Theresa may

For the past 24 hours, there has been a power struggle between the Prime Minister and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Theresa May – or rather her officials – had been insisting that a backstop plan for keeping open the Ireland border would not be amended, to include a sunset clause and formal end date for the backstop. Davis said he would quit in the absence of an end date. She caved. According to sources close to Davis, ‘the backstop paper has been amended and expresses, in much more detail, the time-limited nature of our proposal’. So to be clear, there is now a termination date in May’s backstop proposal.

A lot of attention has been given to the new think tank, Onward, that claims it will win back Britain for the Conservative Party by targeting disaffected Blairites and young people. There is, however, one part of society conspicuously missing from its remit: the poorest. The group’s founder, Neil O’Brien MP, claims that Corbyn is ‘crackers’ and his policies, including nationalisation of infrastructure ‘need deleting’. At no point does Onward – or any of the other right-wing think tanks that have launched – seem to question why Corbyn’s policies are so popular throughout the country. Nor do they wonder whether any Conservative government has made them work before. Has anyone

Thanks to a weekend of nationwide jubilation over Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle, politics has – for once – taken a backseat. However, there’s one story in the Sunday Times that is still likely to cause mild alarm: ‘Tory MPs prepare for snap autumn election as Theresa May hit by Brexit deadlock’. The paper reports that Conservative MPs have privately started to get ready for a snap general election. It’s not that they fear Theresa May is about to go on a walking holiday and get over-excited about some better-than-expected polling. Instead, these Tories fear that the Brexit deadlock will soon become ‘insurmountable for the prime minister’. This isn’t the

This week, Theresa May got her Brexit inner Cabinet to agree that, in the event of no trade deal being in place by December 2020, the UK would continue to apply the EU’s common external tariff. In The Sun this morning, I try and explain why Brexiteers aren’t kicking off about this and the other concessions May is making, or preparing to make. One influential figure puts it to me like this, ‘it is all very unsatisfactory, but it is what it is’. In other words, given the mistakes that have been made—with the lack of proper no deal planning and the backstop–there isn’t really an alternative. The other reason

Turkey’s President Erdogan is in London this week, having tea with the Queen and praising Britain as a ‘real friend’. As Robert Ellis says in his Coffee House piece about the way the Turkish regime is becoming increasingly brutal and censorious, a clear benefit for Britain in this friendship is post-Brexit trade with the Turks. But campaigners are asking at what cost this comes, given the human rights abuses of the current regime, and want Theresa May to condemn the practices of the Erdogan government. This presents a tricky dilemma for the Prime Minister. Turkish political culture – and that of many of the Islamic countries that Britain has strong

In the Brexit inner Cabinet meeting last week, it was clear that Theresa May’s main objection to ‘max fac’, the customs arrangement favoured by Brexiteers, is that it wasn’t consistent with her aims for the Irish border. So, Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has been put on the Cabinet’s max fac working group to examine if it is compatible with the government’s position on the Irish border. As I say in The Sun this morning, if, at the end of this process, Bradley says that it could work in Northern Ireland then Mrs May would be able to climbdown with dignity. Bradley is a May loyalist—she was one of

From the dreaming spires of Oxford this afternoon comes a potent combination of student censorship and fake news. A group of geographers had claimed victory on Twitter in a campaign to remove the portrait of Theresa May from the School of Geography and the Environment. May is an alumnus of that school, but the Not All Geographers campaign wanted to challenge this, and did so by sticking drawings and messages about the hostile environment around the picture until it was removed. ‘We are pleased to announce that the @theresa_may portrait has been removed from @oxfordgeography!’ the geographers announced. Unfortunately, this wasn’t for the reasons that they claimed: a spokesman for

Theresa May has received a shot in the arm from the local election results. But, as I say in The Sun this morning, she still needs to deal with the whole customs partnership question. Even after the remarkable rebuff that the ‘new customs partnership’ received from the Brexit inner Cabinet on Wednesday, despite the Prime Minister putting her authority on the line by making clear her support for it, Number 10 won’t give up on the idea. It believes that with a few changes it can be made to work. Already, ministers are being told that what really matters is getting out of the EU. The case is being made

In this week’s podcast, we discuss Theresa May’s impossible situation – how can she get herself out of the bind created by the Brexiteers and the Remainers? We also discuss the hostile environment policy, and ask, will Ireland appeal its Eighth Amendment? First, Theresa May finds herself in a real dilemma. Her cabinet colleagues, the EU and her advisors are all pulling her in different directions over the question of the customs union. While Remainers argue that a ‘customs partnership’ is the only way to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, Brexiteers believe ‘max fac’ (a maximum facilitation agreement, which includes a technology based border in Ireland) is the

Theresa May will be wishing Amber Rudd was still Home Secretary tonight following a fiery meeting of her Brexit inner cabinet on the issue of the customs union. The Prime Minister convened a three hour long meeting of her senior ministers in a bid to finally thrash out a plan for a post-Brexit customs arrangement to put to Brussels. However, things did not go quite to plan – with a decision delayed after a number of ministers raising serious concerns with No 10’s favoured option. The most revealing aspect of the meeting relates to the customs partnership that Downing Street wants to push. This hybrid customs model would in theory keep

Next Saturday had long been circled in Tory plotters’ diaries as the date on which the next effort to remove Theresa May would begin. But as I say in The Sun this morning, even May’s most ardent Tory critics now accept that next week’s local elections aren’t going to lead to her downfall. Why, because expectations are so low for the Tories that they are almost bound to surpass them. (May’s own position is also stronger than it was in January thanks to her handling of the Salisbury attack.) Tory insiders now believe that they are likely to hold one of their London flagship councils, Westminster and Wandsworth. This combined

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw the Maybot reactivated. Jeremy Corbyn decided to lead the session on the fallout from the Windrush row, widening out his questions to the flaws in the hostile environment policy on illegal immigration, and on who was to blame for these flaws being apparent but not fixed for so long. The exchanges very swiftly became a ding-dong between May and Corbyn as to whose fault the creation of a hostile environment policy actually was. Corbyn wanted to pin the policy on May, but also demanded that Amber Rudd resign for aiming to harden the policy. His questions were decent, but it was May herself who created

At Cabinet today, ministers discussed the fallout from the Windrush scandal. I understand that Boris Johnson made the point that there needed to be a broader immigration amnesty for long-standing Commonwealth immigrants. He argued that this was necessary to prevent others from getting caught up in the same situation, having to produce overly onerous amounts of evidence to show that they have been living here for years. Obviously, this amnesty wouldn’t apply to those with a criminal record. I’m told that Theresa May then rather acidly remarked that Boris had previously called for an amnesty for all immigrants, which he did first in 2008 and then again in 2016 when he privately proposed

This week we ask why Theresa May is pulling up the drawbridge to Britain, exactly when she should be advertising Britain’s openness in a post-Brexit world? We also discuss why charities are working to shut down schools in Africa, and hear from Quentin Letts on his experience of being pursued by the Establishment. As Commonwealth leaders meet in London this week, Theresa May has been under fire for her government’s treatment of the Windrush generation. The government initially refused a meeting requested by Commonwealth leaders to discuss the issue, only to U-turn on it hours later. Fraser Nelson argues in this week’s cover that this royal screw-up is symptomatic of

And we’re back to Brexit with a bump. After a brief pause in the negotiations and legislation, the government has this afternoon been defeated on a customs union amendment in the Lords. The defeat was by no means minor either – peers voted by 348 to 225 in favour of a plan requiring ministers to report on steps to negotiate a continued EU-UK customs union. This in itself isn’t catastrophic for Theresa May. When the bill returns to the Commons it will most likely be thrown out – and besides it only binds the government to report on the steps being taken to negotiate a customs union so there is