Whoever wins the Conservative leadership next week, one can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for them. Even if it’s Boris Johnson. Liz Truss fulfilled her inadvertent promise to ‘hit the ground from day one’, and her successor might do the same.
One of first points of impact could be the Medium-Term Fiscal Statement due on October 31, when Hunt or his successor try to sell a divided party and an unhappy nation on a course of bitter public spending medicine that none of them want. Another is Northern Ireland.
Even as the would-be candidates struggle for nominations, Labour is taking the chance to go on the offensive. Sir Keir Starmer announced yesterday that the opposition will go hard at the Government’s Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords. Peers are set to table more than 20 amendments to the legislation, which will empower ministers to deliver unilateral remedies to the current trade border in the Irish Sea.
The ERG made it very clear that they had no intention of allowing ministers to evade the ECJ issue.
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