Politics

Daniel Hannan, who predicted the Irish ‘No’ vote in this magazine, now says that the EU will simply implement the Lisbon Treaty and never risk a referendum again By ten o’clock on Friday morning, it was clear that the ‘No’s had it. Ireland’s Europhiles were struggling even in their affluent strongholds within the Pale. In the rest of the country, they were being pulverised. A jubilant ‘No’ campaigner rang me from Galway, his words tumbling over each other. ‘It looks like a high turnout, too,’ he exulted. ‘The Eurocrats won’t be able to just carry on as if nothing has happened.’ Oh yes they will, I told him, sadly. They

Until his astonishing resignation from the Commons last week, the prospect of David Davis as the next Home Secretary was one of the foremost attractions of a new Conservative government. On a range of issues from prison policy and police bureaucracy to managed migration and juvenile crime, Mr Davis’s instincts have long been excellent. Since David Cameron’s election as party leader in 2005, furthermore, he acted as a check on the occasional excesses of the Tory modernisers. The ‘decontamination of the Tory brand’ has been a necessary — and highly successful — process. When, from time to time, it veered towards folly, Mr Davis often saved the day, calming the

It’s all too easy to leave Top Secret papers lying around — I should know News last week that police are investigating a ‘serious’ security breach after a civil servant lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on al-Qa’eda sent a shiver of alarmed reminiscence down my spine. The unnamed Cabinet Office employee apparently breached strict security rules when he left the papers, in an orange cardboard folder, on the seat of a train bound for Surrey. It just would be Surrey. Apparently the papers were classified Top Secret. Mine were more secret than that. Top Secret isn’t the top secret classification — or wasn’t in 1976. There were (to