Politics Archives

Thursday

10 Jan 2019

Portrait of the Week – 10 January 2019

Home The government drifted towards a vote by the Commons, which it had cancelled in December, on its withdrawal agreement from the EU. British and European officials discussed extending the period under Article 50 before Britain leaves the EU, which would otherwise come into effect on 29 March. ‘We’re continuing to work on further assurances, on further undertakings from the European Union in relation to the concern that’s been expressed by parliamentarians,’ Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said. She even invited groups of MPs for a drink at 10 Downing Street to court their votes. The government was defeated by 303 votes to 296 on a cross-party amendment to the

Robert Peston

Diary – 10 January 2019

As a hack who lived and breathed the financial crisis, you might think that at the start of 2008 and 2009 I would have been more anxious about what lay ahead than I am today. Wrong. In my understanding of the mechanistic link between a bust banking system and the wallop to our prosperity, I could at least broadcast about what needed to be done to clean up the mess. A problem understood is a mendable problem. I am more unsettled today than at any time in 35 years as a journalist because of a political paralysis that makes the destiny of this nation so uncertain. The Prime Minister’s Brexit

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 January 2019

Behind the incident of Anna Soubry being called a Nazi by a small group of Leave yobs beside College Green lies a classic Brexit sequence of events. For many months now, Remain protestors have infested that area. Their numbers are small, but they are well trained to insert themselves and their banners into relevant live television interviews, and have been praised by the Guardian for doing so. Never have I seen the BBC trying to exclude them from its shots, even when the protestors’ interventions have made it quite difficult for those being interviewed. Sometimes BBC interviewers have gestured on air towards the protestors as evidence of strong pro-Remain public

Tim Farron

My plan to end the abuse of MPs

In football, a player can be sent off the pitch for violent conduct or ‘using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures towards another player’. If a footballer attacks another player rather than the ball, they are disciplined. This is an accepted and acceptable approach to a game where passions run high. A similar approach could be applied to the unacceptable abuse of politicians such as Anna Soubry and a number of journalists, over Brexit. Why are standards that are applied on the sports field somehow lost in real life? By all means play the ball (whether that’s Brexit, the EU itself, May’s deal or no deal) with a passion.

Isabel Hardman

Has Speaker Bercow outstayed his welcome?

John Bercow has been an excellent, reforming Speaker of the House of Commons. He has supercharged backbenchers with greater use of urgent questions, for instance, and has also made Parliament more family-friendly. His pomposity while chairing Prime Minister’s Questions – the endless chiding about what the public might think of MPs’ behaviour, often accompanied with tedious jokes about certain members needing to take ‘a soothing medicament’ – was something even the MPs in question could forgive, given they had a Speaker who was making the legislature bolder. But in the past few months, there has been a shift in the Parliamentary mood. Yes, Bercow still has many supporters on the

Toby Young

Socially segregated Oxbridge colleges are a dreadful idea

The Guardian has published a piece by Andrew Adonis urging Oxford and Cambridge to set up ‘access colleges’ which would only admit applicants from comprehensives. I’ve long been a fan of Adonis. He did more to drive up standards in state schools as a Labour education minister than most Conservatives do as education secretaries. Unlike his partisan colleagues, he has also been wholly supportive of the free schools programme and gave me some much needed words of encouragement when I was trying to set one up. So I was disappointed to see him resurrect this old idea. The last time it was run up the flagpole, five years ago, I

Stephen Daisley

Jeremy Corbyn is right. We need a general election

Brenda from Bristol, look away now. Jeremy Corbyn is pressing Theresa May to call a general election, saying: ‘To break the deadlock, an election is not only the most practical option, it is also the most democratic option. It would give the winning party a renewed mandate to negotiate a better deal for Britain and secure support for it in Parliament and across the country.’ The EU has already made clear there will be no changes to the terms and Corbyn’s election call is really a holding tactic. However, he has, inadvertently, stumbled on an inescapable truth: this Parliament is no longer capable of delivering Brexit or even of thwarting

Steerpike

11 times John Bercow did care about Parliamentary precedent

John Bercow ditched Parliamentary precedent when he allowed a vote to take place on Dominic Grieve’s Brexit amendment yesterday. His decision caused uproar among Tory MPs, but Bercow defended the decision by saying that precedent didn’t count for everything when it comes to setting the rules in the Commons. He told MPs: ‘I am not in the business of invoking precedent, nor am I under any obligation to do so. I think the hon. Gentleman will know that it is the long-established practice of this House that the Speaker in the Chair makes judgments upon the selection of amendments and that those judgments are not questioned by Members of the House. I am clear in my mind that I

James Forsyth

Does May even have a Plan B?

Cabinets these days are fractious affairs. Ministers take increasingly unsubtle digs at each other as they rehearse the same old arguments. But this week, Theresa May chose to have a pop at someone who wasn’t there. ‘We’re still suffering from George,’ she told her colleagues — a reference to the former chancellor George Osborne. Her complaint was that Osborne’s over-the-top threats of a punishment Budget and other such claims during the 2016 referendum campaign had made it far harder to get Tory MPs and the public to take warnings of the consequences of no deal seriously. For her, this is a big problem. Her Brexit deal will only get through

Duncan Gardham

Quiet terror

They don’t like to use the ‘Q’ word in counter-terrorism. It’s a bit like blurting out the name of the Scottish Play in a theatre. At Christmas parties, members of the security agencies insisted they had never been busier but once the year had turned and they were no longer tempting fate, they were prepared to admit that 2018 was a bit ‘quieter’. There were, for instance, far fewer arrests for ‘attack planning’, as opposed to downloading or sharing instructional and propaganda material. Last year, there were only four foiled attacks and one unsuccessful vehicle attack on Parliament. Right at the last gasp, with three hours to go to New

Wednesday

9 Jan 2019

Daniel DePetris

Matteo Salvini is doing Brussels a favour with his harsh migration policy

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and interior minister, is one of the most controversial politicians in Europe. The 45-year old chief of the League party exudes a down-to-earth demeanour with his common-man social media posts, in which he shares pictures of himself eating Barilla pasta and Nutella. To his many opponents, Salvini is a thick-headed, semi-fascist ideologue who wants to turn back the clock and return Europe to a dangerous form of nationalism. But to his supporters, in and out of Italy, he is a straight-talking, no-nonsense defender of his country’s sovereignty against the northern elites in Berlin and Brussels. However Salvini is seen, one thing is beyond dispute: migration levels

James Forsyth

The two problems with Dominic Grieve’s Brexit amendment

Another day, another defeat for the government—this time on Dominic Grieve’s amendment, which requires Theresa May to set out within three sitting days what she’ll do next if the meaningful vote doesn’t pass. The significance of this is that Grieve thinks that the motion the government would put down would be amendable, so MPs would be able to tell the government what they want to happen. But what does this mean in practise? Well, the first thing to note is that there isn’t currently a majority for anything in the Commons. This suggest that no amendment—whether it be for a second referendum or Norway Plus—would be able to pass the

Lloyd Evans

PMQs offered a glimpse of Corbyn’s narcissism

PMQs began with tributes to the late Paddy Ashdown. The philandering man-of-action was the closest thing the Liberal Democrats ever got to James Bond. And though he was often ridiculed by MPs as a self-important windbag, today they hailed him as one of the greats. In this respect the House truly reflected the people. Death brings out the hypocrite in all of us. May offered a few respectful words. The Lib Dems were represented by the weirdly pompous Sir Edward Davey whose knighthood has swollen his head without affecting the capacity of his brain. At least his tribute seemed genuinely heartfelt. The most sincere effort came from Jeremy Corbyn. ‘He

Ross Clark

The forgotten voters who might win the next election for Corbyn

Before Brexit: The Uncivil War is allowed to drift off into the ether, there is an important point which needs to be made, and yet which has not been addressed in all the reams of comment which have written about it. There is a gaping hole in its narrative. That narrative seems straightforward enough: Vote Leave won the referendum because its leader, Dominic Cummings, and his team of geeks realised that they could tap into a vast, lost constituency of Britons with whom politicians and traditional political campaigning methods had lost touch. This they did by analysing Facebook and other social media data and then hitting the lost voters –

Andrew Watts

Michael Gove might not know much about mid-50s swingers, but I do

At this week’s cabinet meeting, Michael Gove said that MPs hoping for a better deal from Brussels were like “mid-50s swingers” waiting for Scarlett Johansson to turn up to one of their parties. Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, added “Or Pierce Brosnan”. But while the casting choices were up for debate – David Gauke added that they were expecting Johansson to make her cameo on a unicorn – no one at the cabinet meeting asked what Gove, 51, knew about mid-50s swingers parties. Now I do know about mid-50s swingers parties. I went to one. Killing Kittens Silvers is a club for “the sexual elite” over 45, with, according

Isabel Hardman

John Bercow’s disregard of precedent is a serious constitutional issue

It would be tempting to dismiss the past hour and a half of points of order in the House of Commons as MPs making fools of themselves by complaining about things not going their way. Indeed, there was some evidence to support that theory, such as the final exchange of the session between the Speaker and Tory MP Adam Holloway in which the backbencher complained about a ‘bollocks to Brexit’ sticker in the window of a car driven by the Speaker’s wife and shouted, in the manner of a lawyer in a lowbrow television drama: ‘Have you driven that car?’ Bercow made this seem even more ludicrous by assuring the

Alex Massie

There are few innocent parties when it comes to this Brexit mess

A New Year and the same old mess, only with knobs on this time. If the government cannot be said to be distinguishing itself right now, its directionless meanderings are matched by those of the House of Commons as a whole. Brexit, we were often told, was a means by which ‘sovereignty’ could be restored to parliament in particular and, more generally, to the great British public itself. On the current evidence, you wouldn’t entrust a tombola to the House of Commons. Last night the Commons demanded that the government avoid a no-deal Brexit. This was, if we are looking for something positive, mordantly amusing. But then gallows humour is

Steerpike

Factcheck: is UK aid being spent on politicians in Bangladesh?

Britain’s foreign aid department was on the defensive this week, following a Mail on Sunday article casting scorn on the decision to spend £200 million in aid on Bangladesh, after the violent and possibly rigged spectacle of the country’s election at the end of last year. In a blistering response, the Department for International Development (DfID), called out the Mail’s headline, which it said was ‘factually inaccurate’ and said that ‘No UK aid was given to the Government of Bangladesh, the Bangladeshi Election Commission or any Bangladeshi political parties for this election.’ But while it may be true that the department has not given money directly to the Bangladeshi government,

Steerpike

Can Martin Selmayr’s denials be trusted?

Martin Selmayr, the so-called ‘monster’ of Brussels, has reacted angrily to claims that he set out to punish Britain over Brexit. Selmayr, controversially elevated last year to become secretary general of the European Commission, was said to have told a meeting in Brussels in November that ‘the power is with us’ in Brexit trade talks. The claim was repeated in a detailed article by Tory MP Greg Hands, who sets out allegations that Selmayr and Sabine Weyand, another top EU official, crafted the Brexit deal in order to inflict maximum pain on Britain. Needless to say, Selmayr isn’t happy. This morning, he shared a link to Hands’ Conservative Home piece

Tuesday

8 Jan 2019

Oliver Lewis

Brexit: The Uncivil War didn’t reveal the truth about Vote Leave

Brexit: The Uncivil War makes a big claim right at the start: to show us what really happened in the EU referendum two years ago, and to give us insight into the inner workings of the Vote Leave campaign. It’s an enticing offer but (ironically for a film about allegedly dodgy campaign pledges) I’m not really sure it ever really delivers on this promise. Now, I admit that I’m as far away as possible from a ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ reviewer. Having campaigned for Brexit long before ‘Brexit’ was even a word, and having served as the Research Director of Vote Leave, I realise it’s pretty much impossible for me to approach this

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