John O'Neill

On Friday, news came that Mohammed Fahir Amaaz and Muhammad Amaad will not face a third trial for assaulting PC Zachary Marsden at Manchester Airport in a brawl which was shown – in part – in viral social media clips almost two years ago. The brothers were accused of causing actual bodily harm but two juries failed to reach verdicts on the charge and CPS said ‘any further retrial in these circumstances would be highly exceptional’. On Talk TV yesterday, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice said the decision ‘beggars belief’. Some online commenters have suggested the brothers were let off entirely. What happened? In July 2024, viral footage showed Fahir Amaaz being kicked in the head by PC Marsden while he was lying on the ground in a car park at Manchester Airport.

After ten months in office, Keir Starmer has promised to ‘finally take back control’ of migration – but what's his record so far? We don’t yet have the key figure for net migration (that’s due in ten days’ time), but other more timely data shows that the Prime Minister is failing to live up to promises he made before the election. This failure is most obvious on small boats. Starmer said he would ‘smash the gangs’ to stop small boat crossings. It hasn’t worked: record numbers are crossing the Channel. Some 11,574 people have made the journey so far this year, 25 per cent more than in the same period last year. Since the general election, just under 35,000 small boat migrants have arrived.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.  During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US are 2.2 per cent and US tariffs on goods from the UK are 3.3 per cent.

Having squandered the Conservative majority, Theresa May is coming under pressure to resign. It's not just from Jeremy Corbyn and opposition parties: Tory MPs are calling for her to go too, with Anna Soubry first out of the blocks this morning. So if she does resign (perhaps after the ‘period of stability’ she's called for) who might take over? Douglas Carswell says it's a straight fight between David Davis and Boris Johnson: https://twitter.com/DouglasCarswell/status/873054521068408832 But who do the bookies fancy? Although she won in Hastings and Rye, with a small majority of just 346, Amber Rudd has been written off by PaddyPower. They agree with Carswell: Boris is the 3/1 favourite, with Davis behind him on 10/3. Other prospective candidates trail behind.

Recent opinion polls have given the Conservatives bigger leads than they've had in years. So what if today's polls were June's General Election results? According to Electoral Calculus, Labour would lose 47 seats and the Conservatives would gain 51. The SNP may have a clean sweep in Scotland – and it still looks too early for a Lib Dem recovery. The net result? The Conservative majority would rise from 13 to 112 – plunging Labour into another leadership crisis.

Norbert Hofer has just conceded defeat in Austria’s presidential election after exit polls and interim results showed him losing by 47 per cent to 53 per cent. Victory goes to Alexander Van der Bellen, the 72-year-old former Green party leader. He has said the election result sends a message ‘to the capitals of the EU that one can win elections with high European positions.’ The last time Hofer lost to Van der Bellen, in May, his margin of defeat was just 0.4 per cent, or 31,000 votes. His right-wing populist Freedom Party brought an appeal and Austria's Constitutional Court ordered the election to be run again. But this time, Hofer seems to have lost by at least 300,000 votes.

We are ‘in uncharted territory with, effectively, a blank sheet of paper’ in front of us – and that means ‘there might be’ a way that Scotland could stay in both the UK and the EU after Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon said on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. So England and Wales would get what they want and Scots what they want – except for the two-in-five Scots who voted to Leave. But Ms Sturgeon had no suggestion as to how such a plan might work in practice, because it wouldn't work in practice. Scotland voted in 2014 to stay in the UK, and the UK voted in June to leave the EU. And EU countries including Spain and France don't want to give Scotland the choice to stay in.

Will Jeremy Corbyn have a shadow cabinet by the end of the day? By 9am there have already been two departures. As Isabel said on the our Coffee House shots podcast last night, a lot of Labour MPs think the mood of the membership has shifted after the EU referendum and they think this vote of no confidence could be coming at the ideal time. In the early hours of this morning Jeremy Corbyn sacked shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn. Benn had been calling fellow members of the shadow cabinet to ask whether they thought he should call on Corbyn to stand down as leader; and whether they would join him in resigning were he to refuse.

The betting markets are all-but-ready to crown Boris Johnson as the next Conservative leader. After it became clear that Leave had won, the implied chance of Johnson succeeding David Cameron spiked to over 50 per cent – while the chance of George Osborne taking over plummeted. But these are the same betting markets that predicted a 14 per cent chance of Leave yesterday – so while this market is fun to watch, you might prefer to leave your money in your pocket.

Two polls putting Leave well clear of Remain – five points according to yesterday's Guardian/ICM poll, seven points  according to a Times/YouGov poll  – have seen bookies slash their odds on Brexit, implying that it's more likely than ever before – as shown by the chart above. A few weeks ago, the betting markets thought there was an 18 per cent chance of Leave: now it's 41 per cent. This does mean the markets think Remain is the more likely outcome, due to the status quo effect: Whatever people tell pollsters, they tend to stick to the devil they know in referenda. The above chart is calculated by taking an average of all bookies’ odds, which (at time of writing) imply a 41 per cent chance of a vote to Leave.

The knives have been out for David Cameron today. The Sunday Telegraph splashed on Priti Patel saying that he is too rich to care about immigration; the Sunday Times on a letter to the PM, signed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, calling his failure on the migration target ‘corrosive of public trust in politics’. And the Sunday Times quoted a Tory MP saying ‘I don’t want to stab the prime minister in the back — I want to stab him in the front so I can see the expression on his face... You’d have to twist the knife, though, because we want it back for [George] Osborne’. Yikes! The morning's papers were just the start.

Today’s migration figures (net migration was 333,000 in 2015, up by 20,000 on the previous year) are bad news for the Remain campaign – but there’s a crumb of comfort for them in today’s GDP and business investment figures. This second estimate of GDP growth is unchanged from last month’s, still saying that the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2016. But business investment unexpectedly fell by 0.5 per cent. Whatever the reasons for it, Remain can say it’s due to uncertainty over the outcome of the referendum – and dish up more Brexit fearmongering: if businesses are putting off investment because we might leave, what terrible things might happen if we do go?