Uk politics

Will the UK have left the EU by October 31st? At the Conservative party conference, ministers, MPs and activists are keen to repeat the event slogan: 'Get Brexit done'. However, many are unsure as to when exactly Brexit will get done. Johnson has promised to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October “do or die” – he has repeatedly said “extension means extinction” for the Tories. But with parliament passing legislation to try to force him to seek an extension, and opposition MPs refusing him an election until that extension is secured, senior Conservatives are starting to contemplate a world in which Brexit isn’t done at the end of October.

In a lengthy interview on the Today programme this morning, Boris Johnson denied that the UK’s plans for the Irish border will require checks a few miles from the border. When asked if the UK was proposing a ‘hard border’ a few miles in from the border, he said ‘absolutely not’. But he did say that it is ‘just the reality’ that there will have to be checks somewhere.  Given that Ireland and the EU have made checks anywhere on the island of Ireland a red line, there is going to have to be movement from one side or the other if there is to be a deal.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has just given a pretty accurate summary of the state of British politics. The leader of the House of Commons pulled no punches as he addressed the Tory faithful at party conference. Mogg said Corbyn is a 'weak man', likened shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer to Brutus and said the Lib Dems were 'extremists' over their Brexit stance. Still, at least Mogg did have some kind words to say about one politician: his sister, Annunziata: Like Gulliver tied down at Lilliput, we are tied down by a ragtag, motley collection of feeble, fickle, footling politicians. All in desperate pursuit of a single ignoble aim – to renege on the solemn promise they made to the British people and try to cancel the largest single democratic mandate in our history.

As the Tories gather in Manchester for their annual conference, Boris Johnson hopes to use the event to push post-Brexit opportunities – saying that if the government can get Brexit done, a bright future awaits. Among those opportunities are the new relationships the UK can forge with countries outside of the EU. On the latest episode of the Spectator Women with Balls podcast, I spoke to International Trade secretary Liz Truss about her current brief along with her new role of women and equalities.

The Conservatives head to Manchester for an unconventional party conference. After opposition MPs vetoed plans for a conference recess, the Tories will meet while parliament sits. No 10 is bullish that it will not let opposition MPs ruin its moment. Expect cars and helicopters on standby to ferry politicians at the last minute if a surprise vote is called. With a working majority in the region of -40, Conservative MPs are fairly sanguine about the practicalities. 'Frankly, it doesn’t matter if we are in London or Manchester. We can’t win votes even if we are all in Westminster,' says one cabinet minister. Ministers and MPs are determined to use the conference to set out their agenda ahead of an early election that they still expect to take place this year.

The Tory plan was to fight the 2017 election as a Brexit election. But that strategy was derailed by a disastrous manifesto that alienated the Tory base and allowed Labour to change the subject to domestic policy. One of the problems with that manifesto was that it was written by a very small clique, meaning that problems weren’t spotted or ignored. To try and avoid a repeat of this, Boris Johnson has put a committee of Cabinet ministers in charge of overseeing the manifesto, I report in The Sun this morning. In line with the Pickles Review into what went wrong at the 2017 election, the Chancellor, the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the party chairman and the chief whip will all sit on this panel.

Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and making life hell for politicians, they claimed. Their ostentatious offence-taking would be a tad more convincing if they had ever said anything about the bile heaped on Brexit voters these past three years. Where were these people when it became positively vogue to refer to lower middle-class Brexit blokes as ‘gammon’?