Eu referendum

Theresa May has done enough, for now, to put Brexit into its box. The Prime Minister hasn’t offered up much, but the piecemeal announcements she has made at the Tory party conference – including setting out a rough Article 50 timetable – have helped stave off uncertainty. Crucially, they’ve also kept the Brexit band happy: with the traditional Tory troublemakers using their conference platforms to sing the PM’s praises for once rather than stick the knife in. Yet it’s clear that Theresa May wants her time in office to be about more than just the referendum. When she was asked about the Brexit vote, the PM had this to say on the

In the run-up to the referendum, Philip Hammond was one of those warning of the dire consequences of a vote to leave the EU. He predicted that Brexit would have a ‘chilling effect’ on the UK economy and said there would be uncertainty for years to come. Since being made Chancellor, Hammond has softened his language about the doom and gloom of Brexit. But only just. This morning, he’s been touring the studios and airwaves ahead of his keynote speech at the Tory party conference in Birmingham. His headline announcement? Ditching the policy put in place by George Osborne to wipe out the deficit by 2020. But while the Chancellor

The Conservative party conference has started and Theresa May has kick-started this year’s gathering with her big speech on Brexit. The Prime Minister revealed earlier that Article 50 will be triggered by March next year. And when she took to the stage in Birmingham, she offered up a few more small glimmers about her Brexit plan. James Forsyth was in the hall to listen to the speech and he said the PM did her best not to talk about ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit. But was she successful? ‘I thought what was interesting about it was that she tried to say that this soft and hard Brexit distinction is wrong. But

Theresa May will receive a rapturous reception from Tory activists tomorrow. She is not just their new leader, but—as I say in The Sun today—someone they see as one of their own. She joined the party as a teenager, met her husband at a Tory disco and still goes out canvassing most weekends. She’s also much closer to the activists in age than Cameron was when he became leader: she turns 60 today, Cameron was 39 when he became party leader. But May should enjoy the applause on Sunday because her job is about to get harder. She is taking the unusual step of speaking on the opening day of

Since he moved to Hong Kong three years ago, the Rat’s Cantonese has been coming on apace. This has rather less to do with his language skills — never that much in evidence on his school reports — than it does with the fact that my stepson works in what is still, despite the mainland Chinese’s best efforts, one of the most aggressively free-market cultures in the world. ‘It’s like this,’ Rat explained, when the Fawn and I visited earlier this year. ‘If you want to get a cab somewhere urgent in the morning and you can’t speak good enough Cantonese then basically you’re stuffed. The drivers just swear at

Theresa May has made one thing clear: Brexit mean Brexit. But when will the Prime Minister actually pull the trigger and invoke Article 50? Boris Johnson gave his take last night: ‘The Government is working towards an Article 50 letter which as you know will be produced, probably, in the early part of next year. That’s still subject for discussion but what is clear I think to our friends and partners in the EU is two broad principles: we are not leaving Europe; Although we are leaving the EU treaties, we do want to have the closest possible trading relationship and it’s very much in their interests to achieve that…

The Brexit bounce continues. HM Treasury has today released forecasts of the economists it follows, as it does every month. Last time, there was a flurry of downgrades and forecasts of an immediate recession. Now, these forecasts are being torn up by everyone, including by the FT (although you can bet the FT won’t report on the upgrades as eagerly as it did the downgrades). The average new forecast suggests GDP will grow by 1.8 per cent this year, far better than the 1.5 per cent forecast last month. This back to where the consensus was before the Brexit vote. The OECD, which had previously predicted “immediate” uncertainty after a

‘I am getting nervous. But it’s not because Trump is good. It’s because people are stupid’. So said the (usually) very funny US comedian Bill Maher on TV recently. When I heard him say it, my first thought was: Trump’s going to win. Not because Maher is right, but because I recognised something from the EU referendum campaign, when the great and the good – from metropolitan comedians to overpaid columnists — piled in to suggest that Brexit backers were all dimwitted lemmings, marching zombie-like off a cliff. Pro-EU devotees, some from positions of astonishing privilege, were punching down. It wasn’t a good look, and it harmed their cause. The

There are not many predictions that are safe to make in the financial markets. M&S’s results will always be disappointing is perhaps one. Sir Philip Green will never apologise for anything is another. And there is one more that can now be added to the list. The Bank of England won’t raise interest rates when it meets this week. But it should. Why? Because the ‘emergency’ post-Brexit cut is already looking like an over-reaction. In truth, the Bank’s Governor Mark Carney is already looking dangerously over-committed to Project Remain. The best thing the Bank could do now would be to admit that it had a made a mistake – and

Throughout the EU referendum campaign, we heard that Brexit would not only sink the UK economy but destroy the Union because Scots were likely to vote Remain. In the event there was a difference at the polls—38 per cent of Scots voted for Brexit, vs 52 per cent in the UK as a whole—but was it enough to destroy, or even threaten, the Union? Polls in the immediate aftermath showed an uptick for support for Scottish separation which has since ebbed away. Kantar TNS has today published a poll showing that 53 per cent of Scots are against independence, which confirms the YouGov poll taken at the end of August showing 54

I’m not a great optimist about the whole Brexit thing, although my colleagues would mostly disagree. It’s as if we were expecting a storm and we’re now cheering because it’s gone quiet. Strangely, eerily quiet. Anyway, like with climate change, I hope I’m wrong, and whenever I have my doubts about the whole thing, I think about the ‘Remain’ protests led by Eddie Izzard. Let’s hope these obviously counter-productive demonstrations continue for the next five years. However, one disaster that doesn’t seem to have materialised yet is the warning that Brexit would lead to a brain drain. One guy in the Guardian, called Mr Imhof, says he’s going, which is a shame, as