, has written to Tory MPs telling them, ‘There will be a number of divisions that day’ as the government attempts to overturn the Lords’ amendments to the bill. Smith’s letter includes a pointed reference to the Tory manifesto, which included a commitment to leave the customs union. This is designed to remind potential Tory rebels that they’d be breaking with the manifesto on which they were elected if they vote for the customs union amendment. But it’ll take more than this to get the government through these votes. One Cabinet minister tells me that it is ‘going to get messy’.

Brendan O’Neill

Sadiq Khan’s Brexit stance isn’t ‘brave’ | 4 June 2018

It’s always good to remind Sadiq Khan that Brexit is more popular in London than he is. Khan loves to play the role of Mayor of Remainia, the political figurehead of this oh-so-clever capital city that can see through the folly of Brexit that those strange inhabitants of Essex, the North and Wales voted for. And yet while it’s true Londoners voted Remain by 59.9 per cent to 40.1 per cent, the fact is more of us voted for Brexit than we did for Khan: 1,513,232 Londoners want to leave the EU, which is 200,000 more than the 1,310,143 who wanted Khan as mayor. So Brexit was such a massive and popular demand for political change that even in ‘the Remainer city’ of London its supporters comfortably outnumber supporters of the actual mayor.

Steerpike

Philip Hammond’s unlikely ally in his war against Gavin Williamson

It’s fair to say that there is no love lost between Philip Hammond and Gavin Williamson. The chancellor and defence secretary have been sniping at each other for months – and there were claims that the rivalry between the pair even escalated into a full-blown row in the Commons in December, with Theresa May forced to intervene. The tensions between the two have shown no signs of settling down since. But now Philip Hammond is no longer alone in his battle against his cabinet rival. His old school mate, Richard Madeley, is giving his fellow Essex boy a helping hand. Madeley – who attended the same school as Hammond back in the 70s – famously 'terminated' Williamson in a TV interview last week after the defence secretary repeatedly refused to answer a question.

James Kirkup

Could a messy Brexit elevate Jeremy Hunt to the top?

Jeremy Hunt is now Britain’s longest-serving health secretary. Having held the post since September 2012, he has been in office for almost six of the 70 years of the NHS that the Government will shortly mark with a major new funding settlement. The occasion seems appropriate for an evaluation of Hunt the politician, as distinct from Hunt the health chief.  Because health is a job that tends to consume and define its holder, we don’t hear much about Hunt except as part of the conversation about the NHS, its funding and its performance. It’s an obvious point today, but reflect on how resilient Hunt has been. Health is a brutal job, especially for Tories.

Sunday

Keith Aitken

The Brexit myth that must be busted

A neat but delusional mythology appears to be gaining currency (see, for example, Lloyd Evans’s interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy) that the Brexit referendum can be understood as a conflict between metropolitan elitists voting Remain and the frustrated masses beyond the M25 longing to Leave. This analysis may chime satisfyingly with recent trends in some other democracies, but it distorts what happened in this one. In the two UK countries furthest from London, the votes went against Brexiting by bigger margins than the UK-wide Leave majority: 56-44 in Northern Ireland, and 62-38 in Scotland. London vs The Rest only works if The Rest ends at Carlisle.

Fraser Nelson

Will Sajid Javid force Theresa May’s hand on immigration?

Sajid Javid is losing no time establishing his personal authority as Home Secretary and making the case for change. I wrote in my Daily Telegraphcolumn two weeks ago that the test of his independence would be whether he’d pick a fight with Theresa May on Tier 2 visas: doctors, engineers and other skilled workers coming from outside the EU. That fight has now begun. Andrew Marr asked him why thousands of tier-2 skilled workers had been rejected recently, usually because they're not earning £50k. Marr quoted one NHS manager saying it was “completely barmy”. It seems that the new Home Secretary agrees “When that policy was put in place, there was a cap that was established: 20,700 a year of these highly-skilled immigrants.

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Sajid Javid vows to take a ‘fresh look’ at immigration

Sajid Javid - I'm 'taking a fresh look' at the UK's immigration policies Andrew Marr was joined this morning by the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who took up his post in April after the resignation of Amber Rudd. Javid was keen to signal that change would be on its way under his stewardship of the department. He was critical of the use of the term 'hostile environment' for illegal immigrants, which he described as 'un-British'. Marr asked him about his attitudes to legal immigration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd8W_GAiQik AM: We have thousands upon thousands of vacancies for doctors in the NHS up and down the country. Last year, your department refused the visas of 1,500 would be doctors... SJ: ...