Brexit

In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade must begin a new story every evening. She must make sure that the sultan is so eager to hear its conclusion he postpones his plans to execute her. On they go, month after month, year after year, a different story every day. I want you to imagine Boris Johnson as Scheherazade. He is taking the stage at the Conservative party conference dressed in diaphanous silk harem pants, a velvet top with chiffon sleeves, a veil to hide his true expression, and with pearls taken from the jewellery collection of a Russian oligarch’s wife laced through his hair. Johnson, too, knows he must come up with

The vaccines make you magnetic, didn’t you know? And Covid is a form of biological warfare, released by the Chinese to weaken the West. New 5G technology is melting people’s brains and the Bank of England is owned by the Rothschilds. I am listening to three delegates from Reform UK’s first party conference, held in parallel to the Tories’ much larger jamboree just down the road. They are outside chaining cigarettes and they’re fired up. At last, they feel they can talk about this stuff without being shut down. I nod along. I’m not a scientist, I explain, and I don’t really know how central banks work. But why, I ask,

As I read The Wet Flanders Plain by Henry Williamson, a veteran of the first world war who encountered hostility from locals when he returned to the western front in 1927, a thought struck me: have I stumbled upon the source of Emmanuel Macron’s Anglophobia? Let’s not beat around the bush; the president of France does not like us. Politicians and diplomats may gainsay, and claim that Macron has the greatest respect for the United Kingdom. But his behaviour during the last four and a half years indicates that the current resident of the Elysée is the most Anglophobic president since Charles de Gaulle. Throughout the Brexit negotiations Macron was the

All current ills in the world, of course, can be blamed on two things: climate change and Brexit. So far, there are few people blaming the rationing of petrol and diesel on extreme weather-related to climate change (although give it time), but the usual suspects have certainly been quick out of the blocks to blame it all on Brexit. Lord Adonis, for example, has claimed:  ‘Brexit is now leading to fuel-rationing’ BP has blamed its inability to keep petrol stations stocked on a shortage of lorry-drivers, but can that really be blamed on Brexit?  In July, the Road Haulage Association (RHA) published a survey of 615 haulage firms as to

For European Union enthusiasts, the ‘trade deal with America’ has joined ‘£350 million pledge on a bus’ as one of the great Brexit lies. A certain amount of gloating has therefore greeted the news that Joe Biden last night ‘downplayed’ the possibility of a US-U.K. Free Trade Agreement. It’s a ‘snub’, Brexiteer hopes are dashed, and so on. But did Biden actually ‘downplay’ anything? Not really, since nobody has been seriously playing up the possibility of late. Many journalists are today talking as if the Prime Minister had been hoping to announce with Biden the trade deal Donald Trump promised Britain in 2017. But Boris has been the one minimising

Scottish civil servants are to start work on a ‘detailed prospectus’ for independence so the Scottish government can hold another referendum ‘when the Covid crisis has passed’, Nicola Sturgeon announced earlier this month. The irony of this – coming just days before the Office for National Statistics reported that the percentage of Scots testing positive in a single week for Covid-19 equated to around one in 45 people – was lost on the First Minister. These things happen when you’re busy fighting to free your people from the tyranny of liberal democracy and free society in one of the richest places on earth. Deputy First Minister John Swinney subsequently went further when he promised a

We need to talk about Jess Brammar. No, not the fact that Ms Brammar has landed the plum job of executive editor of the BBC’s news channels, despite cries of opposition from various Tories who insisted that Brexit-bashing Brammar is too politically partisan for such a position. My view is that it should be up to the Beeb who it employs, and politicians and their advisers should keep their beaks out of broadcasting. Rather, Jess Brammar represents a wider problem. It’s the fact that so much of the cultural elite is hostile to Brexit, which, lest we forget, is the most popular political idea in living memory in this country.

Are the Tories serious about getting rid of the troublesome Northern Ireland Protocol? The latest extension to the so-called grace period – the third in recent months – means that plans for post-Brexit checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland have been suspended again. But this isn’t the good news you might think it is for unionists in Northern Ireland. In the short term, of course, it avoids a repeat of ‘sausage wars’ and megaphone diplomacy around the Protocol’s Article 16 (which allows Britain or the EU to take unilateral action in certain circumstances). This can only be good news. Yet for nervous unionists there is a disturbing lack of security about what might happen when this grace

Five years ago, London’s affluent French poured their dosh into the campaign of Emmanuel Macron. This time around, supporters of France’s rising provocateur are trying a similar tactic. Eric Zemmour is the Tucker Carlson of French media. A potential rival to Marine Le Pen, he is planning a visit to London in October. His undeclared but badly concealed French presidential campaign has the backing of ‘Generation Z’, a shadowy group of French political consultants and fundraisers, who are looking at the monied expatriates of South Kensington and seeing potential campaign money. If Macron’s people aren’t spooked by Zemmour, they aren’t acting like it I profiled Zemmour in the magazine in

Over the past few weeks and months, there has been plenty of focus on the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, and the impact it is having on the province. Less attention has been paid, however, to the equally serious problems in Northern Ireland which still need to be solved. It is an uncomfortable truth, but the problem with Northern Ireland is largely in Westminster. The institutionalised neglect over the past few decades has brought the region to where it is now. How do you know Northern Ireland has been neglected? Easy. Look up the time it takes to travel between just about any town in the province to Belfast by public transport.

There will be chaos at the borders. Food will run out at the supermarkets. Travellers will face long queues, and companies yet another round of disruption. As the UK lays the groundwork for breaking with the Northern Ireland Protocol, we will hear plenty of scare stories about how it might mean losing the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. There is an element of truth in that, of course. The EU may well decide that if we are not sticking to the Protocol then the free trade deal has to go as well. But there is a flaw in that argument, and it is not exactly a minor one. In

Half a century ago, Willie Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’. I can think of no finer description to apply to Keir Starmer’s summer tour of Britain, during which we are told he intends to listen to the concerns of voters in a bid to win back their trust. His first such excursion, on which he was accompanied by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, saw him encounter a dozen former Labour voters in Blackpool. Several of them confided that they had never heard of him, a revelation he described as ‘utterly frustrating’. Ms Kuenssberg reported that the gathering gave Starmer quite a rough ride

The sausage dispute between the UK and the EU may sound like something out of Yes Minister but it is the canary in the coal mine of UK-EU relations. In a sign of some progress, Maroš Šefčovič, the Commission vice-president, will announce this afternoon that the EU will agree to a UK request to extend the grace period for sausages and other chilled meats going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland for another three months. Both sides will offer their own unilateral declarations on what the extension means. RTE’s Tony Connelly provides a typically thorough run through of what we can expect. Two things are particularly worth noting. First, the