Brexit

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: What would be the point of a second referendum?

Another referendum? Sir: Matthew Parris’s article ‘What question should a second referendum ask?’ (26 October) occasioned a wry smile from me this morning. His first question — whether Britain should remain in or leave the European Union — has already been asked and answered, at great expense and trouble, in 2016. The only logical reason why it should be re-asked is if the first time it was asked was illegitimate in some way. But it was only after the result was known that questions were raised about its legitimacy. At the time, not a breath was raised. However, I do like Mr Parris’s second question. We shouldn’t have a second referendum,

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Why a Tory-Brexit party pact isn’t likely

Nigel Farage’s European election-winning machine is the guest that has not yet turned up to the 2019 general election party. This can only be because it has certain fundamental questions still to settle about the nature of its campaign. Such as how many seats to fight. And whether to adopt a strategy of being slightly cuddly towards the Tories or one of strict “equi-hostility” towards all parties that do not back its “clean break” version of Brexit. Which, in effect, would mean all other parties.  Reports in the Financial Times and elsewhere in recent days suggest that despite selecting almost a complete slate of candidates, the party is likely to contest

Wednesday

James McSweeney

Halloween and the horror of ableism

All Hallows’ Eve is almost upon us and busy-bodies everywhere are sharpening their knives ahead of the inevitable annual costume scandal. For ordinary party-goers, there is reason to be fearful. Pick the wrong outfit and the consequences – getting fired, kicked out of university, ending up on the front page of a national newspaper – might be with you for the rest of your life.  Thankfully, the National Union of Students has stepped in to help. Urging every reveller to ‘check and double-check their costume’, the NUS has published an updated set of guidelines on how to be woke-macabre. ‘Halloween should be fun and most of us love it’, says the NUS.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal won’t cost Britain £70bn by 2029

Yet again, listeners to the Today programme awoke this morning to hear a dire forecast for the economic consequences of leaving the EU – with no critical analysis nor even explanation of how the forecast was arrived at. This morning’s horror story came courtesy of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a think tank which claims the economy will be 3.5 per cent – or £70bn – smaller in 10 years’ time than if we had never voted to leave the EU. The NIESR claims the economy is already 2.5 per cent smaller than it would have been had we voted to remain in 2016 and that this

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson rallies Tory MPs as Commons backs snap election

The House of Commons has just voted by 438 to 20 for a 12 December election. Given that amendments on extending the franchise were not selected as they were out of scope, the Commons has also backed an election with the existing general election franchise. Even in these unpredictable times, it would be jaw dropping if the House of Lords tried to amend this bill tomorrow. So, it looks pretty much nailed on that we are heading for a 12 December election. We can see in the parties who have been most enthusiastic about this poll—the Tories, the SNP and the Lib Dems—who thinks they will benefit from it. In truth, they

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Boris and Corbyn don’t deserve an election win

The first thing to be said about a general election in December is that it is necessary. This is the case regardless of your particular Brexit preference (though should that preference be a wish for it all to go away, I am afraid not even an election can offer you any relief). The government lacks a majority and no other government can be formed in this House of Commons. So an election is required. This is not Belgium and, indeed, the United Kingdom is not capable of being Belgium. The second thing to be said about a general election in December is that there are vanishingly few good outcomes available.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

How Boris’s opponents are making this week much easier for him

The stronger the prospect of a general election, the easier it will be for Boris Johnson to get through the week that Britain was supposed to be leaving the European Union. He had said he would rather ‘be dead in a ditch’ than miss the deadline, but is now taking a two-pronged approach to distracting everyone from the fact that Thursday will come and go, and Brexit will still not have happened. The first part of this plan is to make sure that it is clear parliament is to blame for missing the 31 October deadline, rather than the Prime Minister who placed so much emphasis on it. So the

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The joy of the People’s Vote meltdown

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 my vote descend into bitching, backstabbing and Twitter turf wars. No, even more mirthful than that is the issue around which PV is pulling itself apart: the question of whether it should present itself as an openly pro-Remain group or as a neutral outfit that just wants another EU vote because it really, really likes

Matthew Lynn

Five reasons why the Brexit extension is bad news

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 exactly we will fill up the latest three-month extension to the already protracted saga of our departure from the EU. It probably won’t be a great deal different from the last three months, or the three months before that. There is one thing we should know for sure by now, however. It will be very

Saturday

Robert Peston

SNP and Lib Dems join forces to pursue 9 December election

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 Swinson, have adopted a twin track approach. They have written to the President of the European Union, Donald Tusk, asking for a Brexit delay to 31 January, in line with the terms of the Benn Act, with no provision for an earlier withdrawal from the EU. To provide confidence that this delay will lead to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What is Boris Johnson’s plan?

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 get on with it. But he admitted that the EU was inclined to offer an extension to the end of January and that Emmanuel Macron was fighting a lonely battle against this. Earlier in the day, the Elysée had told Number 10 that the French President was too isolated on the issue in the EU

Anthony Browne

Heidi Allen’s confusing political odyssey

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, is an edited version to keep things family-friendly for Spectator readers). It is usually accompanied by a liberal dosage of decidedly unparliamentary language and the sort of words that if I repeated would lead to me being accused of inflaming passions in politics. But the passions among the public are already inflamed and the issue

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: David Cameron’s real referendum mistake

Cameron’s fatal error Sir: Jo Johnson’s otherwise informative review of David Cameron’s For the Record (Books, 12 October) suggests Cameron’s ‘mistake’ was to not call the referendum earlier, and his ‘fatal error’ was his failure to nail down the Leave campaign on how they ‘would actually deliver Brexit’. Not so. Cameron’s mistake was to assume the referendum would produce a Remain result. Cameron’s fatal error was to have taken sides in the referendum. Had he not taken sides, had he not allowed George Osborne to launch ‘Project Fear’, and had he encouraged the dissemination of practical information for both the Leave and the Remain sides, then after the result he

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: More Brexit chaos, royal complaints and Syrian fighting

Home The Commons voted by 329 to 299 for a Brexit Withdrawal Bill but then stymied progress by defeating a timetable for enacting it by 31 October. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, immediately favoured a delay for Brexit. Downing Street called for a general election. Sir Oliver Letwin had torpedoed the government’s Brexit endeavours by amending a motion that had been intended to secure the Commons’ ‘meaningful vote’ for the withdrawal agreement triumphantly secured from the EU by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, only three days earlier. The Commons, sitting on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands War of 1982, voted by 322 to

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Should we be blaming Balliol, rather than Eton, for our political woes?

In our house, the biggest source of tension is that I think there is an important difference between deferring a decision — ‘Do we need carpet on the stairs?’ — and making one. Charlotte argues that ‘Inaction is a choice; not choosing is a choice.’ One that can have consequences, she insists. Like when the house is freezing because the weather has turned. I saw her point on Super Saturday, when MPs voted not to decide — yet — on whether to back Johnson’s Brexit. The decision to delay (‘inaction’) may end up having more momentous consequences than approving the deal in the meaningful vote. Which is why I was

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Do I have a moral duty to allow Brexit chat at supper parties?

Q. I’ve been having friends to supper for many decades. Although I say it myself, these gatherings have often been hugely successful, with lots of laughter, people making new friends and guests regularly staying beyond 1 a.m. When Brexit started it was OK because talk of it didn’t dominate the evening. It now does. Last week I told my guests the subject was banned. They looked thrown but we went on to have an enjoyable evening. On the other hand I am also wondering, is it my duty — as someone with a venue and a good network of friends — to allow my guests to hold forth at this

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Caroline Flint: why I’m backing this Brexit deal

Nothing in Caroline Flint’s CV would have marked her out as someone who would end up marshalling 19 of her fellow Labour MPs through the ‘aye’ lobby to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal. One of the original ‘Blair babes’, she went on to become Gordon Brown’s minister for Europe. She campaigned for Remain in the referendum but this week she ended up telling MPs that ‘the EU is not God’ while fending off accusations that she is the devil. One commentator called her ‘a heroine for those seeking to turbo-charge Thatcherism’. He didn’t mean it kindly. When we meet in her office, on another one of the supposed Brexit make-or-break

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The question a second referendum must ask

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 to find there a personal attack on Sir Oliver Letwin by ‘senior sources’. These sources had scoffed to journalists that when, before the Commons vote on his amendment, Letwin was at Downing Street to discuss it, he was taking ‘conspiratorial phone calls’ on his mobile phone, giving him ‘instructions’ from David Pannick. Lord Pannick is

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

For Remainers, Brexit is really about power

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!’), I warned him about the following afternoon’s audience for our panel on Brexit. They’ll be Democrats, I explained, and they’re hardwired to associate both the referendum and Boris personally with Trump. They’ve all been brainwashed by the New York Times, which portrays Brexiteers as a cross between the extras on The Walking Dead and the

Andrew Taylor

Brexit has at least inspired John le Carré — his thriller on the subject is a cracker

Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in The Riddle of the Sands, spy fiction has enthralled and chilled its readers by holding a cloudy mirror to the murkier corners of international politics. During the Cold War, John le Carré’s novels were hugely influential in shaping popular perceptions about the private manoeuvres behind the public antics. His books have continued to explore the dark places of the world we live in, their subject matter evolving with the headlines. Agent Running in the Field — an intentionally ambiguous title, no doubt — is le Carré’s 25th novel. The first