Politics

Cabinet today was not as dramatic as some had expected. No one argued for ministers being allowed a free vote on the Cooper / Boles amendment. Indeed, I’m told the Chief Whip’s plea for ministers to stick to collective responsibility went unchallenged. Perhaps, the two most interesting contributions came from Jeremy Hunt and David Gauke. Gauke questioned the government’s new approach. He said he was worried that even if the government did get something on the backstop, there still wouldn’t be enough Tory MPs backing the deal for it to pass. While Hunt argued that the best thing for the government to do was to get parliamentary support for a

The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: “Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?” But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. “The latter, I think,” is the response I have heard time and time again, both from Labour supporters and Tories. For the entire day before Abbott’s appearance on Question Time, in which she thinks she was treated badly on account of the colour of her skin and her gender, my wife had been bouncing around the house

David Blunkett once ruled the roost in the Labour party but under Jeremy Corbyn, Blair’s old acolytes are mostly ignored within their old party. So it’s no surprise that there was little for Blunkett to do other than hold his head in his hands as Corbynista favourite Chris Williamson spelled out his views on Brexit today. Appearing on the BBC’s Politics Live, Williamson said he wasn’t that bothered by a no deal Brexit because the ‘key thing’ for a future government to focus on is ‘redistributing income and wealth’. Williamson admitted that economic growth might not be quite as fast if Britain did leave the EU without a deal, but

Today’s Cabinet conference call was more illuminating in terms of direction of travel than the details of what Theresa May is actually going to do. It is now clear that May’s approach is to try and put the Tory DUP alliance back together by getting something on the backstop rather than trying to find some cross party consensus. One of the reasons for this is that the Labour leadership’s reluctance to play ball makes it very hard to get the numbers for any compromise deal. I am told that David Lidington, who had been leading the cross party talks, reluctantly acknowledged this point. As one Cabinet Minister put it to

After Theresa May’s Brexit deal was defeated by 230 votes in the Commons last week, there was speculation that May would lean towards a softer Brexit in order to get a deal through. Despite holding a series of cross-party talks in this vein, that now looks unlikely. As James reports on Coffee House, May is expected to announce that she will continue to seek backstop concessions in a bid to win back Tory and DUP support. Given the level of Brexiteer opposition to May’s deal, that may seem like a long shot. But it’s worth noting that in recent days, leading Leave MPs appear to have softened their opposition to

Liam Fox – Remain MPs are trying to ‘steal Brexit’ With the government in severe difficulties after a week which saw Theresa May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement rejected by the largest margin in Parliamentary history, politicians are now exploring how to break the deadlock before the UK officially leaves the EU on 29th March. Speaking to Andrew Marr, the International Trade Secretary condemned parliamentarians hoping to take advantage of the current stalemate to try and hinder or reverse the referendum result: <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/afHr_MXzcso” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe> LF: You’ve got a Leave population and a Remain Parliament. Parliament has not got the right to hijack the