Eu

Sunday

Martin Vander Weyer

The Brexit bellwether will be the health of our car industry

As I’ve said before, the bellwether of post-Brexit prosperity will be the health of the UK car industry, rather than that of the far larger financial sector. The City is nimble enough to look after itself come what may; it requires little more than plug sockets and clever lawyers to outmanoeuvre barriers to its trade. Car-makers, by contrast, require massive investment in research, robotics and logistics to keep them at the cutting edge of a globalised manufacturing system operating on the tightest of margins. So every indicator is worth tracking. Peugeot-Vauxhall was a mixed signal, and a cloud hangs over the Ford engine plant at Bridgend. But there’s positive news

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Why is Nicola Sturgeon so cagey about Scotland’s EU future?

It’s important to keep an ear out for the rhetoric of Britain’s remaining Remain parties, because they are changing, too. Having announced plans for a second Scottish referendum entirely because of Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon is now incredibly cagey about whether her independent nation would even be part of the EU, or perhaps more like Norway. The same is true of the Lib Dems. Last weekend, Tim Farron managed to give a whole speech to his party’s spring conference railing against only a ‘hard Brexit’ and thus never quite saying whether a Lib Dem government (humour me) would leave the EU or not. These people need to get off the fence. Mind

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How both Britain and the EU might claim victory in the Brexit talks

Theresa May doesn’t do drama. She regards order as both a political and personal virtue. And this goes a long way towards explaining why she is Prime Minister. After the Brexit vote last June and David Cameron’s resignation, the Tories had had enough excitement. They turned to the leadership contender who was best able to project a reassuring sense of calm. It is in keeping with May’s approach that she has drained the drama from the triggering of Article 50, the start of the two-year process for leaving the EU. Other prime ministers might have been tempted to do it with a flourish — to feel the hand of history

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

No, M Juncker, David Cameron did not “destroy” the United Kingdom.

Jean-Claude Juncker could have been invented by Nigel Farage’s spin doctors. He is sneering one-man advert for Brexit, Frexit and any other kind of EU-exit. As Hugo Rifkind argues in this week’s magazine, he is a caricature of the arrogant Eurocrat: “smug, lazy, unelected and utterly impervious to anything.” He is a notorious boozer, and managed ‘head of state’ by running Luxembourg, which a country with a population about the size of Sheffield. His ascension to President of the European Commission embodied everything that was wrong with the EU, a huge signal that it was time to abandon ship. When Michael Gove was once at a party and asked to make

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Jean-Claude Juncker is the worst thing about being a Remainer

The best thing about being a Remainer is obviously the dinner parties, where we all sit around being incredibly well-heeled in leafy Islington. Bloody love a good heel, I do. And a leaf. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Eddie Izzard and Nick Clegg crack jokes at each other in French, as Lily Allen and Matthew Parris do impressions of old people from Northumberland, while in the background Bob Geldof and Professor Brian Cox duet on the piano. It’s almost literally how I spend almost all of my time. Whereas Leaver dinner parties, so I’m told, are just IDS and a Scotch egg. The worst thing about being a

Thursday

Taki

High life | 23 March 2017

A cloudless sky, crunchy spring snow, longer, warmer days. I’ve finally got in some good skiing, twisting around moguls like an arthritic champ. It’s all in the mind, as my old wrestling coach used to tell me. If you think the other guy’s better, you’re bound to lose to him. The same goes for the slope. If it scares you, stay in the club and have another drink. Otherwise, attack it with gusto and feel like a champ again. The same applies to the fairer sex. If you’re too nervous to speak to her, keep moving. We have four of the prettiest young women at The Spectator, all taken alas,

The Spectator

Saving the children

When a humanitarian tragedy disappears from our newspapers, there are two possibilities: that the crisis is over and life for survivors is gradually returning to normal — or that the human toll has become so routine as to no longer be considered newsworthy. Sadly, the deaths of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to seek a new life in Europe fall into the latter category. Eighteen months after the photographs of little Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach generated a huge swell of public emotion, entire families are still dying on a regular basis. In the first ten weeks of

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A way for both sides to claim Brexit victory

Theresa May doesn’t do drama. She regards order as both a political and personal virtue. And this goes a long way towards explaining why she is Prime Minister. After the Brexit vote last June and David Cameron’s resignation, the Tories had had enough excitement. They turned to the leadership contender who was best able to project a reassuring sense of calm. It is in keeping with May’s approach that she has drained the drama from the triggering of Article 50, the start of the two-year process for leaving the EU. Other prime ministers might have been tempted to do it with a flourish — to feel the hand of history

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The real BBC shocker: occasionally it isn’t biased

There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Royal prerogative

No one should complain that My Country; a work in progress is a grim night out. It’s rare for a good play to be written by royal command. The co-authors are the Queen’s personal minstrel, Carol Ann Duffy, and the director of her Royal National Theatre, Rufus Norris. These inspiring artistes have sent their vassals beyond the security of London to annotate ‘the words of people across the UK’ in the hope of understanding a humanitarian disaster: Brexit. The show makes its prejudices clear by dedicating the script to a Remain voter, Jo Cox, who was murdered by a Leave supporter. And it promotes the view, common among Remainers, that

Bruce Anderson

The fall of Paris

Paris used to be the most self-confident city in the world. Brash, assertive, boastful: Manhattan claimed to be the best. Cool, elegant, sophisticated, supercilious: Paris knew that it was the best. This is no longer true. Paris has lost its élan, and that has created a love-hate relationship with the UK. Everyone seems to know someone who is working in London. The ones left in Paris cannot decide whether to punish us or join us: to hope that Brexit fails — or to fear that Brexit might fail, and keep able young Frenchmen from job opportunities in London. Flics everywhere, tattiness, tension: one is reluctant to acknowledge the successes of

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Juncker is now the hardest Brexiter there is

The best thing about being a Remainer is obviously the dinner parties, where we all sit around being incredibly well-heeled in leafy Islington. Bloody love a good heel, I do. And a leaf. Honestly, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Eddie Izzard and Nick Clegg crack jokes at each other in French, as Lily Allen and Matthew Parris do impressions of old people from Northumberland, while in the background Bob Geldof and Professor Brian Cox duet on the piano. It’s almost literally how I spend almost all of my time. Whereas Leaver dinner parties, so I’m told, are just IDS and a Scotch egg. The worst thing about being a

Tuesday

William Cook

Tintin is an EU hero – but is Captain Haddock on Britain’s side?

Blistering barnacles! Thundering typhoons! What dastardly double-dealing! To bolster their puny team of pen-pushing, quota-quoting civil servants, those fiendish Brussels bureaucrats have recruited Europe’s greatest investigative reporter. With Tintin on the EU’s side in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations, do our valiant Brexiteers stand any chance at all? No idea what I’m on about? Then let me explain. As the Daily Telegraph has revealed, the European Council’s Brexit task force has enlisted Tintin as their cheerleader, by hanging a poster of the intrepid journalist in their Brussels war room. This poster is a mock-up of a new Tintin book called Tintin and the Brexit Plan. The picture shows Tintin and Captain

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The Brexit bunch are the real referendum whiners

In an age of fanaticism, it was always unlikely that the urge to censor would be confined to the left. If you think that the insults conservatives have thrown at liberals will not boomerang back to injure them, consider the following examples of right-wing invective. Conservatives claim millennials are ‘special snowflakes,’ unable to handle criticism – a generalisation that crashes and breaks on the vast number of exceptions. To concentrate on specifics for once, it is a matter of fact that the world’s most special snowflake is Donald Trump. He and his supporters target judges, journalists and any other critic. No slight is forgotten or forgiven. Their skin is so

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron and Le Pen both fail to dazzle in first French Presidential debate

It was the burkini that brought Monday night’s debate to life between the five main presidential candidates for next month’s French election. For the first hour of the televised debate there had been much posturing and postulating but no sharp exchanges. That changed when Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of turning a blind eye to the burkini, the Islamic swimwear that last summer caused such controversy in France. Macron rejected the charge, telling Le Pen in a forceful exchange she was a dangerous provocateur. The centrist candidate, who claims to be ‘neither left nor right’, then went on the counter-attack, accusing the National Front leader of sowing divisions within

Monday

James Forsyth

How quickly can a reciprocal rights deal be done for UK and EU citizens?

The EU has been adamant that there will be no negotiation with the UK without formal notification that Britain is leaving. But next Wednesday, Theresa May will formally trigger Article 50—beginning the two-year process for Britain leaving the EU.  Many in government expect the start of the talks to be difficult: ‘get ready for a spot of turbulence’ says one of those intimately involved in the preparations for the negotiations. The expectation is that the EU will insist that the so-called ‘divorce bill’ must be settled first while the UK is adamant that it will only discuss that if the future trade relationship between the UK and the EU is also on

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

If the EU didn’t like Boris’s prison guard joke, why conform to the stereotype?

A few weeks ago, Boris Johnson made a point about the EU negotiations and the futility of the idea of punishing Britain for the sake of it. ‘If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape’, he said, ‘rather in the manner of some World War II movie, then I don’t think that is the way forward, and actually it’s not in the interests of our friends and partners’. Cue howls of outrage. ‘Abhorrent and deeply unhelpful’, said Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator. But was Boris really so wide of the mark? Yesterday Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, gave an interview

Friday

Freddy Gray

On trade, and much else, Donald Trump and Angela Merkel are worlds apart

Oh dear. Anybody who thought that, contrary to expectations, Angela Merkel and Donald Trump might get along seems to have been gravely mistaken. The meeting between the two world leaders was meant to have been held on Tuesday, but was put off by a snow storm. Things still looked pretty chilly in Washington today. Seated next to each other in the White House for the first photo-op, the Donald and the Angela – two leaders with obviously antithetical worldviews – looked terrifically awkward. They didn’t shake hands. Angela seemed slightly more civil. She tried to talk to the president. He just ignored her. The press conference was only slightly warmer. The closest moment to friendliness was when

Thursday

James Forsyth

Double trouble | 16 March 2017

Theresa May is a cautious politician. She has risen to the top by avoiding unnecessary risks; no one survives 18 years on the Tory front bench by being a gambler. But few prime ministers have the luxury of choosing their battles, and she would not have chosen the two that may now define her premiership: successfully negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union while saving the United Kingdom. If she achieves both, she will join the pantheon of great prime ministers. If she fails, she’ll be keeping Lord North company in the history books. Unlike David Cameron, May has been preparing for a new Scottish referendum from the moment she

Simon Barnes

Little birds, big trouble

A British military base is being used for a multi-million-quid criminal enterprise, possibly involving the Russian mafia — and Britain seems powerless to prevent it. Last year they had a crack at enforcement and had to give up. Mafia 1, British army 0. It’s happening in Cyprus, in the British Sovereign Base Areas. The situation in Cyprus is a bit like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, but with more complex problems of nationality, culture and power. It has let this criminal enterprise thrive and prosper on the fringes, with the result that Britain is providing the infrastructure for a major illegal business with suspected links to Russian criminal organisations. Which is a