All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Anyone else enjoying the falling apart of the People’s Vote campaign? It’s one of the funniest news stories I’ve read in months. It’s like a soap opera. EastEnders with posh people. And I’m not only chortling over it because I’m a Brexiteer who’s loving the Schadenfreude of seeing the kind of people who don’t respect
Will an election be called this week? That’s the growing expectation among Conservative MPs. Later today the government will hold a vote on an early election for December 12 under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. To pass, Boris Johnson needs two thirds of MPs to back him. However, this is very unlikely – with Labour MPs
Some fiddly amendments from Sir Oliver Letwin that no one quite understands. A legal action against someone or other from Gina Miller. Lots of protest marches. A petition or two – and possibly even an unreadable novella from Ian McEwan/JK Rowling/John Le Carre (delete as applicable) ranting against Brexit. We don’t quite know yet how
It’s all out chaos at the People’s Vote campaign today, after the outgoing chairman of Open Britain (one of the campaign’s five organisations) Roland Rudd attempted to fire the group’s head of communications, Tom Baldwin, and its director, James McGrory. In their place, Rudd wished to appoint Patrick Heneghan, the former head of campaigns for the Labour
Oh dear. As Boris Johnson attempts to call a general election, this could be the week that supporters of a second referendum get together and push for a so-called people’s vote before any snap poll. One of the big Tory worries is that a majority of MPs could coalesce around such a position. However, that
In The Idea of a University John Henry Newman argued that the purpose of higher education was ‘to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties.’ I often wonder what he would make of
Have you ever wondered why so few moderate Muslim voices are heard in the public debate? I used to, until I started to defend my faith against its extremist defamers. I then found out that any Muslim who ventures into this arena to stand up against hardliners is subject to fierce and immediate character assassination.
Have you ever wondered why so few moderate Muslim voices are heard in the public debate? I used to, until I started to defend my faith against its extremist defamers. I then found out that any Muslim who ventures into this arena to stand up against hardliners is subject to fierce and immediate character assassination.
Trump’s presidency is, in many ways, the Obama Undoing Project. Look at the Iran deal, environmental legislation, labour laws, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and much else. Anything Barack did, I can undo better. That could be the Donald’s leitmotif. (Put aside Obamacare, for now.) One Obama-era accomplishment cannot be undone, however: the killing of Osama bin
When President Donald Trump speaks at a press conference later today we can be sure he will be milking, for all it is worth, the presumed killing of Isis leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi during a raid on his compound in north-western Syria by US special forces. Trump is said to have authorised the operation last
Whenever I use the security lane at an airport, I enjoy watching people retrieving their bags and metallic items when they emerge from the X-ray machine. You can quickly divide the population into two: a small minority of ‘logistically aware’ systems-thinkers and the logistically challenged majority. To anyone with a grasp of systems thinking, it
At the New Yorker Festival party in mid-October, my astute colleague hardly needed the caution. But you know how at a discombobulating bash you seize gratefully on something to talk about. So as Matthew Goodwin and I rubbed elbows with the East Coast elite at the Old Town Bar in Manhattan (‘Look! It’s Ronan Farrow!’),
Jo Swinson: we want an election on 9 December Opposition parties are overcoming their opposition to an early general election, and are putting forward their own strategies for how to hold one. The Liberal Democrats and the SNP plan to submit a short amendment to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act tomorrow, which would set an election
I’ve been surprisingly kind about Theresa May in many of the articles I’ve written here and elsewhere. Surprising, because I never thought much of her as a politician or a person before the spring of 2017. Politically, I found her approach to immigration while Home Secretary to be dreadful and borderline dishonest. That continued seamlessly
This week’s assignment was to write the lyrics to a song entitled ‘50 Ways to Leave the White House’. While the brief steered you in the direction of Paul Simon’s 1975 hit (the inspira-tion for whose distinctive chorus was a rhyming game played with his infant son), I didn’t specify that you had to use
Mostly I stay confident the Prime Minister’s team are playing a weak hand badly, but my confidence does occasionally falter. Then Downing Street does something really stupid (like expelling 21 of its own parliamentary party) and I’m reassured that these people aren’t clever at all. This happened last weekend when I opened my Sunday Times
The Scottish National Party and Lib Dems have joined forces to attempt to force a general election in early December, but on a different timetable from that wanted by Boris Johnson and without any further push to see Johnson’s Brexit deal approved by MPs. The Westminster leaders of the two parties, Ian Blackford and Jo
When Rory Stewart declared his candidacy for the London mayor, there was some concern in CCHQ that the former Conservative MP could eat into Tory candidate Shaun Bailey’s vote share. Stewart has been keen to pitch himself as an outward looking politician in touch with modern Britain. While there’s still some way to go to
As Boris Johnson laid out his plan at political Cabinet on Thursday, it quickly became apparent how much of it was dependent on factors outside of his control. I write in The Sun this morning that he said that he still hoped that the EU would offer only the shortest of extensions, forcing parliament to
Update: Heidi Allen has announced that she will no longer stand at the next election. This weekend, Anthony Browne wrote about her confusing political odyssey: As I pound the streets of South Cambridgeshire where I am the Conservative candidate, the most common reaction I get from voters is “How did that happen?”. (That, at least,
The other day, I went to be interviewed in the Savoy hotel. Sitting in what the Savoy now calls the Thames Foyer was Alice Thomson of the Times, a terrifying interviewer because she is so charming. She made me play the game, which she claims I invented, of offering her interviewee a series of choices which
One of the defining themes of this week has been the government threatening to do something dramatic, before manifestly not carrying out that threat. We’ve had No. 10 sources claiming Boris Johnson would pull his Withdrawal Agreement Bill if MPs voted down the programme motion, only for the Prime Minister to announce he is ‘pausing’
The latest confirmation of the sickness evident in British politics these days comes courtesy of political scientists at the universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff whose latest research reveals, once again, the risks voters from across the great Brexit divide are willing to accommodate in pursuit of their preferred political objectives. Fully 71 per cent of
The UK and Brussels are currently engaged in a waiting game – only no one is sure who is waiting for whom. EU leaders had been expected to announce the terms and length of an Article 50 extension this Friday. However, that decision has been put on hold in light of Boris Johnson’s call for
This week, the government looks close to the finishing line – now all Boris wants for Christmas is an early general election, James Forsyth and Katy Balls write in this week’s cover. But will Corbyn let it happen? On the podcast, Katy and James talk to James Mills, former advisor to John McDonnell and Jeremy
Who will you feel most sorry for in the event of a December election? Election officials who will find many of the venues they normally use for polling stations already booked up for Christmas parties and school plays? Or party activists, who will have to go door-knocking in the cold and dark, maybe through horizontal
We are, of course, on the cusp of an exodus of UK businesses as they leave to set up home in other EU countries. We know this because Remainers keep telling us so. Banking jobs are going to disappear to Frankfurt, manufacturing jobs to France or the Czech Republic. Or maybe not. It is not
Last night I took a short nap and had the strangest dream. In it, the Tory prime minister made clear that unless the opposition allows him to have a general election on 12 December his government would go on strike. The legislation to implement the Brexit deal he cherishes would be put on hold. The
Oh God. Is there no end to this madness? The fate of Jamie Griffiths is now known: he’s the teenager who touched – not groped – a girl he liked on two separate occasions last November on the arm and hip. The teenager was charged with sexual assault and now he’s been found guilty at Manchester and
Constitutional government relies on a series of shared understandings, and those with differing political objectives being willing to act in accordance with agreed practice. The high tempers of the Brexit process have certainly put pressure on these understandings and on that willingness. From the Cooper-Letwin episode to the Benn Act, too many parliamentarians have, unfortunately,
Word tonight is that Labour will whip its MPs to abstain on Monday’s general election vote. Officially, Labour won’t formally declare its position until tomorrow. But if its MPs do abstain this means that the government won’t secure the necessary two-thirds support to dissolve parliament under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. So no general election
Boris Johnson wants an election this side of Christmas – the Conservative party is doing well in the polls, he has secured a deal with the EU, and Labour’s Brexit message is simply not cutting through, if the polls are anything to go by. But an election is not within his gift. On Monday, MPs
Boris Johnson has announced that MPs in the House of Commons will vote next week on holding an election on 12 December, in an attempt to break the Brexit impasse. And as expected, plenty of Labour MPs are already lining up to think of reasons to avoid being accountable to the electorate. Mr S wonders
