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Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Could Le Pen win in France? After Trump, it’s foolish to rule it out

France’s centre-right newspaper, Le Figaro, is running a poll on its website asking readers if they’re happy to see Donald Trump in the White House. At the last count 56 per cent of the 131,954 respondents said they were. One person who most definitely is delighted is Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, who said the election result was ‘good news for our country’. That’s because, as she went on to explain, Trump would end ‘wild globalisation’, improve relations with Russia and, most importantly, rein in ‘the warlike interventions that are the source of the huge migratory waves that we are suffering’. But what will it do to her

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Let’s shut out this angry, unrepresentative mob

If you’re aiming to refute the suggestion that you can’t comprehend the difference between mob rule and the rule of law, then I suspect it’s probably a bad idea to raise a mob and lead it marching on a law court. Just my little hunch. Yet here come Nigel Farage and his piggybank Arron (Piggy) Banks with a plan to do just that. When the Supreme Court meets next month, the chaps behind Leave.EU aim to lead a march of 100,000 people to Parliament Square, to remind the chaps in wigs what Britain jolly well voted for. As if that had anything to do with anything at all. So far,

Monday

The Spectator

Theresa May’s passage to India

When a Prime Minister flies off abroad with a few business-leaders it is seldom worthy of comment. Such trade missions tend to achieve little, beyond generating headlines intended to flaunt politicians’ pro-business credentials. But with the impending departure of Britain from the European Union,-Theresa May’s visit to India this week, accompanied by Sir James Dyson and others, has huge significance. For the first time in four decades, a British Prime Minister can discuss doing trade deals — something which we have until now been forced to contract out to officials in Brussels. Mrs May chose her destination shrewdly. With its rapidly expanding economy and the gradual liberalisation of economic policy, India

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The Brexit backlash continues

The row over last week’s High Court ruling on Article 50 rumbles on this morning. Theresa May has given her backing to the judiciary, with the PM saying she ‘values the independence of our judiciary’. Yet some of this morning’s newspaper editorials are in much less forgiving mood. The Daily Telegraph points out the distinction between the rule of law and the rule of judges and says that Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Terence Etherton, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Sales quite simply got it wrong last week. The paper says the government is right to appeal the decision, pointing out that it’s not uncommon for

Sunday

Dot Wordsworth

Brexit means Brexit. But what does post-Brexit mean?

Staring at a brown envelope, my husband said: ‘I’ll deal with that post-breakfast,’ and then laughed as though he had made a joke. In his mind it was a play on words, the unspoken words being post-Brexit. It is true that no one is safe from that phrase these days. As a compound adjective, it’s not so bad: post-Brexit prosperity. As an adverb, it sounds awkward to me: prices rising post-Brexit. The word Brexit itself was established as more than a passing vogue only after the referendum, I think. It had been invented in 2012, on the pattern of the portmanteau word Grexit ‘Greek exit’, and while the prospect of

Saturday

James Forsyth

Government’s high court defeat sparks election chatter

What worries government ministers, as I say in The Sun this morning, is not the actual vote on the Article 50 bill—voting against the bill as whole would be akin to rejecting the referendum result—but attempts to tie Theresa May’s hands ahead of the negotiation through amendments to the bill. One senior Cabinet Minister tells me that peers and MPs ‘won’t be able to resist’ trying to amend the bill. Though, it is worth noting that because of public concern about free movement there probably isn’t a Commons majority for staying in the single market, post referendum. Downing Street is adamant that they don’t want an early election, and that

Friday

Alex Massie

The unhinged backlash to the High Court’s Brexit ruling

As a general rule, any day the government loses in court is a good day. So yesterday was an especially fine day. A delicious one, too, obviously, in as much as the fist-clenched, foot-stamping, whining of so many Brexiteers was so overblown and ludicrous it toppled into hilarity. People who shouted for months about the urgent need to restore parliamentary sovereignty now reacted in horror to the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. ‘That’s not what we meant’, they spluttered. We meant governmental supremacy only when it suits us. Well, tough. A certain amount of squealing was only to be expected since, if Nigel Farage has taught us anything, it is that the Brexit-minded

Philip Sime

Europe’s press isn’t happy at the Brexit ruling either

Britain’s newspapers aren’t happy at yesterday’s High Court ruling that the government cannot trigger Article 50 without the say-so of Parliament. And the news isn’t going down well in Europe either. There are fears that a Brexit hold-up could have ramifications on the continent. In the days after the referendum, European leaders were quick to call for a speedy Brexit. Now there are worries that a delay in the British courts could make that impossible – spelling trouble for a European Union which, for the large part, wants to get Brexit over and done with. Here’s how the European press has reacted to yesterday’s decision: In France, Le Monde says the ruling that Parliament must begin Britain’s exit from the EU

Mark Nayler

Spain’s political deadlock finally ends

After nearly a year of bickering and stalling, Spanish politicians have finally formed their country’s new government. Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), returns for a second term as prime minister. This time, Rajoy heads up a coalition made up of the PP, centrist newcomer Ciudadanos (‘Citizens’) and the centre-right Canary Islands Coalition. This is good news for Spain and shows that, at last, pragmatism has trumped ideology. It has ensured that a dreaded third election, which had been looming in December, won’t now be needed. Rajoy’s administration won’t have it easy though. The coalition is deeply unpopular with many Spaniards and will face formidable opposition in congress. What’s

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: The Brexit blockers’ ‘betrayal of democracy’

The High Court’s ruling that Parliament should have the final say on pulling the Article 50 trigger has not gone down well in today’s papers. ‘Enemies of the people’ screams the front page of the Daily Mail alongside a picture of the judges who made yesterday’s decision. If its headline didn’t make its view clear enough, there’s little room for interpretation in its editorial: the court’s decision was ‘an outrageous betrayal of democracy’, the paper says. The Mail suggests the ruling isn’t a one-off but forms part of a pattern where the courts have consistently sided with the Europe ‘against the interests of the British people’. But, the paper says, this

Thursday

The Spectator

A passage to India | 3 November 2016

When a Prime Minister flies off abroad with a few business-leaders it is seldom worthy of comment. Such trade missions tend to achieve little, beyond generating headlines intended to flaunt politicians’ pro-business credentials. But with the impending departure of Britain from the European Union,-Theresa May’s visit to India next week, accompanied by Sir James Dyson and others, has huge significance. For the first time in four decades, a British Prime Minister can discuss doing trade deals — something which we have until now been forced to contract out to officials in Brussels. Mrs May has chosen her destination shrewdly. With its rapidly expanding economy and the gradual liberalisation of economic

Matthew Lynn

The Bank of England made a mistake. It should have admitted it

The currency has been devalued by more than 30 per cent. Interest rates have been pushed all the way up to 20 per cent. The IMF is standing by with an emergency package, and capital controls and dollar rationing have been maintained. It has been a heck of a morning for the pound – although, fortunately enough for most us, the Egyptian rather than British one. Over here, it has all been rather quieter. The Bank of England, as most people expected, has stuck with its decision over the summer to take rates all the way down to the 0.25 per cent. It now looks inevitable that it will hold

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

It’s time for Hammond to send a ruthless hit squad into RBS

The new series of The Missing is surely the gloomiest television of the year. But it has nothing on the endless saga of RBS, which seems to use the same disturbing time-shift device: whenever there’s a horrible new plot twist, you have to spot whether we’re in 2008, 2011 or today. The crippled bank, still 73 per cent state-owned, has lost £2.5 billion in the first three quarters of this year, having just paid out another £425 million in ‘litigation and conduct’ costs chiefly relating to mortgage-backed securities hanky-panky in the US. Since its bailout eight years ago, it has lost considerably more than the £46 billion of taxpayers’ money

Monday

Britain doesn’t need to bluff about Brexit

The Government’s insistence that we should not give away our hand in negotiations with the EU has backfired. It is putting us in a weak position because the primary reason for not giving away your hand is when you are bluffing. We are not bluffing. We are in a strong position and should take maximum advantage of it.  When negotiating with someone who may or may not be reasonable, there is unavoidable uncertainty. We should define the worst that can happen and prepare for it. We can’t control how our opponents behave, but we should define all the things we can control and make sure we control them. Whether or

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

Morrissey is right – Brexit really is magnificent

Being an out-and-proud Brexiteer, someone who would go to the barricades for Brexit, someone who might even take a bullet for Brexit, I often get emails from people who feel the same way but feel they can’t express their Brexitphilia in public. This week, in response to my Big Issue column on, yes, the beauty of Brexit, a correspondent tells me that, like me, he voted Leave for liberal, democratic reasons, not Little Englander ones, but such has been the ‘name-calling’ and ‘toxicity’ in response to his decision that he’s had to slink off social media and keep his head down. It’s awful. Loads of Brexiteers feel like this —

Friday

Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: Nissan’s Brexit boost for Britain

Theresa May hailed Nissan’s decision to stay put in Sunderland and build its new Qashqai and X-Trail models at its plant in the north-east as a ‘vote of confidence’ in the UK. But was this just the PM drumming up the deal or is it really such good news for Britain? The Times suggests the agreement may have come at a price. The newspaper says a ‘written promise’ was made to the company that it wouldn’t lose out from Brexit. Some have said it smacks of a sweetheart deal between the Government and the carmaker – something business secretary Greg Clarke, who insisted no cheque book was waved at the

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Contours of the mind

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we are discussing cartography and the nether regions, it is wonderful to find in the British Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore knickers made out of second world war airmen’s silk escape maps. Maps certainly colonise our imaginations in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much of personal value can be lost in the creases and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And couples who often travel

The Spectator

Barometer | 27 October 2016

Folio society A new collection of Shakespeare’s work credits Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays. Some other candidates claimed to have written Shakespeare plays: FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). His poems are said to share a similar structure. But lacks motive to use Shakespeare as a pen name. WILLIAM STANLEY, 6th EARL OF DERBY (1561-1642): A Jesuit spy claimed he was secretly writing plays. EDWARD DE WERE, 17th EARL OF OXFORD (1550-1604): Theatre patron said to have used pen name because an aristocrat could not take credit for public plays. Dead for the last 12 years of Shakespeare’s life. ROGER MANNERS 5th EARL OF RUTLAND. Said to have

Louise Gray

Why Brexit could be a boon for GM crops

Genetically modified crops could be grown in England following a split from the European Union. But will it be good for Britain to forge ahead with a science that many consider to be dangerous for the environment, and potentially our health? George Eustice, the agriculture minister, revealed in a written parliament answer that as part of plans for Brexit, the government was looking at the regulation of genetically modified crops.  It has come as no surprise to the farming world, which has been campaigning for years for a more relaxed approach to GM. Many in Westminster already support the planting of GM crops on a commercial scale – although the situation is different in devolved

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: May’s Brexit plan and EU leaders’ ‘rudeness’ towards Britain

Theresa May was widely praised in yesterday’s papers after the Government backed a third runway at Heathrow. And there are more plaudits for the Prime Minister in today’s editorials. The Sun says that yesterday’s figures showing the wages of the poorest rose faster than for any other section of society made it clear that it wasn’t true the Tories only care about the rich. It says the Government’s plan to reduced the balance of inequality contrasts strongly with the ‘fevered minds of Jeremy Corbyn and his deluded followers’, who try and paint Britain as ‘an unfair society plagued by gross inequality’: a picture which it says isn’t true. But The