Brexit

Sajid Javid – Our priority ‘must be law and order’ The Tory leadership race is becoming a crowded field, with thirteen candidates now setting out their stalls as they aim for the premiership. Andrew Marr spoke to two of the hopefuls, including Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Javid wished to talk about boosting resources for the police if he attains the country’s highest political office: On #Marr, Home Secretary and Conservative Party leadership contender says that if he had got his way in cabinet there would be more police officers on the streets now https://t.co/OakG0Gu6Ro pic.twitter.com/4d1GnNbcKI — BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) June 2, 2019 AM: If you’d had your own

Sam Gyimah, the former Minister for Universities who quit in protest at Theresa May’s deal, has become the thirteenth Conservative leadership candidate, announcing his decision live on air on Sky today. When asked by Niall Paterson if he would like to be the next Conservative leader, Gyimah replied “Well, yes. I will be joining the contest to be the next Conservative leader and prime minister to broaden the race.” He wishes to be the champion of that cause the Tory members are crying out for: a second referendum. “There is a wide range of candidates out there, but there is a very narrow view on Brexit being discussed” he said.

The message from the EU is clear: there will be no improvement to the deal rejected by Parliament. And if talks fail? Donald Trump today makes an offer: that the United States, the UK’s No 1 customer, is standing by with its own free trade deal. It needn’t take even a year, he says, as he’d go “all out” so Britain can do a lot more trade with the world’s largest economy. The EU’s deal, he says, is anyway ludicrous: the £39bn is too much money. And why, he asks, would the UK government agreed to a two-year moratorium on signing free trade deals? In an interview with the Sunday

The Tory leadership contest has been dominated by Brexit so far. To a large extent, this is inevitable: Brexit is the biggest issue facing the country and the Tory party. But dealing with Brexit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Tory recovery. If the Tories are to win a fourth term in office, they are going to have a compelling domestic agenda as well. So far, the ideas put forward in this contest haven’t been particularly imaginative—doubling defence spending and a penny off the basic rate are standard Tory fare. The biggest question, to my mind, for the Tories is how to revive the ownership society. The

If it was in a playground in one of the rougher parts of town, which increasingly it resembles, this could easily escalate. One candidate remarks that he thinks the party should ‘f**k business’ so another one wades in to argue ‘f**k ‘f**k business’’. And perhaps by lunchtime some other candidate you have never really heard off will be tweeting that instead the party should ‘f**k, ‘f**k, f**k business’’. Before long, the Tory party leadership contest will start to look like the bits that were edited out of a Malcolm Tucker rant in The Thick of It for being too sweary. And yet the row spectacularly misses the point. Of course

I have often wondered what would happen if politicians were bound by the same rules as advertisers, or if manifestos were brought within the scope of the trading standards laws. What if we could take legal action against a government for failing to provide the extra NHS beds or school places they had promised? Given the propensity for governments to excuse themselves from their own legislation when it suits them – Blair’s government simply passed a clause excluding political parties when Labour’s women-only shortlists fell foul of sex discrimination legislation – it is hard to imagine such a law being passed by Parliament. But on 14th May, Westminster Magistrates heard

I love everything about the European Parliament election results. As a Brexiteer, of course I love that the Brexit Party came out of nowhere to obliterate the Tories and Labour and induce yet another outbreak of Brexit Derangement Syndrome among the chattering classes. But I also love the fact that Remain parties did well, too. I’m happy that the Lib Dems, with their sneering, juvenile, anti-democratic slogan of ‘Bollocks to Brexit’, came in second place. And I’m pleased that the Greens, for whom Brexit is a calamity on a par with the climate catastrophe they breathlessly drone on about, also had a good showing. Why? Because the victory of a

Alastair Campbell has been something of a Labour party fixture for the last twenty years – but not any longer. Blair’s former spin doctor has just been given the boot from the party for revealing that he voted Lib Dem at the European elections. Campbell said he was ‘sad’ and ‘disappointed’ to get an email from Labour expelling him from the party: ‘I am and always will be Labour. I voted Lib Dem, without advance publicity, to try to persuade Labour to do right thing for country/party. In light of appeal, I won’t be doing media on this. But hard not to point out difference in the way anti-Semitism cases have

Rory Stewart is emerging as something of a dark horse in the Tory leadership contest. But while the international development secretary is an impressive candidate he is not immune to making a mishap. Richard Madeley reminded him this morning of a particular low point for Stewart: his made-up ‘fact’ about Brexit –that 80 per cent of people backed Theresa May’s deal – during a radio interview last year: RM: Why did you say that? RS: It was a weird thing to say. It was straight after it was announced, and I wanted to say that I felt the vast majority of the country were in the centre ground and I