Uk politics

Today the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has launched a campaign telling the world that London is 'still open for business'.  He has announced a Twitter hashtag: #LondonisOpen. It’s an odd campaign, echoing the 'Britain is open for business' line that George Osborne was trying to peddle before being sacked. The premise seems to be that the Brexit vote was a disaster, but one we can recover from if we grit our teeth and adopt the spirit of the blitz. But the only people who thought that Brexit would somehow not mean being open for business were Osborne, Khan and others advocating Project Fear. Their gloom was outvoted by the optimism of Vote Leave. I’m sure that Mr Khan is very well-intentioned.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Spectator cover story about David Cameron’s purge of the posh. My peg was a new wheeze from the Cameroons whereby prospective employees should be asked not just where they went to university, but about their childhood and parents’ assets etc. The idea was to make sure that too many posh people didn't make it to the top. Sinister, I argued, and not meritocratic. Judging people on their merits means not marking them down for being poor or posh. Inverted snobbery is still bigotry, and ought to be deplored as such. And yet the government was proposing rolling it out, first with the civil service and then.... ...

Theresa May has demonstrated this week that she isn’t interested in being continuity Cameron. Her reshuffle was, as I say in The Sun, a brutal change up from the previous Cabinet and she has shown that she is determined to take on the party of the rich tag in a way that David Cameron never could. In this reshuffle, May hasn’t bothered to disguise who her friends are and, just as importantly, who are her enemies. She was ‘wintery but courteous’ when she sacked people. Any Prime Minister who sacks more ministers than the size of her majority is taking a risk. Some of those who she sacked are already thinking about their next move. But others accept it had to be done. .

For some time now, and especially since September 2014, the SNP administration in Edinburgh has been inspired by a single, powerful, notion: govern as though you were enjoying the early days of a newly-independent state.  Of course, Scotland is not - or not yet - an independent state and, for the time being at least, still has two governments, one in Edinburgh and another in London. But in attitude and demeanour, the SNP behaves as though independence has already arrived in everything except the formal recognition of that fact. This is a matter of mood and framing, for sure, but it's also something which has consequences. It's why Theresa May's visit to Scotland and her meeting with Nicola Sturgeon today is a heavily symbolic matter.

I first met a boyish, sunny Tony Blair more than 20 years ago. Our encounters have always been slightly tense since I reported some clumsy remarks he made about tax when he was still an apprentice PM — and he reacted much as Andrea Leadsom did against the Times last week (though via A. Campbell rather than Twitter). On Wednesday afternoon at Admiralty House he is a stricken caricature of how he was: painfully thin; waxy skin; astonishingly terrible teeth. He is a brilliant actor but not that good: he has been tormenting himself over Chilcot. But he isn’t sorry for the invasion, as he told me, and would do it again if circumstances repeated. His journey from fêted hero in 1997 to perhaps the most isolated man in Britain is a national tragedy.

‘Brexit means Brexit’ has been Theresa May’s message since she started running for the Tory leadership. But Brexit could mean a whole variety of things. For example, a Norwegian-style deal with the EU would, technically, be ‘Brexit’. But now, Theresa May has shown real intent. She has demonstrated that she really is serious about this. She has appointed three leavers to the key Brexit-related jobs in government. David Davis will be Secretary of State for exiting the EU, Liam Fox gets the International Trade job and Boris Johnson the Foreign Office. The David Davis appointment is particularly striking. He resigned, unexpectedly, from David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet.

Jeremy Corbyn will be on the Labour leadership ballot. After a contentious meeting that lasted for almost six hours, the party’s National Executive Committee have ruled by 18-14 that as the incumbent his name will appear automatically on the ballot paper and so there is no need for him to gather nominations from MPs and MEPs. This is a massive victory for Corbyn and his wing of the party. He is now favourite to win this leadership election and if he does, the 172 Labour MPs who voted no confidence in him will either have to shut up or split off and form their own party. Crucially, if they leave after Corbyn has won again, it will be Corbyn and the hard left who will be left in possession of the Labour name and the party apparatus.

There are plenty who have been left bruised by May’s decade and a half at the top of the Conservative party, but even her worst enemies concede that the woman who is to become the next Prime Minister has shown a remarkable durability in high office. She’s the longest-serving Home Secretary in half a century, and has made a success of what’s very often a career-ending job. A long-retired party grandee recalls May, then newly elected to Parliament, approaching him in 1997 to ask what she must do to succeed. ‘Ignore the little things,’ he replied. It’s advice that her critics reckon she has firmly ignored ever since.