Eu

Thursday

Patrick Marnham

Frexit – oui ou non?

In France, Brexit has provoked resentment and shock. For many years-Britain has been seen in both Paris and-Brussels as the European ‘bad boy’, out for what it can get and intending to give as little as possible in return. The first news was greeted with headlines such as ‘Can Europe-survive?’ but there was also a note of relief: ‘End of 40 years of love-hate’. Even before the referendum, Emmanuel Macron, the finance minister, had denounced the British record in Europe, claiming that the-United Kingdom had hijacked the great project and diverted the Union from its political destiny in order to reduce it to a single market. Last week, as hostilities

Monday

James Forsyth

The question for Stephen Crabb, can you go toe to toe with Vladimir Putin?

The Tory leadership hopefuls all appeared before a packed out 1922 hustings tonight. First up was Michael Gove. His pitch was that he had the conviction, the experience and the vision to lead the party and the country. He argued that the Tories’ aim should be to help those on £24,000 a year. Surprisingly, Gove wasn’t asked any questions about what had happened between him and Boris Johnson last week. However, he was asked twice about his former adviser Dominic Cummings. Gove said that Cummings would have no formal role in his Number 10. Gove was typically fluent, answering nine questions in the fifteen minutes allotted to him. He was

Rem Korteweg

The Great British Trade-off: Why the path to Brexit might be painful

So when can the UK start negotiating its own trade agreements? Throughout the campaign and thereafter, Brexiters have made passionate pleas for liberating the UK from the EU so it can pursue trade deals of its own. Daniel Hannan, a senior campaigner for Leave, quipped that every continent was growing except Europe and Antarctica, and that Britain after Brexit should strike deals with emerging economies quickly. Boris Johnson suggested that countries like Australia and India were already lined up to begin talks. But before the UK can enter this glorious new era of bilateral trade deals, the new Prime Minister must negotiate the divorce terms with the EU. He or

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage’s full resignation speech

I’m aware that not everybody in this country is happy. Indeed, a lot of young people have been wound up by scare stories and are actually very angry and very scared about their future. It’s an irony really, that it’s the youth of a country that appear to be worried right across the whole of the European Union. It is the under-30s that are protesting in the streets against undemocratic centralised control and indeed against the Euro and virtually everything that emanates from Brussels. In time, I hope that some of these sharp divisions can be healed when people start to realise that actually life outside the European Union is really very exciting and

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Ukip leadership: runners and riders

Today Nigel Farage has announced that he will be standing down as Ukip leader. Farage has pledged not to ‘unresign’ this time around, stating that now he has achieved his goal in the referendum, it’s time he ‘stood aside’ as leader of the party. This means that the search is on to find Farage’s successor. With Farage known to have a fractious relationship with some members of Ukip, his departure could mark a new more harmonious chapter for party relations. Steven Woolfe: Woolfe is the one to watch in the race. Loyal to Farage and with experience as an MEP, he has been being talked up as a future leader in Ukip circles

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Merkel tells Juncker: Britain needs plenty of time to invoke Article 50

Der Speigel has published a fascinating write-up giving last week’s extraordinary events from Angela Merkel’s perspective. Specifically, it seems, she’s had enough of Jean-Claude Juncker, the egregious president of the European Commission, and has told him to bow out from future negotiations with the UK. She’s fed up of him insisting that Britain rushes to invoke Article 50. Indeed, her “utmost concern,” says the magazine, is “giving Britain as much time as possible” for an orderly transition. Here’s an extract:- At 1 p.m. on the Friday after the Brexit referendum, Merkel makes a statement to Berlin journalists in which — in contrast to Schulz — she does not demand a rapid British withdrawal. One

Sunday

Douglas Murray

It’s time for our warring politicians to wake up to what really matters

Well I might as well say publicly what I’ve been saying to everyone who will listen privately for the last week. It seems to me that our country will regret the distraction and levity we have shown this past week. For those who campaigned to leave the EU, June 24th was not an opportunity to take a break but the start of the real work. Of course it remains astonishing that having lost the vote the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer chose to go into hiding and abandon the country they were in place to serve. But it is also unforgiveable that having won the campaign those who

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Brexit test

Stephen Crabb made a passionate plea this morning for Tories to stop thinking in terms of Remain and Leave when it comes to picking a leader. He warned that if people carry on doing this, it will lead to the party splitting. But all things being equal, I do think it would be best for the next Prime Minister to be a Leaver. After all, David Cameron resigned because he had campaigned for Remain and the country had voted to leave and he thought that made it impossible for him to chart the country on the new course it must now follow. There are two main reasons for thinking a

Friday

Kate Maltby

Forget the fighting. We’re entering a period of unparalleled opportunity for the Tories

Auf wiedersehen, Boris. He’ll be back, like a blond, bloated Voldemort inhabiting another life form – Top Gear host? Archbishop of York? Or endless BBC camping tours of Britain on a bike, the Portillo of the Portacabin? As Boris’ agent collects the offers – and his publishers are still owed a Shakespeare biography by the end of this anniversary year – he leaves behind him a Conservative Party scarred but resilient. There’ll be recriminations this week. Yet there’ll also be enduring relief, as one of Britain’s oldest institutions finds itself finally free of wrangling Etonians, chaps whose Brobdingnagian entitlement so undermined the gospel of One Nation inclusivity that both presumed

Steerpike Steerpike

Sarah Vine’s media warning fails to hold true

At times this week it has seemed as though Sarah Vine will soon be running the country — that is, if she isn’t secretly already. As well as informing readers, through her Daily Mail column, that she — along with her husband Michael Gove — has been ‘charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people’ following the Leave vote, Vine is reported to have played a pivotal role in the Justice Secretary’s decision to turn his back on Boris Johnson and run for leader. In fact, the first sign that all was not well between the Johnson and Gove camps came when Vine seemingly accidentally sent an email on the topic

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 30 June 2016

A rational vote Sir: There has been a lot of bile poured out about those who voted Leave by the Remainers. Their intelligence, their racial tolerance and their general moral standing has been called into question. I was a Remain voter, but live in an area that was 69 per cent Leave, and work with people who were strongly anti-remaining. To take one example, being anti-free migration is being referred to as racism. For many people migration is not anything to do with race or even nationality: 1,000 people from the next town would create the same degree of concern as 1,000 Poles. When jobs, houses, school places and so

Philippe Sands

Diary – 30 June 2016

Referendum day is as nondescript and wet as the day before, happily spent in Cambridge at my son’s Leo’s graduation. Even here the coming vote intrudes. Some students say that the master of Trinity College has come out for Brexit. Leo’s boyfriend Eddie, newly graduated in German studies and about to head to a job in Berlin, worries about job prospects. Our lunch table is shared with genial and smiling but very divided family. The polling station is equally lively, a place for chat with neighbours. The working day is uneventful. Dinner with friends in the evening, asleep before the first results. I wake in the middle of the night,

Nicholas Farrell

La bomba Britannica

In Italy, media coverage of the triumph of Brexit has been wall-to-wall as Italians worry about the collateral damage and wonder if they too dare… So far La bomba Britannica has hit the Milan stock market much harder than the London one. On Friday, Milan fell by 12 per cent against the FTSE-100’s 3.5 per cent. Italy’s banks — too numerous, too small, undercapitalised and saddled with alarming levels of toxic debt — took the biggest hit. New eurozone rules that ban government bailouts for big depositors have turned them into sitting ducks. Shares in Monte Paschi di Siena (bailed out once already in 2013 by Italy’s central bank) fell

Wednesday

Ed West

Why we need a second referendum – on the EEA

Roger Scruton once observed, in his astute way, how important national feeling was to democracy: ‘Democracy is a form of government that depends upon a national, rather than a credal or tribal idea of loyalty. In a nation state the things that divide neighbours from each other – family, tribe and religion – are deliberately privatised, made inessential to the shared identity, and placed well below the country and its well-being on the list of public duties. It is this, rather than any Enlightenment idea of citizenship, that enabled nation states so easily to adopt democracy. In a place where tribal or religious loyalties take precedence, democratic elections, if they

Steerpike Steerpike

Sarah Vine reveals the Gove household reaction to Brexit: ‘you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’

Since Leave triumphed in the EU referendum, there have been growing concerns that the Brexiteers were not suitably prepared for success at the polls. As well as no clear plan of action, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have been uncharacteristically quiet since the result came in. Happily Gove’s wife Sarah Vine has now filled us in on what the Justice Secretary has been up to over the past few days. In her Daily Mail column, Vine reveals that the first she heard of the result was near 5am on Friday when Gove was woken up from his slumbers by a phone call: ‘I was just drifting back to sleep when my husband’s

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Nigel Farage does his best to alienate the rest of Europe

Thankfully, many in Europe – not least the European Parliament – will have stopped listening to Nigel Farage a long time ago. The Ukip leader, no stranger to attempting to infuriate his MEP colleagues, has been winding them up again. In this morning’s session, he gloated: ‘You all laughed at me. Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?’ But Farage didn’t stop there, telling those around him: ‘I know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your lives, or worked in business, or worked in trade, or ever created a job, but listen’ It was clear from the huge smile across Farage’s face during

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Keep an eye on BBC journos injecting their political agendas into the Brexit debate

A quick update on the BBC TV News. At ten o clock last night the programme ran a report from its idiotic northern correspondent, Ed Thomas, which attempted to suggest that the Leave campaign was responsible for nasty things being said to immigrants. Thomas is an appallingly partisan correspondent and presumably has his job because he is only person within the BBC with a vaguely northern accent. He chose to interview two neanderthals. Then over to the inestimable Laura Kuenssssberg, who referred to the UK’s ‘likely’ exit from the EU. No, Laura: exit. We have to keep watching these patently parti-pris buggers. The subtle and not so subtle way they

Mark Nayler

Will Spain’s election finally end the country’s power vacuum?

The only surprise result in Spain’s repeat general election on Sunday – rendered necessary by the impasse produced by December’s – was the failure of the new Spanish left to nudge the Socialists out of second place. The radical-left coalition Unidos Podemos (‘United We can’), a combination of Podemos (We Can) and Izquierda Unida (United Left), was expected to increase its joint share of the votes and take second-place behind the Conservative Popular Party (PP), replacing Pedro Sanchez’s PSOE as the dominant force of the Spanish left. Instead it came in third place, taking 21.11 per cent of the vote and 71 seats. Everything else was almost an exact re-run of December’s inconclusive vote, prompting

Monday

James Forsyth

Jo Johnson backs Boris

Jo Johnson has declared his support for his brother’s leadership bid. In a statement to The Spectator, the minister for universities and science says: ‘Boris and I were on different side of a hard fought referendum campaign. But it is time to move on, time to unite and time to deliver. I have known my brother for longer than anyone in parliament. He is the great communicator—and I have no doubt at all that he is the person best placed not just to secure a new settlement for Britain in Europe but also to provide the optimistic, confident and outward-looking leadership we will need in months and years to come.’

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron indicates that he wants the UK to stay in the single market

David Cameron came to the House of Commons this afternoon to update the House on Brexit. Cameron was greeted by the loudest Tory cheer that I’ve heard of seven years of sitting in the press gallery. He was in remarkably good spirits, considering what has just happened. Jeremy Corbyn’s predicament appear to have cheered Cameron up. He joked that the new Labour MP for Tooting should keep her phone on as she might be offered a job at any moment. He also joked at Corbyn’s expense that he thought he was having a bad day until he saw what was happening to Corbyn. When it came to the process of