Boris johnson

Monday

Alex Massie

What is the point of these prime ministerial statements?

I know I can’t speak for your circumstances but I hope you’re enjoying this Festival of Brexit as much as I am. The country hasn’t endured this kind of dismal government since the last one and, sweetly, the opposition is just as inspirational and attractive as it was then too. Yet again, nothing has changed. Say what you will about Boris Johnson however – and I suppose there’s plenty you could – no-one can deny he possesses the priceless ability to spraff on and on with stuff he, even he, must surely know is nonsense on a zip wire. On Monday evening he charged out of Downing Street – rather

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Boris Johnson tries to shift the blame for an early election

In his statement outside No. 10, Boris Johnson’s message was simple: back me or help Corbyn. Ahead of a crunch Brexit vote tomorrow in the Commons, the Prime Minister urged Tory MPs to get on side and help ensure a Brexit deal could be agreed. In order to do this, Johnson said it was vital that MPs did not vote for the rebel alliance plot to try to force the government to request an Article 50 extension: ‘But if there is one thing that can hold us back in these talks it is the sense in Brussels that MPs may find some way to cancel the referendum. Or that tomorrow

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Does Boris Johnson want to lose tomorrow’s vote?

To reinforce what I said about the gravity of tomorrow’s vote, rumours are swirling that Dominic Cummings – the PM’s chief aide – wants to lose (I am not persuaded!) the vote so he can purge Grieve and any other rebel Tories and then take on Corbyn’s Labour before the next EU council on 17 October. He may now feel this the best platform to honour Boris Johnson’s pledge to leave the EU by 31 October. This is quite the game of chicken. What is clear to me is that events will move very fast if Johnson loses tomorrow – because Johnson will not want his authority damaged by a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What is Number 10 up to?

Boris Johnson’s team wants to set up a binary choice between backing him on Brexit and a Jeremy Corbyn government. First, they are trying this on their own MPs—hence the decision to treat this week’s vote on an extension as if it was a confidence matter. But if this doesn’t work, and at the moment it looks like there are enough rebels for anti no-deal MPs to seize control of the order paper, then—I suspect—they will go to the country with the same message. They are determined not to allow MPs to make a puppet of Boris Johnson. They know that if the Prime Minister requested an extension, even if

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Boris Johnson about to go for an election?

Things are moving fast in Westminster this afternoon, with speculation mounting that Boris Johnson might be about to call an election. The Cabinet is meeting this afternoon, and there will be a reception of Tory MPs in Downing Street this evening, too. Those involved are definitely discussing an early general election as one possibility. The reason this is under consideration is that Number 10 expects MPs to win their bid tomorrow to take control of the order paper, which would mean that Johnson is pitched into eight weeks of being Prime Minister but with no power. He will have lost around a dozen Tory MPs, meaning he has no majority. In

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris’s game of chicken with Tory rebels

Is Boris Johnson playing a game of chicken with anti-no-deal Tory MPs? The two sides are locked in a furious standoff over the threat from the Prime Minister that MPs will lose the Tory whip and be prevented from standing for the party at the next election if they back this week’s rebel legislation blocking no deal. That threat, first reported by James Forsyth, might have caused one or two MPs to back down, but it has made others, including Rory Stewart and David Gauke, more defiant. They are insisting that they will vote for the extension legislation this week, even if it means they stop being Conservatives. The point

Steven Fielding

Why the far-left really does think there is a ‘coup’

On Saturday thousands of people across Britain demonstrated against Boris Johnson’s recently-announced prorogation of parliament. Despite the heated response it provoked, proroguing parliament is a standard device which over the years has been employed by governments of all stripes. And as parliament was to be suspended for a few weeks during September and October in any case to allow the parties to hold their annual conferences, Johnson’s measure has reduced MPs’ time to prevent a no-deal Brexit by just a few days. In the context of an unprecedented crisis, with the clock ticking down to October 31, the Prime Minister’s act of constitutional sharp practice nonetheless outraged those who demonstrated

Sunday

Katy Balls

Boris Johnson clashes with Gaukeward squad over deselection threat

How many Tory MPs will vote against the government this week in a bid to stop a no deal Brexit? When MPs return to the House of Commons on Tuesday from the summer recess, a cross-party group of MPs – with the help of John Bercow – are expected to try to take control of the order paper and push through a bill to legislate against no deal. As James revealed at the weekend, No. 10 is planning to dissuade Tories from joining the efforts by threatening to deselect any Tory MPs who vote for such measures. This evening a government whips source confirmed the move: ‘The whips are telling

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Boris was right to u-turn over Freedom of Movement

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on 31 October. A problem, when it hasn’t worked out let alone revealed what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s cover story, this decision saw millions of EU nationals plunged into uncertainty – and by a Prime Minister who had promised them security. The Sunday Times today reveals that the decision has been revoked. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million EU nationals living in the country, giving

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

A guide to the different sorts of chaos looming over Westminster

What is going to happen next week in parliament? Most anti-no-deal rebels see it as their last opportunity to block Britain leaving the European Union without a deal, but what they haven’t yet agreed on is how best to do it. There are a number of likely scenarios, some of which intertwine with one another, and to show how chaotic the next few days are likely to be, I’ve drawn up a flowchart of how things might pan out (you can click on the image to view a larger version of the chaos): The most likely parliamentary route is through an emergency debate under Standing Order 24, which the rebels

David Skelton

The forgotten towns that will decide Boris Johnson’s fate

If Boris Johnson does call a snap election this year, his fortune will be decided in the same places that swung the referendum for Brexit. Britain’s forgotten towns, places like my home town of Consett, perched high in the hills of north-west Durham, will determine the Prime Minister’s fate. In Consett, there is little sign now that this was a place once home to one of the world’s biggest steelworks. Steel from here was used to build great structures, bridges and battleships for the whole Empire, from Blackpool Tower and bridges in far-flung places to Britain’s fleet of nuclear submarines. But Consett went from being a symbol of industrial might to an emblem

Friday

Anna Bailey

Boris Johnson’s Parliament shutdown isn’t unconstitutional

Has Boris Johnson done a Charles I and shut down Parliament indefinitely? The headlines this week might lead you to think so. ‘Uproar as Boris Johnson shuts down parliament to protect Brexit plan’, reported the FT. John Bercow called it ‘a constitutional outrage’. ‘It’s tantamount to a coup against Parliament,’ raged former attorney general Dominic Grieve. Nicola Sturgeon called it ‘a dictatorship’. Yet the reality hardly lives up to the rhetoric. These are the facts: Parliament will return from summer recess on 3 September as planned. Parliament will not sit from mid-September to early October during the three-week party conference season – also as planned and as happens every year. What has

Alexander Pelling-Bruce Alexander Pelling-Bruce

How Boris Johnson boxed his Brexit opponents in

As a Leave voter, it is satisfying to watch Boris’s Johnson’s bold Brexit plan unfold. The predictable backlash to it – what Jacob Rees-Mogg called the ‘candyfloss of outrage’ – is also an entertaining spectacle, with some of those most determined to stop Brexit resorting to ever lurid analogies to describe the Prime Minister. But why are the Government’s opponents now wailing so loudly? The answer is simple: because they know this week’s prorogation move has boxed them in. First, let’s be clear: whatever some of Boris Johnson’s supporters might say, the plan to suspend Parliament is a deliberate attempt to decrease the parliamentary time MPs have to act to pass

Thursday

The Spectator

Is Trump’s suggestion to bomb hurricanes really that stupid?

Blowing against the wind President Trump was ridiculed for suggesting that hurricanes could be impeded on their passage across the Atlantic by bombing them. Yet there is nothing new in trying to stop or reduce the power of hurricanes by artificial means. — Between 1962 and 1971 the US government ran an experiment called Project Stormfury to try just that. The idea was to spray the eye of a hurricane with silver iodide crystals in the hope that it would stimulate the development of a second ‘eyewall’ of cloud, in competition with the first, thereby helping to break up the storm. The method was tried on four hurricanes over eight

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The treatment of EU nationals will be a litmus test of Boris Johnson’s Brexit

What makes Boris Johnson an improvement on Theresa May? Those of us who cheered him on into 10 Downing Street have a long list. He backed Brexit, so would stand a far greater chance of getting it done. He’d hire better people, who could outwit and outmanoeuvre his parliamentary enemies (as we have seen this week). He is acting with a pace and with a daring that is extraordinary – and commensurate with the challenge he faces over Brexit. But the real point of Boris as leader is that he promised to give his party a better chance of healing the divisions of the referendum and uniting the country. This

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

History will soon judge this fraught time

Good stories have a dénouement. The Act III moment when all is revealed and the narrative comes in to land is critical to most plays and novels. And so we want it to be with Brexit. Who will turn out to have been right, and who wrong? Whose bluff will have been called, and to whom will go the secret pleasures of ‘I told you so’? Real life usually disappoints, however. No single event settles matters, and both sides of a dispute tend to find ways of maintaining that they were right all along, and if outcomes confound them then this was somebody else’s fault. Thus, in case it should

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What will the Tory and Labour election campaigns look like?

We know that the Conservatives are gearing up for an election in the next few months. Their official line is that they don’t want one, largely because it will appear better if they are apparently pushed into a poll, but that doesn’t mean that preparations aren’t well underway. One of the main benefits of proroguing parliament is that it allows the Tories to produce an election manifesto before there is an election, using the Queen’s Speech. In today’s Guardian, I’ve written about what’s going to be in that manifesto/Queen’s Speech: the focus will be on education and crime. The latter is largely there because Team Boris feel Theresa May left

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ruth Davidson takes a pop at David Cameron in her resignation speech

Ruth Davidson’s departure is a blow to the Tory party and the Union. Without her, the Tories will find it even more of a struggle to keep hold of their Scottish seats at the coming Westminster election. At the same time, the removal of such a formidable campaigner will make it that bit easier for the pro-independence parties as they try and win a majority at Holyrood in 2021—something that would almost certainly lead to a second independence referendum. Davidson’s press conference this morning was an understated affair: this was not an emotional goodbye, more a matter-of-fact resignation. I suspect that Number 10 will have been relieved by the fact

Katy Balls Katy Balls

How Cabinet responded to Boris Johnson’s prorogation plan

When news broke on Wednesday morning that Boris Johnson was planning to prorogue Parliament for five weeks ahead of a new Queen’s Speech, a conference call was hastily scheduled with his Cabinet. By the time it happened, every minister on the call was aware of what the Prime Minister was seeking to propose. The Prime Minister used the call to stress that the decision to suspend Parliament was not about denying MPs the chance to have their say. However, he did say that  if Brussels thinks MPs cannot frustrate Brexit, there is a better chance of an eventual deal. The general mood of the Cabinet towards Johnson was one of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Might there be a Brexit deal after all?

Parliament has not yet returned from its summer break but we are already in a bitter constitutional battle, with the Prime Minister pitted against the Speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition parties. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament is a deliberate attempt to raise the stakes. He wants to deny time to any effort by MPs to pass a law forcing him to request a Brexit extension. His message to them: bring me down or let me get on with Brexit. When parliament returns on Tuesday for a two-week session, MPs will have to decide how to respond to Johnson’s move. Opposition MPs had previously agreed to