Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.
A Labour party that goes into the looming general election campaigning for a new Brexit referendum, which Jeremy Corbyn says it will do, will delight Boris Johnson and fill EU leaders with despair. Because Johnson will think millions of British people will recoil at the idea of a general election followed by a referendum in quick
What more-or-less all Tory MPs seem to have missed is that Philip Hammond, the ex-chancellor who has become the anti-no-deal Sandinista, agrees with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings on the big thing that matters. Hammond loudly – and Johnson, with his consigliere Cummings sotto voce – all accept that EU leaders and negotiators do not
On the day Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, I said his most important appointment was that of Dominic Cummings – who had run the triumphant pro-Brexit, Vote Leave referendum campaign – as his most senior government adviser. It signalled Johnson was not bluffing when he pledged to extract the UK from the EU do or
I am regularly asked whether MPs can block a no-deal Brexit, whether they will block a no-deal Brexit and whether there will be a referendum. The short answers are: 1. MPs have the power to block a no-deal Brexit 2. The likelihood of them permanently and definitively blocking a no-deal Brexit is slim-to-none 3. There
Brussels believes that it has completed almost all the necessary no-deal planning, except it may try to organise improved communication between relevant national agencies and the EU Commission. It regards the idea being floated by many Brexiter MPs and the CBI that there will be mini deals before 31 October to lessen the shock of no
During the 2016 referendum battle, I consistently said that leaving the EU would make the UK poorer, though probably not as poor in the short term as George Osborne was arguing. But – as I always added night after grinding night on the News at Ten and in a couple of Tonight films I made
I don’t know if Boris Johnson is as surprised to be prime minister as those who’ve known him for 20 years, and worked for him when he was Spectator editor, and became incredibly grumpy at his seeming pathological inability to make up his mind. But it all felt a bit unreal and disconcerting to see
The closest analogy to the government Boris Johnson is forming is Blair’s and Brown’s New Labour government of 1997, when they appointed super powerful political advisers – Campbell, Powell, Balls, Whelan – to boss conservative Whitehall. That is what Johnson is doing – in spades – by making former Vote Leave campaign chief Dominic Cummings
When Boris Johnson chants his mantra of delivering Brexit, uniting the country and beating Jeremy Corbyn, it is very much a personal imperative. For the simple reason that if he fails, as many of his colleagues anticipate, he will look like a blithering idiot. The point is that back in the spring of 2016, he
At just before midday today, Brexiters will own Brexit for the first time, and that will really matter – if, as expected, Johnson is crowned Tory leader. Because from that moment, they will have no one but themselves to either praise or blame, for either Britain’s brave new dawn or its slow and painful demise
Interviewing Boris Johnson is like staring long and hard into an expressionist painting: there are pyrotechnics, the shape of commitments and policies, but it might all be mirage. After I spoke with him on Wednesday for my show, my abiding sense was that he would dearly love a root-and-branch renegotiation of Theresa May’s Brexit deal,
What has it come to in the Labour Party when the only way Labour peers feel they can communicate with their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is to pay to take out an advert in the Guardian? No major party has ever been this dysfunctional. The advert has been signed by roughly a third of Labour Lords.
With just a week to go before the result is announced of the election to choose the new Tory leader, and our new PM, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are shape-shifting into each other. On Brexit Hunt is adopting more and more of Johnson’s rhetoric about the need to keep open the option of a
Boris Johnson’s failure to rebuke Donald Trump for his unpresidential attacks on the serving British prime minister and our US ambassador show that he takes for granted he’ll be the next PM, despite his insistence on the ITV debate last night that it would be presumptuous for him to do that. He is looking beyond
Here is the Boris Johnson paradox: the Tory party appears to have made up its institutional mind that Boris Johnson will be its next leader and our prime minister. And yet all the senior Tories I meet – ministers, MPs and especially his supporters – are bracing themselves to be disappointed and even betrayed by
MPs opposed to a no-deal Brexit will make an almost-final attempt early this coming week to make it impossible for Boris Johnson – if he becomes PM – to prorogue or suspend parliament to force through a no-deal Brexit. The plan which has been designed largely by Dominic Grieve, the senior Tory MP and former
Is it the country that has gone mad? Or just a majority of members of the Conservative party? They are the questions that rattle around my brain as the self-styled “sensible” candidate in the Tory leadership campaign, Jeremy Hunt, speaks to me for an ITV interview. He tells me it would serve democracy and save his party
William Hague is not noted for agonies of self-doubt. But the former Tory leader’s judgement, in his Telegraph column on which of Johnson and Hunt is best suited to lead his party and our country, was not a close run thing: Hunt is one of the most impressive ministers Hague has worked alongside, and might
There is a lot of confusion about Boris Johnson’s approach to Brexit. And that is deliberate because the candidate has yet to make a big call about the nature of the modifications he is seeking to the Brexit plan negotiated by Theresa May. The ultra Brexiters among his supporters, the hard core of the European Research Group
I asked important EU and UK people involved in Brexit talks what they made of Boris Johnson’s claim on BBC that: 1: The EU would be prepared to cancel the Northern Ireland backstop. 2: Continue free and frictionless trade with UK for an “implementation period” after Brexit on 31st October. 3: Negotiate a new package of measures