Robert Peston

This is what a senior member of the cabinet told me this morning about whether Boris Johnson’s prospects of becoming Tory leader and our PM have been seriously harmed by the disclosure that neighbours summoned police to his home after they heard his girlfriend Carrie Symonds shouting at him to ‘get off me’. Minister: ‘It

The video of Mark Field pushing a Greenpeace activist by the neck is so upsetting. Watch as Tory MP for Cities of London & Westminster @MarkFieldUK grabs a Greenpeace protester who interrupted a Philip Hammond speech in London tonight https://t.co/wZTzEC8lKF pic.twitter.com/tJuwCZ1P0X — ITV News (@itvnews) June 20, 2019 The climate-change protestors were, according to the

Astonishing scenes at Mansion House tonight. Not the climate change protestors who interrupted Philip Hammond’s speech (though goodness knows how they got through the extraordinary security) but the Chancellor saying he will fight and fight again to prevent Boris Johnson going for a no-deal Brexit (though he did not name Johnson). He said:- “I cannot imagine

This is my scenario for how the last two days of the MPs’ stage of the Tory leadership ballot will play out – which of course by definition means none of it will happen (and the clever money probably bets against me). Most of the 30 votes won by the defeated Brexiteer Dominic Raab will

Tomorrow at 1.30pm, Labour’s shadow cabinet, in a special Brexit session, may move towards making the historic decision to call for a referendum in ‘all circumstances’ – that is, on any Brexit deal agreed by parliament or on a no-deal Brexit. That said, sources close to Jeremy Corbyn caution me against expecting any momentous announcement

At the hacks’ hustings for the Tory leadership candidates, I asked the five who could be bothered to be held to account by your inky fingered servants a really boring question. Would they accept the definition of a ‘hard border’ on the island of Ireland written into the December joint agreement between the UK and

Before this Tory leadership election started, the party’s grandees and custodians were telling me party members MUST at all costs be given a choice of candidates to be leader and our next prime minister. Now they tell me Boris Johnson is so far ahead – both among MPs and seemingly among the membership – that it would

Now the real shenanigans begin. Boris Johnson will – barring a disaster of Johnsonian scale – be on the ballot of Tory members to pick their next leader and our prime minister on or around 22 July. And, truthfully, given that he is by a margin the darling and chouchou of those members, it is

Brexit is both the cause of the Tory leadership contest – it was too much for Theresa May – and is the toxin that threatens to destroy the contest to replace her and her party. The reason is that even if the new prime minister were to take the UK out of the EU –

Pretty much the whole intellectual gap (if we can dignify it as such) between the candidates in the Tories’ leadership contest is summed up in two tweets this morning that react to the Conservative humiliation in the Peterborough by-election. One tweet was by the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the other by his predecessor Boris Johnson.

When the influential Tory ERG Brexiter Steve Baker refused last night on my programme to deny Boris Johnson is closer to his position on how to leave the EU than Dominic Raab, and he would be backing Johnson, I concluded that Johnson is now unstoppable. Barring some self-inflicted cataclysm (which cannot be ruled out) – the former

Now that the Tory party has confirmed we’ll know the identity of its new leader and therefore in theory our new prime minister in the week beginning 22 July, it is also possible to capture the single issue that will dominate both the coming two weeks of voting by MPs – who will choose the

In refusing to come out for a confirmatory referendum as the primary aim of Brexit policy, Jeremy Corbyn and his allies – Len McCluskey, Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne, and Andrew Murray – have signalled they would not want to turn their backs on Labour’s traditional working class voters, many of whom are Brexiters and do

I never thought I would live to see the Conservative and Unionist Party, dominator of British politics for centuries, falling to a vote share of nine per cent in a national election. Hindsight is mind-bending, which means I now find it impossible to believe that David Cameron could ever have conceived that holding an EU referendum

Theresa May has been forced from office by her own MPs because they concluded there would be no progress on delivering Brexit, or on anything important, while she remained their leader. But if they thought her government was characterised by factionalism and chaos, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the big facts of her failed

Put 10th June in your diary. Because that is when the contest to elect a new Tory leader, and therefore a new prime minister, will begin, I am told. Why am I confident of that? Well it is the last possible date for the contest that the shop stewards for Tory MPs, the executive for the

I am told, in completely unambiguous terms by a source very close to the Prime Minister, that there will be no statement from Theresa May tonight on anything – either setting out a timetable for her departure or agreeing to pull the vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB). ‘Why would we do any of