Theresa may

Theresa May could not have been any clearer: the UK is leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice after Brexit. Here’s what she told the Tory party conference back in October: ‘Let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again. And we are not leaving only to return to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. That’s not going to happen.’ And for those who didn’t get the memo, here she was in January: “So we will take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the

Election day polling by Michael Ashcroft showed a Britain divided not so much by class or region as age. The 45-54 age group split almost evenly between the two main parties. Older voters went for the Conservatives; younger ones for Labour. Among 18-24 year olds, only 18 per cent voted Tory, while 67 per cent supported Labour. Among 24-35 year olds, that first figure rose to only 22 per cent and the second dropped to only 58 per cent. It is inevitable in the aftermath of these findings and June’s result that the Conservatives should mull younger voters’ embrace of Jeremy Corbyn; think that the latter have little grasp, because

Theresa May is back from holiday and the Brexit work continues in earnest. Over the next few days, two key papers – spelling out detail on the customs union and the Irish border – will be published. There’s no doubt, says the Times, that this ‘is a crucial week for Brexit’. ‘After more than a year of disagreement and drift’, there are now some ‘encouraging signs’ that things are slowly being put in order: the joint article written by Philip Hammond and Liam Fox and which was published yesterday advocating a transition period, is one such sign. The publication of reports ‘to flesh out the banal slogans’ touted so frequently so

The furore surrounding the Brexit divorce bill is hotting up. The weekend’s papers saw speculation that Britain would cough up £36bn as part of a settlement package for its departure from the EU. Nonsense, says Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying this morning: ‘I don’t recognise the figure’. It’s not only the government hitting back; Tory eurosceptics are also turning up the volume. Yet while the government is eager to talk down the size of the bill, the criticism coming from the backbenches is less nuanced. Instead of quibbling over the amount, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood dismiss the bill out of hand. Rees-Mogg wrote on

The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict, become a very thorny one indeed as negotiations crawl into the autumn. Talk of ‘putting the border in the Irish Sea’ — somehow leaving the north inside the EU for customs and immigration purposes, but cut off from European funding — was a red herring that provoked DUP tantrums, but more significant was the weekend outburst from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. As far as his government is concerned ‘there shouldn’t be an economic border… and we’re not going to help [the British] design some sort of border that we don’t believe

There are three areas on which the EU insists that the Brexit negotiations must make progress on, before proper trade talks can start: the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the Irish border. Today, the Irish PM said that no progress had been made on this issue, that the Brexiteers had had 14 months to devise a plan and hadn’t come up with anything adequate. Implicit in the Taoiseach’s speech is a threat to block the start of trade talks this autumn. If Dublin doesn’t think any progress had been made on the border question, the European Commission is highly unlikely to recommend to

It may not be this week. It may not be Boris Johnson. But eventually a minister will break with this tottering government and establish himself (or herself, for it could be Andrea Leadsom) as the leader of the diehard right. Brexit is crying out for its Ludendorff; the scoundrel who can blame his failures on everyone but himself. The smart move for today’s right wing politicians who find their careers blocked is to break with the Tory leadership – whatever or whoever that may consist of – and resort to old  slogans. The referendum delivered a mandate to leave, Johnson, or whoever takes up the challenge of building a new

Ahead of the summer recess, there was concern among Tory high command that the long holiday could result in seven weeks of leadership plotting. But worried Mayites can rest easy as instead what’s transpired instead is an endless free-for-all over the government’s Brexit position. Every day hacks now take a comment from a minister on one aspect of Brexit and then try and work out whether or not the whole Cabinet agrees with them. Today it was the Prime Minister’s spokesman who stepped up to the plate. After some confusion last week over the government position on immigration (after Brandon Lewis said freedom of movement would end by 2019 but his Home Office boss