David davis

It’s safe to say that David Davis’s turn at navigating the roadmap to Brexit has not gone completely to plan today. The aim of the speech was to reassure businesses and Brussels that the UK will maintain high standards and regulations – with a pledge to keep a level playing field on state aid and competition policy. However, in pre-briefed quotes ahead of the speech, the Brexit Secretary promised that Brexit would not mean Britain is ‘plunged into a Mad Max style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’ but instead will lead a ‘race to the top in global standards’. The colourful prose has won much attention in the press – and has

David Davis’s decision to describe a leaked EU paper suggesting Brussels could impose sanctions on Britain in a transition period as ‘discourteous’ had repercussions in Brussels today. In a solo press conference on Britain’s transition period, Michel Barnier cut a prickly figure as he warned that a transition period immediately after Brexit in 2019 is ‘not a given’. Issuing Britain with a gentle ticking off, Barnier insisted that he was not being ‘vindictive’ as he raised concerns over May’s position. He said he has planned an update on the future relationship but this could not take place due to timetable constraints ‘on the UK side’. The EU’s chief negotiator did at

A row is underway in the Conservative party over the Brexit transition period. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the all-powerful European Research Group (the Brexit wing of the Tory party), has said he would rather extend Article 50 than have a transition period in which the UK is a rule-taker from the EU. Despite this, a transition period is what’s on the menu for Britain come March 2019. So, David Davis attempted to use his speech today on the topic to try and calm Tory nerves. The Brexit Secretary tried to provide a voice of calm (and a voice of true Brexit) after Philip Hammond sparked anger on Thursday with

During the government’s crunch negotiations with Brussels to get ‘sufficient progress’ before Christmas, nervous Brexiteers began to worry that Theresa May was about to give too much away. Jacob Rees-Mogg used a question at PMQs to warn the Prime Minister that her Brexit red lines were ‘beginning to look a little bit pink’. He urged her to ‘apply a new coat of paint’ before she next goes to Brussels. So, it will come as some concern to the Conservative Brexiteers – and the members of the European Research Group, that Rees-Mogg now leads, that today Davis said anyone who goes into negotiations with ‘red lines’ is an ‘idiot’. In an appearance

After David Davis caused a mini-furore over the weekend by claiming that the government’s Brexit compromise on the Irish border was a ‘statement of intent… much more than legally enforceable’, the Brexit Secretary was sent back onto the airwaves this morning to attempt a second time lucky. With the Irish government concerned over Davis’s comments on Marr, Davis hummed a new tune. He said that far from suggesting the UK could back out of Brexit deal on Irish border, he had meant is that it is ‘more than legally enforceable’. While only time will tell whether this is enough to calm Brussels nerves, Davis did at least manage to provide

David Davis: May’s EU deal ‘a statement of intent’ The Brexit Secretary David Davis joined Andrew Marr this morning to discuss Theresa May’s recent round of negotiations in Brussels, where the European Union finally agreed to progress to the second phase. Friday’s breakthrough included an agreement that there would be ‘no hard border’ between the UK and Ireland, and that the UK would maintain ‘full alignment’ with the EU’s single market and customs union. Marr asked Davis about how the Prime Minister’s deal would affect the negotiations going forward: DD: This [deal] was a statement of intent more than anything else. It was much more a statement of intent that

Not for the first time, David Davis’s words came back to haunt him as he was quizzed on Brexit today. The Brexit secretary, who is having something of a tough week in a year of tough weeks, told MPs that no detailed sector-by-sector analysis of what the impact of leaving the European Union would be had been carried out. He said this morning that: ‘The usefulness of such a detailed impact assessment is near zero and given how we were stretching our resources to get to where we were at the time, it was not a sensible use of resources.’ So far, so simple. The only problem? As Hilary Benn

Nobody said Brexit was going to be easy, did they? It turns out that even talking about how difficult Brexit is going to be is pretty tricky, and the person feeling that most keenly is David Davis. Today the Brexit Secretary came under fire from all parts of the House of Commons for the heavy editing of some impact assessments on Brexit which it wasn’t entirely clear had ever actually been written in a form long enough for them to be edited down. Last year, Davis told MPs that ‘we’ve carried out or are in the midst of carrying out about 57, I think, sectoral analyses, each of which has

It is Remembrance Sunday, and the party leaders put their politics aside this morning as they gathered around the Cenotaph to lay wreaths and honour those who lost their lives in times of war. However, in the TV studios, the political debate still carries on with as much vigour as before: Sadiq Khan – Boris Johnson has ‘got to go’ The Mayor of London joined Andrew Marr today and within minutes Khan had called for Boris Johnson to be dismissed from his post as Foreign Secretary. Marr raised the subject of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British national who is currently serving a five year jail sentence in an Iranian prison. During

If Michel Barnier and David Davis, in their regular dialogue of the deaf, seem to be inhabiting different mental universes, that is because they are. The British and French have often found each other particularly difficult to negotiate with. Of course, Barnier represents not France but the EU, and he has a negotiating position, the notorious European Council Guidelines, on which the veteran British diplomat Sir Peter Marshall has recently commented that ‘I have never seen, nor heard tell of, a text as antipathetic to the principle of give and take which is generally assumed to be at the heart of negotiation among like-minded democracies’. But, as a senior German

For all the talk of a new ‘momentum’ to the Brexit talks since Theresa May’s Florence speech, today’s press conference between Michel Barnier and David Davis certainly had a whiff of déjà vu to it. The EU’s chief negotiator spoke severely of his concerns over a lack of ‘progress’ while the ever-optimistic Brexit secretary played up all the ‘progress’ that had been made. Despite that ‘progress’, Barnier confirmed – as expected – that he would not be recommending to the EU Council meeting next week that talks move to the second stage, of talking about a ‘future relationship’. However, he did suggest that he hoped this recommendation would come within

Jeremy Corbyn – We need to ‘look very carefully’ at any future EU trade relationship As the Labour party conference in Brighton gets underway, Jeremy Corbyn put in an appearance on The Andrew Marr Show. Of particular interest, was Labour’s position on the single market – particularly whether the Labour leader was prepared to change his mind after pressure from party members and senior Labour figures: AM: 66 per cent of your party members want to stay inside the single market. Will you listen to them? JC: Of course I will listen to them. What I would say is that the important priority is to ensure that we have a tariff

Stephen Bush of the New Statesman asked a good question the other day. Why do people who hate what Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are doing to Britain go easy on David Davis? He’s right to be perplexed. It turns out all those trade deals the leave campaign promised can’t be done for years. Liam Fox has nothing to do except be a public nuisance, which now I come to think of it is the only post he’s qualified to fill. Johnson meanwhile is an embarrassment, even to an administration which seems beyond shame, and Theresa May does her best to keep him locked in an FCO cellar. Davis, on the

The EU withdrawal bill debate is winding on, with MPs criticising the ‘power grab’ planned by ministers. There won’t be any votes until Monday, and unless something changes, it looks as though the legislation will pass its second reading. Assuming that this is the case, it is much more useful to look at who is threatening to make amendments to the bill at Committee stage. The tone of the Brexit-sceptics so far has largely been reasonably respectful, as they are trying to encourage ministers to make concessions ahead of that. It is rare for a government to be defeated in a committee stage vote, but this bill is different as

The most memorable line from David Davis’s statement on the Brexit negotiations to the Commons was his claim that ‘nobody pretended this would be simple or easy’. MPs who disagree with the Brexit Secretary loved this because quite a few people have made claims to that effect, including Davis and his colleague the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. But in terms of any revelations to MPs, the most interesting line from the minister was that the negotiations on the divorce bill could go down to the wire. ‘My expectation is that the money argument will go on for the full duration of the negotiation,’ he told the Commons. This is

Spare a thought for David Davis over the bank holiday weekend. As revellers descend on Notting Hill Carnival on Monday, the Brexit Secretary will be at the negotiating table in Brussels for the third round of Brexit talks. With the EU 27 adamant that trade talks can only begin once progress has been made on the other issues, the focus will be on the Brexit ‘divorce bill’, the rights of EU nationals, and the Irish border. Given how uphill talks have been so far, the expectation in Whitehall is that this could be a bad-tempered outing for both sides. Michel Barnier – the EU’s chief negotiator – is expected to,

Britain’s Brexit wish list is slowly being filled out. Today, the government sets out its plans for the temporary customs union it wants with the EU after Britain leaves in 2019. Brexit secretary David Davis says the aim for this new relationship is for it to be as ‘close as we can to the current arrangement’. This will please the likes of Philip Hammond and the Times are painting this proposal as a victory for the Chancellor over Liam Fox in the ongoing Cabinet tussle. It will also placate businesses eager to avoid a cliff-edge. As ever with Brexit negotiations, not everyone will be entirely happy. David Davis was keen

The furore surrounding the Brexit divorce bill is hotting up. The weekend’s papers saw speculation that Britain would cough up £36bn as part of a settlement package for its departure from the EU. Nonsense, says Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying this morning: ‘I don’t recognise the figure’. It’s not only the government hitting back; Tory eurosceptics are also turning up the volume. Yet while the government is eager to talk down the size of the bill, the criticism coming from the backbenches is less nuanced. Instead of quibbling over the amount, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood dismiss the bill out of hand. Rees-Mogg wrote on