Uk politics

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Theresa May: I’ll quit when Brexit is delivered

From our UK edition

Theresa May has said she will step down once Brexit has happened. Speaking to Tory MPs, the Prime Minister said she would not remain in post for the next phase of negotiations with the European Union. May told a meeting of the 1922 committee this evening: 'I am prepared to leave this job earlier than I intended in order to secure a smooth and orderly Brexit'. But the PM stopped short of naming a date for her departure. May had previously said that she would not lead the party into the next general election. The latest announcement on her future is an attempt to win over rebel Tory MPs into backing her Brexit deal. Here is what May told MPs: “This has been a testing time for our country and our party. We’re nearly there.

Lloyd Evans

Have we seen the last of the Maybot?

From our UK edition

An astonishing PMQs. Theresa May no longer looks like a sheeted ghost. She’s quit the sick-bay and acquired a veneer of normality. Chipper, brisk, in command. Cheerful even. Jeremy Corbyn gave a lacklustre performance typified by the artless syntax of his opening phrase: ‘Her chaotic and incompetent government has driven our country into chaos.’ He probed her on the indicative votes but she shrugged him aside. Using a favourite ploy she poured scorn on his forensic skills. ‘He shouldn’t just read out the question he thought of earlier,’ she hectored. ‘Listen to the answer.’ She picked at Labour’s confused positions on the Customs Union and the second referendum.

James Forsyth

If May promises to go, will it be enough to win over Tory rebels?

From our UK edition

Theresa May goes to see the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs at 5pm this evening. Speculation is rife that she will use the meeting to announce a timetable for her departure, though there’s no official line from Number 10 on this. I understand that Tory switchers are being told that Theresa May will go if the withdrawal agreement bill gets Royal assent, which would have to be by May 22nd. This would, obviously, require meaningful vote 3 to pass – though, as Katy says, John Bercow is not keen on the vote happening at all. If May does set out a timetable, then I suspect a good number of Tory Brexit rebels will move into the government column. Even without it, there are already some coming over.

Alex Massie

A second referendum is a big risk but it’s the only solution

From our UK edition

You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the predicament in which Jacob Rees-Mogg and his fellow travellers in the European Research Group now find themselves. Happily I am not so encumbered. Having spent months decrying the withdrawal agreement negotiated with the European Union the Moggists now find themselves forced to think about backing it for fear nanny may otherwise bring something worse to the table.  Well, other than anyone capable of observing the facts of Brexit life, who could have predicted this? Who could have recognised that, from the perspective of the Brexiteers themselves, half a loaf is better than no bread at all?

Katy Balls

John Bercow makes life difficult for the government, again

From our UK edition

Are we looking at a case of déjà vu for Meaningful Vote 3 this week? It's not just that Theresa May is currently on course for defeat (even with a string of Eurosceptics switching to back the deal the Prime Minister is short of votes). It also looks as though the government may not even be allowed to put the deal to a vote this week. Last week, John Bercow threw a spanner in the works by announcing that he would not permit a Meaningful Vote 3 unless the deal underwent a substantial change. No. 10 hoped to bring back the deal this Friday for a third vote – with a paving motion being mooted as a way around the problem. However, this afternoon the House of Commons speaker issued a warning to those behind such a move.

Brendan O’Neill

Don’t call Corbynistas ‘cultural Marxists’

From our UK edition

Suella Braverman, the Conservative MP for Fareham, said yesterday that the radical left is increasingly hostile to open debate and is now obsessed with ‘snuffing out’ freedom of speech. And how did the radical left respond to her comments? By trying to snuff out her freedom of speech. It was almost too perfect: a politician says lefties are easily offended and determined to shut down opinions they don’t like, and lefties respond by stamping their feet and saying, ‘I’m offended! Shut her down!’ Self-awareness isn’t the new left’s strong suit.

Steerpike

Revealed: How Jeremy Corbyn is ‘training for power’

From our UK edition

Tories beware – Jeremy Corbyn is in 'training for power'. But the Labour leader isn't readying himself for Downing Street by ensuring his party finally makes up its mind on Brexit. Instead, he is going on long runs, according to a Corbynista fan site with close links to the Labour leader's office. Skwawkbox reports that Jez 'has been preparing for the demands of office with regular 15 kilometer runs'. [caption id="attachment_10269852" align="alignnone" width="343"] Skwawkbox reveals Jeremy Corbyn's fitness regime[/caption] According to the site, 'Corbyn’s training regime reflects his readiness for Downing Street and Labour’s determination to get there'. Corbyn's Labour party has sometimes been likened to a cult.

Robert Peston

Theresa May’s Brexit deal is heading for a third defeat

From our UK edition

Here is the measure of today's events in Parliament: probably the least important question is whether the PM names her own departure date when she sees a rowdy meeting of Tory MPs at 5pm under the umbrella of the 1922 Committee. This is not to trivialise whether or not she confirms she would stand down on May 22nd or shortly afterwards, subject to her Brexit deal being ratified later this week. If she conveys in any way when she's going, and her colleagues have no idea whether or not she will, that's huge. But every Tory MP knows she is a short-dated Prime Minister. Whatever Theresa May says today, none of her MPs expect the leadership election that would select her successor to be held later than the summer.

Ross Clark

The shame of Jacob Rees-Mogg | 27 March 2019

From our UK edition

Until this morning Jacob Rees-Mogg had had a remarkable Brexit. From being an obscure backbencher he had risen, without any formal position, to being just about the most powerful figure in the Conservative party after the Prime Minister. He controlled a party within a party, influencing the votes of seventy or so MPs. He became the most lucid of all MPs on Brexit, speaking with a logic and clarity which disarmed his opponents. He introduced a term to the debate – vassalage – which identified perfectly the weakness of Theresa May’s deal, and emphasised how the EU had successfully driven the Prime Minister into a corner. But this morning, all that has gone.

Isabel Hardman

This is MPs’ chance to reinvigorate democracy. Will they take it?

From our UK edition

MPs are rather bewildered today. It's not just that some of them are trying to understand the intricacies of the Labour Party whipping operation, with frontbenchers saying one thing in broadcast interviews, and the whips saying quite another in private conversations. It's also that parliamentarians are having to decide what it is they actually want from Brexit. This is a significant shift for all of them, whether they were elected two decades ago or in the most recent general election: MPs' job is to decide whether or not to let legislation written by the government of the day pass unamended. Now, rather than simply rejecting a bill, or making changes to its detail rather than the overarching principle, they are having to choose from a long list of options.

Dominic Cummings

The ERG are Remain’s useful idiots

From our UK edition

Watching SW1 these days reminds me of that scene in Citizen Kane when Boss Jim Gettys confronts Orson Welles (Kane): Gettys: ‘You’re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would Mr Kane…With anybody else I’d say what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to you, only you’re gonna need more than one lesson — and you’re gonna get more than one lesson.’ Kane: ‘… I’m gonna send you to Sing Sing Gettys, Siiinngg Siiiiinnnnngggggg…’ These guys didn’t learn from the 2004 referendum (on a North East regional assembly) before 2016.

Tuesday

Robert Peston

A snap election simply cannot happen – and yet it might | 26 March 2019

From our UK edition

Here are the reasons why there must be and cannot be a general election. First, the drivers of a general election: 1) Tomorrow, MPs will start the process of identifying, via so-called indicative votes, a route through the Brexit mess that a majority of them can back. 2) This process is likely to continue next Monday, when a range of Brexit or no-Brexit options should be whittled down to one. 3) There will then be a vote, maybe the following day, compelling the prime minister to negotiate with Brussels whatever MPs have decided. It is too early to say what option MPs will coalesce around. And maybe they are too fractious and divided to coalesce around any practical solution.

Monday

James Forsyth & Katy Balls

Ministers left no clearer about May’s intentions at crunch Cabinet

From our UK edition

After today’s Cabinet, ministers are no clearer about what Theresa May’s intentions are. ‘Reading tea leaves would be easier’, remarks one Secretary of State. This problem is demonstrated by the different messages those present took from the meeting. One Cabinet source said that May’s closing words about governing in the national interest ‘felt a bit like a farewell speech’. While another minister says that May ‘gave no impression of being off’. Part of the problem was that because May had to dash off for a phone call with Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, the meeting hadn’t drawn to its natural conclusion when it was brought to an end.

James Forsyth

Are we heading for a softer Brexit?

From our UK edition

With Oliver Letwin’s amendment passing, MPs will seize control of the order paper on Wednesday afternoon to hold indicative votes. These votes will come before any third vote on May’s deal. The not-so-secret hope of many in government is that they might help the withdrawal agreement get over the line. Theory one is that they’ll show that the majority in the Commons is for a softer Brexit, and so push some reluctant ERGers into the government column. Some ministers also hope that the DUP will not be keen to go for an early election at this moment; and will be more inclined to compromise if they think that the government will go back to the country rather than accept a customs union.

Isabel Hardman

Tory uproar as Bercow insults backbencher Greg Hands

From our UK edition

The Commons has just erupted into a bizarre row over an insult thrown across the Chamber. Normally, in these situations, the Speaker ends up scolding the MP who deployed the insult, but in this case it was John Bercow himself who provoked the uproar in the first place. Demanding that Tory MP Greg Hands come to order, the Speaker told the Chamber that Hands hadn't been a very good whip when he had held the role, which immediately led to angry roars from the Tory benches, followed by repeated shouts of 'withdraw!' Initially, Bercow stuck to his guns as Conservatives complained in points of order that he had only recently asked them to consider their language when addressing one another, and that he had praised Oliver Letwin during the debate which had preceded this argument.

Tom Goodenough

Full list: the 30 Tory MPs who backed Letwin’s Brexit amendment

From our UK edition

MPs have decisively backed Oliver Letwin's amendment, handing them control of the parliamentary timetable on Wednesday in order to hold a series of indicative votes on Brexit. The cross-party amendment was voted through by 329 votes to 302. Three Tory ministers – Steve Brine, Richard Harrington and Alistair Burt – resigned in order to back the amendment. A total of thirty Tory MPs rebelled against the Government on tonight's motion. The decision by MPs to back Letwin's plan is a further major blow to the authority of the Prime Minister. Earlier, Brexit secretary Steve Barclay said the amendment is 'unprecedented in its nature'. But Theresa May has insisted that the Government will not be bound by any indicative votes on Brexit that do take place on Wednesday.

Isabel Hardman

Theresa May gives MPs another Brexit lecture

From our UK edition

The most damaging thing that Theresa May did last week was to turn on MPs in her Downing Street statement, blaming them for the Brexit chaos. Given how settled Westminster seems to be on this conclusion, you might expect the Prime Minister to have tried to mend broken bridges in her Commons statement this afternoon. That she didn't underlines why so much of this mess is her own responsibility. May was not strident, but neither was she making any attempt to mollify MPs. Indeed, her only attempt to engage with MPs' role in this involved yet another lecture about the number of chances they had been given to put amendments down for a second referendum, and that any attempts to stop Brexit was 'not respecting the voters and not respecting our democracy'.

Ross Clark

Has Leo Varadkar finally come clean on the Irish border?

From our UK edition

Without the issue of the Irish backstop, it is reasonably safe to assume the UK would be leaving the EU on Friday with a withdrawal agreement. The government would not be falling apart and businesses and investors would know where they were. But of course, as we have been told constantly by the EU, the backstop is essential. It is absolutely the only way of ensuring, post-Brexit, that the Irish border remains open. What, then, if the whole thing was a hoax – if Britain and Ireland are capable of agreeing between themselves on a customs arrangement which eliminate the need for customs formalities? That is exactly what it appears may be about to happen, if we are to believe Irish PM Leo Varadkar.

Steerpike

Why can’t the New York Times stand Brexit?

From our UK edition

It seems that the editors of the New York Times will print any nonsense about Britain — the British live on mutton and oatmeal! — so long as it confirms their prejudices about Brexit. ‘With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia,’ Sam Byers wrote on Saturday. The British, who are in fact more tolerant of immigration than any other European people, are supposedly ‘poisoned’ by ‘colonial arrogance’ and ‘dreamy jingoism’. Britain, whose stock market carries more trades per day than Wall Street, is somehow a ‘backwater’.

Brendan O’Neill

Don’t be fooled by the twee placards at the People’s Vote march

From our UK edition

I’ve had a lot of flak for describing Saturday’s march for a ‘People’s Vote’ as ‘disturbing’. Angry emailers inform me it was actually a super-polite demo at which children and even pets joined hundreds of thousands of adults in a good-natured traipse through central London calling for Brexit to be rethought. It’s true the marchers were polite. And it’s true there were pets. I saw a dog with a ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ sticker attached to its head. But the politeness bordering on tweeness of Saturday’s mass march cannot disguise its true and, yes, disturbing aim — to overthrow a great act of democracy.