Jeremy corbyn

In September, Labour conference will impose on Jeremy Corbyn a policy of backing a second referendum in all circumstances. So, I say in The Sun this morning, what will he do between now and then? Corbyn has two paths open to him. He can either decide to embrace a second referendum now or do a deal with Theresa May so that the UK is out of the EU before Labour conference meets. If Corbyn went the second referendum route, he would ensure that Labour did well in the European Parliament elections next month as it scoops up the votes of energised Remainers while the Tories have lumps taken out of

Jeremy Corbyn has insisted that Theresa May hasn’t yet moved on her Brexit red lines in talks with the Labour Party. In a broadcast clip this evening, the Labour leader said: ‘Well, the meetings are very long. A great deal of detail is gone into by both parties. We have people who have been on this case for several years so they’re all very accustomed to it all. We’ve gone into it because the government at last acceded to a request I first made last September that we’re prepared to talk and put forward our views, but talks have to mean a movement and so far there’s been no change

As another crunch Brexit week approaches, Theresa May has used a video message to update the public on ‘what’s happening with Brexit’. With the Sunday papers filled with angry Conservative MPs venting about her decision to enter negotiations with Jeremy Corbyn in a bid to break the Brexit deadlock, the Prime Minister uses the address to try and justify her decision. Adopting a more casual tone that normal, May says that Parliament has rejected her deal three times and ‘as things stand’ there is little reason to expect MPs to back it on a fourth vote. This is why she has made the decision to talk to Jeremy Corbyn about

The irony of the stalemate in the cross-party Brexit talks is that Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are not that far apart on the issue, as I say in The Sun this morning. They might use different language, but what they want is really quite similar. But while they may not be that far apart, their parties are. A deal would require not one of them, but both of them to be prepared to split their parties. If Theresa May was to soften her deal to try and get Labour support, she would exacerbate the divide within her own party. I am told that in the talks, the government has

There is a logic in Mrs May’s late move to Labour. It is the same logic by which both parties, at the last general election, put forward very similar policies about Brexit. They need to stay together (while feigning disagreement for party reasons) to frustrate what people voted for. Just as they both said in 2017 that they wanted to leave the customs union, now both are working to stay in it. It is the same logic by which Mr Speaker Bercow has arranged for Sir Oliver Letwin to become prime minister on roughly alternate days. None of the main players really wants Brexit, but none can really say so.

This evening, Jeremy Corbyn walked out of a meeting between opposition party leaders and the Prime Minister about Brexit. The reason for his angry protest had nothing to do with what was being discussed, but his distaste for one of the attendees. Former Labour MP Chuka Umunna was there to represent the Independent Group, and this, according to those present, was too much for the Labour leader to stomach. Labour has since said the the terms of the meeting had changed and that this wasn’t what Corbyn had agreed to when he said he would meet the Prime Minister in her office. But this is an impressive own goal, even

Rugby was immortalised in Tom Brown’s School Days, but its headmaster, Peter Green, is brandishing another book — a Christie’s catalogue with the school’s name on it. During an attic clear-out items were discovered in an archive room and were put up for sale. They had been given to the school in around 1880 by the Old Rugbeian Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, and included Chinese ceramics and British watercolours. The highlight was a rare drawing by Dutch Old Master Lucas van Leyden, which sold for £10 million. If the decision to sell that seems crass, it isn’t, says Green. ‘Why would we keep it? It has no intrinsic value to Rugby School.

The only certainty in the Brexit process is that there is no certainty. Brexiteers had long sought solace in the fact that, by law, the United Kingdom will leave the European Union on 29 March with or without a deal. But it’s now clear that this is not necessarily the case  —  or even likely. As we have seen this week, Theresa May is not in control of her party any more than Jeremy Corbyn is in control of his. Corbyn has been forced to move towards the idea of another ‘public vote’ on Brexit, though he has no enthusiasm for one, because he fears that if he doesn’t, MPs

To say that the May administration is ‘the worst government anyone can remember’ is to abuse the English language. It isn’t a government but a collection of factions so far apart I am surprised they can stay in the same cabinet. On the backbenches the European Research Group operates as a separate English nationalist party. Everywhere Tory politicians are scrambling to position themselves to succeed Theresa May, rather than holding on to any notion as quaint as putting their country before their careers. Yet faced with this ungoverning government, a maladministration that is so exhausted it is running out of Conservative MPs who can serve as ministers, the opposition is

The House of Commons does work better than it seems to, I promise you. When a big subject comes up, it spends weeks, months, even years, posturing and sparring, but it has a way of working out when a choice is truly important. Brexit has taken years, and is truly important. We saw the first signs of this realisation dawning on Parliament when it rejected Mrs May’s original deal so decisively. We saw the second signs on Tuesday night. As that series of covert Remain amendments — most notably Cooper-Boles — fell, a pattern became apparent. Enough MPs now understand that if the institution of parliament is ever to command

Jeremy Corbyn scolded a Tory MP during his opening speech in the Commons debate on Theresa May’s Brexit Plan B, telling the backbencher that his intervention hadn’t added anything to the seriousness of the occasion. How odd, then, that the way the Labour leader conducted himself throughout his speech also ended up fitting that criticism perfectly. The Labour leader’s response was dominated not by a careful critique of the Prime Minister’s strategy for getting a new Brexit deal agreed with European leaders and then accepted by the Commons, but by his petty refusal to take an intervention from a backbencher on his own side. Angela Smith, who has long been

One of the ironies of contemporary British politics is that many younger voters – some of whom are so opposed to eurosceptic baby boomers that they accuse them of ‘stealing their future’ – are also enamoured with Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader is, after all, a eurosceptic baby boomer who some still speculate might have secretly voted Leave at the referendum. But a poll out today suggests that the Corbyn coalition is finally beginning to creak under the weight of this contradiction. According to an Opinium survey, commissioned by For our Future’s Sake (FFS), the student wing of the People’s Vote campaign, just 23 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds approve of Corbyn’s handling of

Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the Belvedere Hotel proclaiming — incongruously, you might think, given IMF warnings about what a no-deal Brexit might do to global growth — ‘Free trade is great’. My own excuse was that I’m too busy at home rehearsing the role of a wickedly exploitative landlord in a spoof Victorian melodrama called Her Honour for Tenpence. And

The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: “Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?” But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. “The latter, I think,” is the response I have heard time and time again, both from Labour supporters and Tories. For the entire day before Abbott’s appearance on Question Time, in which she thinks she was treated badly on account of the colour of her skin and her gender, my wife had been bouncing around the house

The Commons has grown rather used to Theresa May giving an update on Brexit each Monday afternoon, and still more used to the Prime Minister offering precious little in the way of new information each time she does so. Today’s statement was a little different, in that May is now asking MPs for more information, rather than MPs turning on her and accusing her of not telling them anything. She laboured rather heavily on the point that Jeremy Corbyn has so far refused to attend the cross-party talks designed to work out an agreement that the Commons can stomach, introducing it early in her statement, and returning to the point