Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Queen’s Speech: Full text

My Lords and Members of the House of Commons. My government’s priority is to secure the best possible deal as the country leaves the European Union. My ministers are committed to working with Parliament, the devolved administrations, business and others to build the widest possible consensus on the country’s future outside the European Union. A

Tom Goodenough

Queen’s Speech: the full guide to what’s been scrapped

Today’s Queen Speech was supposed to be a moment of crowning glory for Theresa May. Instead, it’s a muted affair, with the Tories’ plans for Government left in tatters as a result of their blown majority. ‘Strong and stable’ is out; in comes ‘humility’ and ‘resolve’ – and the party’s manifesto has been largely binned. Here’s what didn’t

Katy Balls

Queen’s Speech: Theresa May bins her manifesto

Today’s Queen’s Speech is notable not for what’s in it, but for what’s been left out. With no Tory majority and no agreement with the DUP, Theresa May has had to gut her 2017 Conservative Manifesto. The fact that the legislation ‘trailed’ on the eve of the speech included plans to tackle nuisance whiplash compensation

Don’t be apathetic – take charge of your savings

It’s obvious to see how far cash savings have fallen over the years and how increasingly difficult it is to avoid inflation eroding your nest egg. In stark contrast are the striking potential returns that can result from investing in stocks and shares. But it’s worth remembering that fund values can fall as well as

The one big lesson Tories must learn about young voters

It’s the youth wot won it (almost). The day after the election turned into a day of self-congratulation for young voters, as initial reports indicated 72 per cent turnout among 18-24 year olds. As post-election data comes in, it is obvious that the so-called ‘youthquake’ was exaggerated. Nevertheless, there was undeniably an upward trend in engagement.

The price of being single

The average cost of attending a wedding is £800 per couple, according to a press release from Nationwide which landed in my inbox earlier this week. The building society completely ignored the fact that single people attend weddings too. Nationwide says wedding attendance costs can really mount up ‘especially if you’re going as a couple’.

Feeling full of rage? Blame the summer heat

Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver. When I remonstrated with him, he leapt out of the cab and assaulted me, with a violent shove in the small of my back, trying to push me off my bike. It was the heat

Steerpike

Watch: Dennis Skinner’s Queen’s Speech quip

Dennis Skinner is no fan of the Monarchy. But he used his traditional quip at today’s Queen Speech to try and do Her Majesty a big favour. The rescheduling of the speech – which had been due to take place on Monday – has made things tricky for the Queen to make it to one

Stephen Daisley

Gerard Coyne’s show trial is a stark warning to Labour moderates

‘There is no step, thought, action, or lack of action under the heavens,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘which could not be punished by the heavy hand of Article 58’. Unite the Union’s rules appear to operate on much the same basis as the Soviet provision against ‘counter-revolutionary action’. Gerard Coyne, Unite’s West Midlands secretary, has been

Isabel Hardman

DUP pushes a hard bargain as talks with Tories stall

Tomorrow Theresa May will present a Queen’s Speech that doesn’t have the formal support of a majority of the House of Commons. Her negotiations with the DUP still haven’t concluded, with party sources this afternoon warning the Conservatives that they won’t be ‘taken for granted’ and criticising the way May and her team have conducted

Ed West

Labour is now the party of the middle class

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so pessimistic about this country’s future, and I’m not usually a barrel of laughs to start with. Aside from the terrorism, and the recent tragedy in North Kensington, there are real black clouds in the distance. Investors are being put off Britain, a problem that pre-dates Brexit but is

Steerpike

Alan Duncan is a model of indiscretion in new BBC Brexit documentary

The new BBC documentary Brexit Means Brexit: The Unofficial Version lifts the lid on what has gone on behind the scenes since EU referendum result last year. While a host of Westminster stalwarts – including Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Anna Soubry – have contributed to the programme, it’s Alan Duncan’s appearance that has caught Mr

David Lidington resets relations with the judges – but can it last?

As the Brexit negotiations kicked off in Brussels yesterday, an equally delicate act of diplomacy took place in London at the Royal Courts of Justice, where David Lidington was sworn in as the new Lord Chancellor. Ceremony aside, this was a big political moment, involving one of the most important speeches of Mr Lidington’s career so far. He

Steerpike

Could Vince Cable be the Lib Dems’ answer to Jeremy Corbyn?

There was a time when progressives thought that politics had become too much of an old boys’ club. In the place of ageing male politicians, liberals called for more women and ethnic diversity in politics. However, times are a’changing. After Jeremy Corbyn defied all expectations in the snap election by hoovering up 40 per cent of the vote,

Katy Balls

What’s wrong with the 12 new Scottish Tory MPs?

Although the snap election result was disappointing for the Conservative party as a whole, there was reason for celebration north of the border. Ruth Davidson led the Scottish Conservatives to unprecedented success, with 13 MPs elected in total. Now that David Mundell is no longer the Tories’ only MP in Scotland, the Secretary of State for

The Euro’s badly-needed reform could finally be on the cards

Has Germany finally started to shift its position on the future of the Eurozone? Speaking today, at a conference for the German equivalent of the CBI, Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to open the door to a new form of governance for the 19-country bloc. Since the financial crisis, the common currency zone has bounced from crisis to

Spend your pension pot wisely

There was an almighty hoo-ha when George Osborne introduced pension freedoms. In the biggest change to pensions in a generation, anyone aged 55 and over is now allowed to take their entire pension pot as a lump sum, paying no tax on the first 25 per cent and the rest taxed as if it were

Katy Balls

‘Constructive’ Brexit talks get off to a shaky start for David Davis

To kick the Brexit negotiations off, David Davis and Michel Barnier exchanged mountain-themed gifts, of a hiking book and walking stick. Given that the EU’s chief negotiator previously warned Brexit would be a ‘steep and a rocky’ path, the choice seemed apt. Although the Brexit secretary said he had been encouraged by the constructive approach both

Isabel Hardman

Will Theresa May become Brexit’s scapegoat?

Normally in the run-up to a Queen’s Speech, Westminster watchers wonder how radical the Prime Minister feels like being – and how much political capital they have available to spend. But of course this year’s Speech is rather different, because the Prime Minister has no political capital and the negotiations with the DUP haven’t concluded.

Steerpike

George Osborne’s new mission

Although it’s been said that revenge is a dish best served cold, George Osborne seems to take the approach that it is best served daily. Since the former Chancellor left politics to edit the Evening Standard, he has taken great joy in making Theresa May’s day a little bit worse with each issue. Today is

Gavin Mortimer

How long can Macron’s message of hope survive?

It says much about the extraordinary rise of Emmanuel Macron that some commentators are describing the outcome of Sunday’s second round of voting in the parliamentary elections as something of a disappointment for the new president. His La République en Marche [LREM] party won an estimated 359 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly,

Please can the bullying of Theresa May stop?

We all remember it from school, whether as perpetrator, or assistant of perpetrator, or victim: the moment when everyone turns against another pupil and it becomes legitimate to be vile to her. When she is ‘down’, it becomes more and more enjoyable to torture her and to find endless new aspects of her to be