Brexit

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Should I return to the land of my Italian ancestors?

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose. He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

I’ve had my fill of brasseries: Moncks reviewed

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European–style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brexit rebels warm to Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan

The European reaction to Boris Johnson’s plan has been getting cooler today. But in parliament it has been a different story. In response to Boris Johnson’s statement earlier, several members of the so-called Spartans—those Brexiteers who voted against Theresa May’s deal on 29 March—indicated they would support it. At the same time, a slew of ex-Tory MPs who voted for the Benn Act made clear they were happy with it too. Frank Field urged Boris Johnson to stage a declaratory vote on this plan before he goes to the EU Council, to show European leaders that it could pass the Commons. Boris Johnson said that he would think about it but

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: Peter Bone’s concern for John Bercow’s lost voice

Poor John Bercow is suffering from a lost voice this morning, which is somewhat unfortunate for a Speaker. But fortunately he has Peter Bone watching out for him. The Brexiteer Tory MP has taken to his feet in the Commons to express his concern for Bercow, suggesting he takes some time out to recover: ‘The Speaker is clearly suffering from his voice and he does put enormous hours into the chair. Would it be appropriate, or would the leader recommend whether the Speaker is asked not to chair those sort of debates, particularly so on the European Union, to protect his health?’ ‘The expression ‘dream on’ springs to mind,’ said Bercow.

Steerpike Steerpike

Green MEP: Boris’s proposal is no good…but I haven’t read it

Vice President of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala has made her mind up about Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposal: it’s no good. The Finnish MEP said ‘it’s not a very serious proposal’. But has she actually read the Prime Minister’s letter to Jean-Claude Juncker? Err, no. ‘But I am more or less aware of the proposal,’ she said. Unsurprisingly Hautala got short shrift from Iain Dale, who was interviewing her on LBC. ‘Can I suggest you actually read the letter? It does contain detailed proposals, it protects the integrity of the single market,’ he told her.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Will Leave voters forgive a Brexit delay?

‘It is definitely less than 50 per cent,’ says one Downing Street source when asked about the chances of a Brexit deal. And this is one of the optimists. One cabinet minister warns that the UK ‘is driving into a brick wall’ with its current Brexit proposals; other ministers are not sure if this offer is designed to make a deal or just to make the point that London was prepared to compromise but Brussels refused to budge. So it’s a stand-off. Boris Johnson is determined to take the whole of the UK out of the customs union, and the Irish and the EU are equally robust in their view

Aidan Hartley

Britain is following in the footsteps of Africa’s former failed states

Kenya   ‘In the past months the people of Uganda have been following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain,’ Uganda’s President Idi Amin telegrammed the Queen in 1973. ‘The sad fact is that it is the ordinary British citizen who is suffering the most… I’m sending a cargo ship full of bananas.’ Back then Fleet Street hooted with laughter at this African buffoon trying to patronise the United Kingdom and its leaders. Yet I wonder what Idi Amin would be able to say about Britain and its leaders today. When I first started out as an FT Many African political systems today would never tolerate the things

Daisy Dunn

Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?

This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories, the different ways of telling…!’ No one in the real world speaks like this. But it’s just about OK, because she isn’t quite real either. She is a Fairy Queen, come to Edinburgh to spirit away a young pianist named Tam, as in Tamlin, who is a bit wet but really rather nice. The story

Matthew Lynn

Brexit grifters are making a killing selling useless advice

Over the past three years, as we have torturously debated our departure from the European Union, we have heard a lot from the Brexiteers about the industries that might benefit from leaving the EU. Some of these predictions may materialise, others may not. There is one industry, however, that is already doing very well as a result of the referendum. Lots of consultants are making a shedload of money. In the past few weeks, it has become clear just how much. Brexit ‘grifters’, to borrow a phrase from the classic 1990 movie, are roaming the country, occasionally helping companies cope with a significant yet hardly earth-shattering change in trading relations

Wednesday

The Spectator

Full text: Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan

A FAIR AND REASONABLE COMPROMISE: UK PROPOSALS FOR A NEW PROTOCOL ON IRELAND/NORTHERN IRELAND There is now very little time in which to negotiate a new Agreement between the UK and the EU under Article 50. We need to get this done before the October European Council. This Government wants to get a deal, as I am sure we all do. If we cannot reach one, it would represent a failure of statecraft for which we would all be responsible. Our predecessors have tackled harder problems: we can surely solve this one. Both sides now need to consider whether there is sufficient willingness to compromise and move beyond existing positions

Robert Peston Robert Peston

Boris Johnson’s threat to MPs and the EU: ‘Back me or sack me’

In setting the scene for Boris Johnson’s first and potentially historic speech as Prime Minister to Tory party conference, Downing Street made two statements that sounded a lot like threats, both to EU leaders and to opposition MPs. In tearing up the 2107 Joint Report that underlies the so-called backstop to keep open the border on the island of Ireland – that foundation of the Brexit deal agreed by Theresa May and ditched by Johnson – Downing Street said “officials have made it clear that if Brussels does not engage with the offer…then this government will not negotiate further until we have left the EU”. In other words, Johnson wants

Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott: My heart leapt when Boris Johnson became prime minister

If Britain is to be a free country, the difficulties of leaving simply have to be faced. Now, I know that many people here in Britain think that these are daunting times, but surely they are also stirring times ,because yet again a great country is grasping for freedom. If I can say one thing above all, it is that if there is any country on earth that should be capable of standing on its own two feet, it’s Britain. The mother of parliaments, the world’s common language and the industrial revolution, three of the greatest gifts to the modern world. So I just want to make a few fundamental

Tuesday

Charles Day

Why is the EU obsessed with forcing regulatory alignment on Britain?

I still don’t quite understand the position of some ardent Remain supporters. I do not understand why allowing the UK to leave, and then starting up a campaign to rejoin was rejected. After all, that is what the last line of Article 50 invites the state to do by invoking the process in Article 49 (the process to re-join). Doing so would allow Britain to honour the democratic vote, which, contra to common perception, is what a lot of genuine believers in the EU themselves want us to do. It would end the word ‘remainer’ entirely. A word now unfortunately synonymous with a very negative campaign and a dark time

Chris Daw KC

Corbyn’s cynical Brexit scheme will end in tears for Labour

My piece for Coffee House last week likened Boris Johnson to the naked emperor, puffed up with self-importance but devoid of real power. As the Tory party conference has got underway, I have become even more confident that Boris’s cabinet will soon be shown to be as denuded of power as their leader. But it isn’t just the Tories that are in a mess. Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit position is as untenable and, if anything, even more bizarre than Boris’s. Has there ever been a major party leader entering conference season and an election campaign, in short succession, while explicitly refusing to take a position on the most important issue of our times?

Monday

Alexander Pelling-Bruce

The Oliver Letwin speech that first revealed the Benn Act game plan

On Coffee House last week, I wrote that the judgment of the Supreme Court shows that the Benn Act is unconstitutional. It is more than that: it constitutes a revolution in the way in which Britain is governed. Oliver Letwin, who helped draft the Act, made this abundantly clear when speaking in the House of Commons on 14 February. His speech came in the run up to the first time Parliament took control to direct Government policy by legislation. But it also reveals the game plan that ultimately led to the Benn Act and the topsy-turvy situation we now find ourselves in. Letwin describes it as “astonishing turn of events”

Robert Peston Robert Peston

It’s now or never for Boris Johnson if he wants a Brexit breakthrough

There is only one speech that matters this week, here in Manchester at Tory party conference. It will be Boris Johnson’s on Wednesday and it will be significant – potentially historic – for what he has to say about how and whether he hopes to break the impasse with Brussels on negotiating an alternative to the Northern Ireland backstop and therefore strike a new deal to leave the EU. Intriguingly, perhaps weirdly, cabinet ministers are ebullient with optimism that Johnson is on the verge of striking a deal with Juncker and Barnier that is sellable to most Tory MPs, Northern Ireland’s DUP and even enough Labour MPs to carry it across the

Matthew Lynn

Here’s the flaw in the Boris hedge fund conspiracy theory

It is one of the most diabolical plots of all time, a conspiracy so vast, so deep, and so wicked it could have come from the pen of Dan Brown. A small cabel of powerful hedge funds have installed Boris Johnson at Number 10, paying for his campaign and his advisers. Once there, his task is to crash the UK out of the European Union without a deal, plunging the economy into chaos, and sparking a rout of sterling and a collapse in the FTSE. In the background, those same hedge funds will have ‘shorted’ the pound and the London equity market. In the process, they will make a few

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

How Brexit is winning over ‘never kissed a Tory’ voters for the Conservatives

Brexit is seen by some as the Conservative curse. The theory goes that David Cameron called the referendum to resolve the EU problem once and for all, only for this to blow up in his – and his party’s – face. Where this was once a Tory issue, now it is everyone’s problem. But might that view be wrong? And might Brexit actually be a big opportunity, rather than a hindrance, for the Conservatives to win over supporters who would never in their wildest dreams have even thought about voting Tory? That’s the view put forward by Esther McVey, who spoke of her experiences on the doorstep, and how she

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs on ‘red standby’ to leave snoozy conference for Brexit vote

The Tory MPs who’ve bothered to turn up to conference this week are torn between two places. They’re on a three-line whip in case anything kicks off in Westminster, where parliament will continue sitting this afternoon. Solicitor General Michael Ellis joked this morning that he was on ‘red standby’ to return to the House of Commons if there is a vote. The Labour party is on a two-line instruction, though many of its MPs are attending the sitting to try to make a point about holding the government to account while the government is away. It’s not yet clear whether they will hold any votes, though there is a need

Sunday

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson won’t surrender the metaphor

In a feisty interview on The Andrew Marr Show, Boris Johnson defended his use of the term ‘surrender act’, calling it a ‘martial metaphor’ of the type that has long been used in British politics. He said that he had been a ‘model of restraint’ in his own language. He did, however, express regret for sounding so dismissive of the Labour MP Paula Sherriff’s concerns about death threats. It was clear that Boris Johnson had three intentions in this interview. First, to ram home his message that the Benn Act is a ‘surrender act’ – I lost count of the number of times he used the phrase. Second, to try