Uk politics

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s last-minute legacy panic

Theresa May has just a handful of days left as Prime Minister, but is still trying to secure a domestic legacy for herself. She is doing this in a last-minute manner that makes David Cameron's famous essay crises look incredibly well-organised. Last week, she called for better design rules to prevent 'tiny homes' being built, which sounded odd given as Prime Minister she could feasibly have introduced some rules herself. May would say that her beef is with local government, not her own failure, when it comes to the lack of quality in newly-built homes. Localism is very convenient when it allows you to blame someone else for not doing something.

Sunday

Katy Balls

The Tory leadership contest is entering its most important week

Although there's three weeks until the next Tory leader is announced, the contest is entering what is the most important week of the membership stage. On Saturday (6 July), postal ballots will begin to be sent to the Tory membership. The expectation is that the majority of members will vote quickly rather than wait to see how the contest plays out over the remaining weeks. It follows that each campaign sees this week as pivotal for getting its message out there. In that vein, Jeremy Hunt hardened his Brexit position over the weekend. The Foreign Secretary used an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show to try and beef up his no-deal credentials.

Guglielmo Verdirame

Why GATT won’t break the Brexit deadlock

There has been a lot of talk about how Article XXIV of GATT can provide an alternative to the Withdrawal Agreement. But here’s the deal with Article XXIV of GATT: it is a solution to a problem which is not the problem. Let me try to illustrate this with a story. Imagine a couple – let’s call them Joe and Angela – who are going through a divorce. After a long-drawn process, and hundreds of billable hours, their lawyers have at last produced a draft divorce settlement. The successful business that Joe and Angela have built will continue, but Joe will need to make a series of maintenance payments to Angela and the family home will be sold. Joe finds this difficult to accept but he is also desperate to move on with his life.

Saturday

Mark Lobel

Can the Brexit party keep its right and left-wing supporters happy?

This weekend, the most popular political party in Britain will hold a rally in Birmingham to plan its march to Westminster. The Brexit party came first in the European elections but to its supporters, this was just the warm-up. If today’s polls became tomorrow’s election result, then the Tories would be left with just 87 MPs, barely a quarter of their current strength. Nigel Farage would lead an army of 193 MPs, and doing such damage that Jeremy Corbyn would still hang on to a party of 234. It is scenario that is terrifying the Tories – and delighting the Farigistas. In Birmingham tomorrow, the party aims to unveil the first 100 of their would-be MPs, part of Farage’s plan to fight every single seat in the next general election.

James Forsyth

Hunt won’t let up in his attacks on Boris

It is a week on since the first hustings of the Tory leadership run off. Boris Johnson appears to have righted the wobble that led to his rather lacklustre performance in Birmingham. But Jeremy Hunt is not going to ease off. As I report in The Sun this morning, the Hunt campaign’s attitude is, ‘We’re not going to let up on attacking Boris because we know it is cutting through’ The Hunt camp point to polling in the last few days which shows that he has a bigger advantage over Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson and that the public prefer Hunt to Johnson as Prime Minister. This may be, and Hunt—who is far less well known that Boris—may be benefitting from some kind of novelty factor.

Friday

Stephen Daisley

It’s time to no platform the Labour party

This evening in Britain, the Jewish Shabbat dinner will follow the traditional order: blessing the candles and the wine, washing hands, giving thanks for the bread and trying to get through the first serving of noodle kugel before someone brings up the Labour party. The decision by the national executive committee to restore the whip to Chris Williamson will be on the menu tonight. The Jew-baiting Nosferatu was suspended in February for ‘a pattern of behaviour’, that pattern taking the shape of a giant middle finger to the Jewish community and culminating in a grisly speech declaring Labour ‘too apologetic’ about anti-Semitism.

Steerpike

Brexit party MEP Claire Fox shows solidarity with Boris

Tom Penn and Eve Leigh, the next-door Remainer neighbours of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds who recorded their late-night row, managed to spark a lively debate about the balance between public interest and privacy when they passed the recording on to the Guardian shortly after the incident last weekend. It appears though that the Brexit party's Claire Fox is squarely in camp Boris when it comes to the couple's right to argue in their own flat. Speaking at Forest's 40th Anniversary Gala Dinner, the Brexit party MEP and Moral Maze panelist hit out at their neighbours' decision to pass the recording on to the newspaper.

Bruce Anderson

Boris Johnson will make us long for Theresa May’s return

He just will not do. Sexual incontinence alone should not disqualify Boris from the premiership, though it is hardly an asset. But the latest incident dramatises the flaws in his character. Indeed, one could say that he is all flaw and no character. There are three major flaws. The first is serial dishonesty. He simply has no concept of truth. As Philip Stephens of the FT once put it, Boris has lied his way through life and politics. He will say whatever is necessary to get himself out of a hole of his own digging. But if anyone quotes Boris back to himself, even a couple of days later, his reaction will be incomprehension and irritation. The second is profound selfishness. For Boris, other people only exist as an instrument of his own gratification.

Thursday

Matt Kilcoyne

Boris’s campaign is a triumph

Forget what you’ve been told about the Conservative leadership campaign. The Boris campaign's weekend meltdown has not lost him the election. And Jeremy Hunt has not suddenly leapt into the lead. This is still Boris’s election to lose and the odds are that he will almost certainly triumph. The reason is simple. Boris is following the tried-and-tested playbook of successful campaigns the world over. He is speaking plainly and to the right people. And he has a simple message that he repeats often, reassuring party members that he is the man to trust on the issue that they care about: Brexit. In recent weeks, Boris's campaign has changed dramatically. But this was a tactical shift and wasn't a sudden panic.

Wednesday

Ian Acheson

What Rory Stewart did next

Rory Stewart’s pitch for prime minister seems strangely distant now, lost in the enveloping chaos of Boris Johnston’s shamble to glory. All is not lost, however. The divergent metrics of parliamentary and public sentiment – and the character deficits of the frontrunner, who claims to be able to square that circle – make it abundantly possible that Stewart will have another chance to shine before the year is out. So what should he be doing in the meantime? I was peripherally involved in Stewart's leadership campaign, helping to organise some of his Northern Ireland visit, including a trip to my home county (and Britain's true Lake District) Fermanagh.

Dominic Grieve

Boris’s Brexit stance is either reckless or ignorant

Boris Johnson’s statement that he would not impose a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the event of no deal may be said with sincerity and for the best of reasons, but he is either proposing something completely reckless – which will be deeply and fundamentally damaging to the whole of the British economy – or else he does not understand the UK’s legal obligations under the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. That treaty was drawn up after the experience of the trade wars of the 1930s and the way in which they helped create the atmosphere that led on to war. So the treaty is designed to check any moves towards using trade as a crude instrument of foreign policy and to encourage its growth as a cement for peace.

Robert Peston

Why neither Boris nor Hunt can stop a no-deal Brexit

There is a lot of confusion about Boris Johnson’s approach to Brexit. And that is deliberate because the candidate has yet to make a big call about the nature of the modifications he is seeking to the Brexit plan negotiated by Theresa May. The ultra Brexiters among his supporters, the hard core of the European Research Group led by Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg, want him to ditch her Withdrawal Agreement completely – and replace that with a “GATT 24” temporary free trade arrangement for the years that would be necessary for the negotiation of a permanent new trade deal with the EU. This they regard as true liberation from the EU. Now confusingly Johnson yesterday – in a Talkradio interview – referred to this as his “Plan B”.

Ross Clark

The flaw in Jeremy Hunt’s Brexit plan

Jeremy Hunt’s case to be Conservative leader is that he is the sensible, low-risk option. While Boris is now committed – thanks to his interview on Talkradio yesterday to leave the EU on 31st October, come what may, ‘do or die’, Hunt is holding out the prospect of some flexibility. The last day of October, he said this morning, is a ‘fake deadline’. Trying to force Brexit on that date, he said, could lead to a general election, a Corbyn government, followed by no Brexit at all. If the government were close to cutting a deal, he has said, then we should extend the deadline. If there were no deal in sight, on the other hand, Hunt says he would take Britain out of the EU without a deal.

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Why Tories are hooked on Boris Johnson

Modern politicians are like drug dealers intent on keeping their clients’ hooked. They sell fixes to their core voters: upping the strength and deepening the addiction. The punters know at some level they are being played. But a temporary high is better than no high, and infinitely preferable to the sweats and shakes the cold turkey of reality brings. Boris Johnson is the British right’s pusher. He feeds its addiction, taking Conservatives from drug to drug. Higher and higher they go. Further and further from the straight world of the normies with their tedious facts and nagging doubts.

Neil O'Brien

Boris’s secret weapon in the fight against Corbyn

After nine years cleaning up Labour's mess, things are looking up. Government debt as a share of the economy is starting to fall. For Theresa May's successor, this means there is an opportunity to spend some desperately-needed money on public services: the police, prisons, schools and local government. But it's also vital – and a key Tory weapon in the fight against Corbyn – to cut taxes, putting more money in people’s pockets. Boris Johnson has already made such a pledge, floating the idea of increasing the point at which people pay the higher rate of tax. In the long-term, that would be good to do. Yet given the limited room for manoeuvre, right now we must focus on tax cuts that benefit large numbers of people.

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson doubles down on his Brexit position

The Boris Johnson campaign has today responded to accusations that Johnson has been avoiding scrutiny by sending their candidate on a mini-media blitz. In the past 24 hours, Johnson has given interviews to the BBC, LBC and Talk Radio. There's even a promise of more media interaction to come. In all of the interviews, the former mayor of London refused to answer questions on his private life – on the issue of why police were called on Friday night to the apartment he shares with his partner Carrie Symonds. He did, however, send social media into a frenzy when he was asked how he liked to relax and replied that it involved making model buses out of old wine crates.

Melanie McDonagh

Why should we pay for Harry and Meghan’s new home?

Before you get too worked up about the £2.4 million cost to the taxpayer of refurbishing Frogmore “Cottage” for a family of three – one a baby – bear in mind to keep some indignation in reserve for next year. Because this is only the first instalment of the project before the costs have had a chance to overrun, and you know what it’s like with builders. Wait for the next financial year. The other thing is, this already-not-inconsiderable-sum isn’t actually necessary for the housing of Meghan and Harry in the style they feel they deserve.

Robert Peston

‘Preposterous rubbish’: The EU’s verdict on Boris’s Brexit plan

I asked important EU and UK people involved in Brexit talks what they made of Boris Johnson's claim on BBC that: 1: The EU would be prepared to cancel the Northern Ireland backstop. 2: Continue free and frictionless trade with UK for an "implementation period" after Brexit on 31st October. 3: Negotiate a new package of measures to keep an open border on the island of Ireland during the implementation period, and; 4: Would break all their own red lines because they won't like Nigel Farage's 29 MEPs turning up at the European Parliament, and will panic when Johnson says he won't necessarily pay all the £39bn Theresa May agreed that the UK owes the EU in full, or on time.

Steerpike

Watch: Boris dodges Carrie Symonds question 26 times

Boris Johnson has come out of hiding but it seems he is still doing his best to dodge scrutiny. On LBC this morning, Boris was quizzed repeatedly about how a picture of him in the Sussex countryside with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds found its way into the media. And 26 times, he refused to answer. Here is how the exchange unfolded: NF: Why the picture today? BJ: Newspapers will print whatever they are going to print. NF: Where did the picture come from? Boris Johnson, where did the picture come from? BJ: The longer we spend... NF: Where did the picture come from? BJ: The longer we spend on things extraneous... NF: Is it actually you or is it Ed Sheeran? ... NF: Did you know the picture was being put out there Mr Johnson? BJ: There are all kinds of pictures of me put out there...

Alex Massie

Boris’s backers have a lot to answer for

In today’s Times, a “long-standing friend” of Boris Johnson complains that “there’s a tendency to infantilise Boris”. Putting the man who still looks likely to be the next leader of the Conservative and Unionist party and prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland under a form of, well, house-arrest must have seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, the race is his to lose and can only be lost by him. “Clearly”, the chum adds, “there was a need to protect him but it went too far”.  This seems revealing. A number of questions arise. First, *why* do people feel inclined to “infantilise” Johnson?