British Politics

RICHARD PORRITT with the week’s big stories All hail to the mutineers! The Daily Telegraph pulled off a remarkable feat this week by outraging both Remainers and Leavers with their bonkers splash labelling Tory Brexit rebels ‘mutineers’. Even Brexit minister Steve Baker took a shot at the Conservative Party’s in-house newsletter, saying ‘colleagues have sincere […]

RICHARD PORRITT rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit 10 Peter Lundgren MEP Swedish right-winger Lundgren has claimed this week that warnings about Britain being isolated and poor after Brexit are ‘bulls**t’. Phew. This from a man who represents a party launched by […]

RICHARD PORRITT with the week’s big stories ‘Can she last until Christmas?’ That is the question we pose on the front page of this week’s paper… and it’s a question a Number 10 insider answered with a sigh moments after her doomed conference speech last month. ‘Well,’ he continued amid the shock of the worse […]

Steve Anglesey counts down the worst Brexiteers of the week 10 Arron Banks If his lucrative dog-whistle business should ever go wrong, Leave.EU backer Banks really should consider a career as a psychic. Just after 9am on October 30 he was crowing on Twitter that the ‘Russian stuff out of the US against Trump… is […]

RICHARD PORRITT with this week’s big stories A Brexit stalemate, no money in the coffers and polls which have a hard leftie as favourite to win the next election – the news is not good for poor Theresa May. And now a raft of old fashioned sex scandals is set to rock her government as […]

STEVE ANGLESEY picks out the worst Brexiteers of the week 10 Henry Bolton Fresh from declaring that he could strange a badger with his bare hands, UKIP’s new leader has admitted that since the party is skint and his position is unpaid, he’ll probably have to sell his home to get by. No worries, Henry […]

RICHARD PORRITT with the week’s big stories Thanks to concerned readers in academia, The New European was among several media outlets to receive a copy of Chris Heaton-Harris’ sinister letter to universities this week. Did this dunderhead Tory really think he could fire off veiled threats to vice-chancellors up and down the country in an […]

RICHARD PORRITT on the week’s big talking points The chlorinated chickens have come home to roost for the Brexiteers this week. First lobby group TheCityUK says Britain stands to lose as much as £10bn in lost investments if a transitional deal is not worked out. Then the Resolution Foundation warned millions of families face shelling […]

STEVE ANGLESEY rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit 10 Gerard Batten ‘English is not taught in our schools and hasn’t been for decades,’ claimed the UKIP MEP on Twitter, surprising hundreds of English teachers across the nation and enraging thousands of pupils […]

Steve Anglesey rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit. 10. Katie Hopkins The peroxide hate machine appears to have gone Full Icke after last Saturday’s road traffic accident near London’s Natural History Museum. Having initially deleted tweets including ‘dear tourist, right now London […]

RICHARD PORRITT with this week’s big stories. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ asked a depressed Number 10 staffer at the news Theresa May was to do an LBC phone-in. She wanted to talk about the government’s newly-announced race audit but the callers wanted to talk about that and much more. One asked about whether she […]

For decades, European migrant labour has been part of the British rural landscape. Now, in pursuit of a fantasy, Brexit risks leaving the soft fruit and veg industry to decay. SIMON WATKINS reports. The landscape is straight out of The Darling Buds of May, or perhaps Nigel Farage’s English pastoral fantasy. Rolling hills, touched with […]

Steve Anglesey rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit. 10. Jacob Rees-Mogg Told a Tory fringe meeting: ‘I think our Prime Minister is a heroine of 10,000 years and I welcome the every waking breath of the Prime Minister, our great leader.’ So […]

RICHARD PORRITT with this week’s big stories. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Brexit head-banger and anti-abortionist, used a fringe event at the Tory conference to back the current head of the party’s nutter wing Boris Johnson. Speaking at a Bruges Group event he said: ‘There has been too much crying into our soup and saying it is all […]

Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to do more to oppose Brexit is because he says the EU would prevent him delivering on his manifesto promises. But is he right? ALASTAIR CAMPBELL finds out The story so far… there was a referendum. Labour backed Remain against Leave. But the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, something of a lifelong Eurosceptic, […]

RICHARD PORRITT with the week’s big stories So to Manchester and the final party conference of the season – Conservative. Not many people expected Theresa May to be giving the leader’s speech in the wake of the general election disaster but she’s made it and is determined to reassert some authority. And one government aide […]

MICHAEL WHITE on Tory treachery, Lib Dem ambition and a week of serpentine manoeuvring in Westminster Another momentous week, another object lesson in how events, chance and human agency collide in unpredictable ways to produce profound consequences. Who could have predicted that cautious Angela Merkel’s decent instincts towards refugees – every German family knows first-hand […]

STEVE ANGLESEY rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit 10 Russell Brand Asked on Newsnight if he supports Brexit, the increasingly precious former comedian replied: ‘To be honest, I source my emotional connection to politics beyond those kind of parameters.’ Sadly, Rusty later […]

A new far right is on the move with a simple, scapegoating message. ANTHONY CLAVANE reports At the end of this month UKIP will elect a new leader at its party conference in Torquay. Anne Marie Waters, a founder of the far-right nationalist group Pegida UK, is one of the favourites to succeed Paul Nuttall. […]

MICHAEL WHITE on the painfully slow realisation dawning on the Tories that Brexit is complicated and requires compromise How deeply irritating it must have been for travelling Theresa May constantly to be distracted all week from the draft of Friday’s ‘vision thing’ speech in Florence by the sight of her priapic Foreign Secretary wildly waving […]

Steve Anglesey rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit 10 John Rees-Evans Desperate to bring some momentum to his flagging UKIP leadership challenge, Rees-Evans retweeted a Twitter poll asking people to name their favourite candidate. He cheekily asked his followers to ‘Vote Early, […]

RICHARD PORRITT with this week’s big stories The comrades are massing on the south coast for the Labour Party conference – but hidden by the raucous renditions of The Red Flag the whispers of division continue. With the McDonnell rule – meaning leadership contenders only need the support of 10% of their peers, not 15% […]

In part one of our exclusive extracts from his latest diaries, ALASTAIR CAMPBELL reveals how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fought over the future of the Labour Party, and what they both made of the rise of David Cameron – and chronicles his own rapidly deteriorating mental health Saturday August 6, 2005, France Sky News […]

25 years ago, on Black Wednesday, the Conservative Party was busy making a mess of the UK’s relationship with Europe. DAVID WARD, who was adviser to Labour’s then leader John Smith, looks back to see what lessons can be learned to stop the current government doing the same again It is an anniversary the Tories […]

RICHARD PORRITT with the week’s big stories So to Bournemouth and Sir Vince Cable’s debut at Liberal Democrat conference as leader. ‘We need to give people power over the decisions which affect their lives,’ he says in the foreword to the conference programme. Some might say giving the public a say got us into this […]

STEVE ANGLESEY rounds up the losers and losers (because there are no winners) of another crazy seven days on Planet Brexit 10 Michael Caine The 84-year-old actor told an audience at the Venice Film Festival that he supported Brexit because ‘I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate than a rich servant of […]

Right, so where are we now then? When last we spoke, Keir Starmer had give us perhaps the first hint that Labour might be starting to back away from at least a ‘Hard’ Brexit, if not (yet) Brexit altogether. Nothing much else (at time of writing) seems to have happened on that front; Labour appear […]

MICHAEL WHITE on the Brexit-obsessed UK’s diminished international status as the EU looks to tackle its own problems Was Michel Barnier right to threaten British voters with ‘an educational process’ about the grave consequences of leaving the EU’s single market? Was Theresa May right to tell reporters during her trade trip to Japan that she […]

Theresa May’s insistence that she is sticking around as PM may have been met with scepticism and incredulity, but PR agent MARK BORKOWSKI argues her reboot may yet work Theresa May stunned many in Westminster when she expressed her desire to lead her party into the next general election. After the almighty stumble of June’s […]

British identity is fragmented like never before, with the rise of pop-up populism dividing people into ‘them’ and ‘us’. Author PETER POMERANTSEV takes a deeply personal journey through Britain to find out what it means for the country I used to think the British were different: that if anyone in the world knew who they […]

For comedian MITCH BENN, Theresa May’s attempts to extend her political life put him in mind of his favourite film, Blade Runner. Here, he goes on the trail of Downing Street’s replicant They don’t advertise for killers in a newspaper. Not this newspaper anyway. They advertise attractively reduced rate subscriptions, framed signed copies of the […]

STEVE ANGLESEY picks out the worst Brexiteers of the week 10 Peter Whittle ‘Great to speak tonight at @UKIP Norfolk hustings,’ tweeted the favourite to become the Kippers’ next leader, after talking at an event last weekend. ‘This is a party with a strong beating heart.’ And who can doubt it when you see the […]