Ross Clark

As Jeremy Hunt has repeatedly claimed during the Conservative leadership campaign, to set a deadline of 31 October for leaving the EU is foolish. Why tie yourself to that date if a deal with EU negotiators seemed close to being sealed? But if you have fallen for that argument, it seems no less puzzling why you would want to set a deadline of 30 September instead – as Hunt has done this morning. That is the date, he has announced, that he will decide whether a deal is achievable or not. If it is, he is prepared to carry on negotiating with the EU indefinitely. If it isn’t, then he will commit to a no-deal Brexit a month and a day later. His announcement will, of course, be listened to eagerly in Brussels, where 30 September will have been underlined in red.

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.

Whatever you think of Boris Johnson’s ability to be Prime Minister you have to admire the PR skills of Carrie Symonds. Last Thursday evening an event occurred which could seriously damage Boris’ chances of winning the Tory party leadership contest – a domestic row between the couple in which the police were called to her flat. Unsurprisingly, it dominated the news agenda over the weekend. In a sense it still is way up the news agenda. But over the past 36 hours the focus has subtly changed. The ‘scandal’ is no longer what was said, and thrown, in an upstairs flat in Camberwell last Thursday, but the provenance of a soft-focus photo of the couple – apparently all smiles again – sitting in a Sussex garden.

A neighbour records a domestic row through the wall of their flat, takes the recording to a newspaper which then publishes details of the conversation. I wonder what The Guardian would have made of that in 2011 when it was on its crusade against press intrusion which led to the Leveson Inquiry – especially had the newspaper been a red-top. Eight years ago, it was hacking into the messages on mobile phones which caused the controversy – a practice which led to criminal trials and a comprehensive, judge-led inquiry into the ethics of the press.

Why are MPs so pathetically in thrall to Extinction Rebellion? This morning, while the world was focused on the Conservative leadership campaign six Commons select committees (Treasury, BEIS, Environmental Audit, Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology, and Transport) jointly launched a 'Citizens' Assembly' on climate change. If you think you have heard that term before, it was one of the central demands of the climate change activists who occupied Oxford Circus for two weeks in April. One by one, they seem to be having their demands met as if they were a conquering army as opposed to a ragbag of anti-capitalist protesters. They demanded that Parliament declare a ‘climate emergency’ – which it duly did on 1 May.

Heathrow Airport commences the consultation on its third runway plans today with a very big problem on its hands: a man who has threatened to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop the runway seems very likely to be Prime Minister by the time the consultation has concluded. In theory, the project ought to be dead in the water – although, as Lord Adonis pointed out on the Today programme this morning, that would be to underestimate Boris’ capacity for u-turns. According to some reports, Boris has already assured fans of Heathrow expansion that he will respect the decision of Parliament to go ahead with the project. But to take that at face value, too, underestimates Boris’ ability to make simultaneous, mutually-exclusive promises to different audiences.

Theresa May is said to be desperately searching for a legacy in her last few weeks at Number 10. It is staring her in the face. Today, the Office for National Statistics published its latest employment figures which confirm, against all odds, that we are in the midst of a jobs miracle of which any previous prime minister would have been proud. The employment rate climbed again to 76.1 per cent, the equal highest on record. The unemployment rate fell to 3.8 per cent, the lowest rate since the autumn of 1974. The rate for economic inactivity – which takes into account people who are not working but not looking for work either – is also at its lowest rate ever, at 25.2 per cent of the working age population.

The problem for Michael Gove is not that thousands of Conservative party members will open their copy of the Daily Mail this morning and think to themselves: ‘Gove has taken illegal drugs, therefore he is unfit to be Prime Minister’. It is that Gove or his supporters will fall into the trap of trying to turn his admission into a virtue. How tempting it will be for them to try to say: ‘look, all Govey’s done is what millions of other students have done. That makes him a normal human being – unlike all these swivel-eyed moralists who would condemn him for it’. But that is what would be fatal to Gove’s chances of winning the Tory leadership.

Politics may seem to be deeply confusing at present, but in fact there is one very stark conclusion to come out of the Peterborough by-election – that while Labour and the Conservatives are both deeply unpopular, the Labour vote remains more tribal than that of the Conservatives and will hold up better in a general election. Hard though it might be to see the bright side when your party’s share of the vote has plunged from 48 per cent to 31 per cent, Peterborough is something of a quiet triumph for Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour result is truly miserable until you realise that the Conservatives’ share fell from 46 per cent to 21 per cent.

For at least a year the Brexit debate has been conducted almost entirely on negative ground – arguing over how harmful it might be if we leave with no deal, or whether leaving the EU is already threatening the economy. There has been rather less discussion of the benefits of Brexit – what Britain will be able to do in the future which it can’t do as a member of the EU. It was this, after all, which won the 2016 referendum for Leave, so why have leavers been so shy about continuing to make the case for Brexit? This week, though, comes one positive contribution in the shape of a paper on the financial services industry by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).

I have often wondered what would happen if politicians were bound by the same rules as advertisers, or if manifestos were brought within the scope of the trading standards laws. What if we could take legal action against a government for failing to provide the extra NHS beds or school places they had promised? Given the propensity for governments to excuse themselves from their own legislation when it suits them – Blair’s government simply passed a clause excluding political parties when Labour’s women-only shortlists fell foul of sex discrimination legislation – it is hard to imagine such a law being passed by Parliament. But on 14th May, Westminster Magistrates heard an attempt to create one through political precedent.

How ironic that British Steel goes into administration on the day before the European elections, putting 4,200 jobs at risk in a leave-voting constituency. And how utterly fatuous to blame Britain’s vote to leave the EU for the failure of the Scunthorpe plant. There is a link with Brexit, but it is not the one mentioned in passing on BBC news bulletins this morning – that our leaving the EU has frightened off European customers. If anything, the fall in the pound since 2016 should have helped British Steel, making its exports to the rest of the EU cheaper. But that has not been enough to counter the mass of cheap steel that is coming out of China. The Scunthorpe plant very nearly closed in 2016, when its then owner Tata Steel, decided to jettison it.

It is still a few hours before Philip Hammond makes his speech to the CBI this evening but so much of it has been trailed in advance that delegates might as well just read the newspapers – and then book some entertainment from a juggler or fire-eater instead. We know he is going to attack what he calls the “populist right”. We know, in a thinly-veiled attack on Boris, he will say:  “There is a real risk of a new prime minister abandoning the search for a deal, and shifting towards seeking a damaging no-deal exit as a matter of policy.