Eu politics

Tomorrow in Florence, Theresa May needs to make the speech of her life. Britain has a strong hand to play in these EU talks and it’s time the Prime Minister showed it. May must assert once again that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, shoring up the UK’s bargaining position. She should also insist Britain won’t confirm any ‘divorce bill’ until these Article 50 talks end in March 2019, with the final amount dependent on the goodwill the EU has shown. Above all, taking her cue from Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister needs to present an inspiring vision of the UK outside the EU. The heyday

I know many Leave voters. Most of my family. Around half of my friends. Lots of the people in the immigrant community in London I grew up in. (We’re bad immigrants, being anti-EU, so we never feature in the migrant-sympathetic commentary of EU-pining hacks.) And not one of them has ever said they chose Brexit because of that £350m-for-the-NHS thing on the side of a bus. The idea that that bus swung the referendum, that it duped the voting hordes, has become one of the great, and nasty, myths of the Brexit era. The bloody bus is back in the news this week after Boris Johnson said he’d like to

So, the worst has happened, just as Ryanair said it would. The budget airline has had to cancel thousands of flights – around 50 of them, every day, for the next six weeks. It follows an ominous warning that was made by chief executive Michael O’ Leary last month: “What is increasingly likely to happen is that there will be no flights. Mrs May and the Brexiteers will be trying to explain that to you in 12 months’ time, why getting a car to Scotland or a ferry to Ireland are the only options on offer.” Except, that is, while last month’s warning concerned Brexit, this week’s cancellations concerned a cock-up

Twenty years ago Wales (barely) said Yes to devolution. Despite a Welsh Assembly being supported by the wildly popular new Prime Minister Blair and opposed by the very unpopular Conservatives, the public gave the most grudging endorsement to partial self-rule. A lot of water has flowed under many Welsh bridges since then. Public opposition to devolution fell away surprisingly quickly after 1997; the latest evidence, which I will be presenting in Cardiff on Monday, confirms that a clear majority in Wales now support devolution. There is little political opposition either. The Conservatives swiftly accepted the referendum result; since returning to power at Westminster they have overseen two Wales Acts transferring

I used to have a lot of time for Boris Johnson. Sometimes whole days, in fact: from 8am until 8pm, I’d ring and text and email him, politely urging him to tell me what he planned to write his exquisitely expensive Telegraph column about, and when he’d deign to send it to me. It was, as others who’ve had the joy of calling him a colleague can attest, maddening. But he always filed, in the end. I don’t claim that working acquaintance with Boris gives me any unique insight into his soul. In fact, familiarity only makes his real character more obscure. My overall impression of a man famous for being talkative

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

To everyone’s huge surprise, Jeremy Corbyn has come out as being quite a hard-line Eurosceptic, despite his tireless campaigning last year during the referendum. He has also further cemented his party’s newfound respect for immigration restriction, attacking the importing of cheap labour from abroad. Whether any of this makes any impact on his legion of supporters, who seem to project their own vision of what he should be onto reality, I don’t know; the Labour coalition already seems so incoherent but then I’ve given up trying to understand how politics work; it’s like there’s been a writer’s strike up in heaven and nothing makes sense anymore. I suspect Corbynmania mainly comes

Happy Independence Day everyone (groan). One year on from that momentous day, here are 13 things we’ve learnt from the Brexit vote. Most people will take any argument that suits them. They will swap ideological clothing if needs be – note how many on the Left suddenly care deeply about the pound and the City, while many on the Right seem keen on huge economic risks. Most voters are ignorant. This applies to both sides, although on average Remainers are better educated. But as Dominic Cummings has pointed out, the average Remainer didn’t know that much about how the EU actually works; they just looked at Nigel Farage and knew