After the party comes the hangover. Following all of yesterday’s hype about “light at the end of the tunnel” and taking Leo Varadkar’s very guarded words about the possibility of a deal being reached between the EU and the UK next week as being confirmation that “Boris has done it” by certain sections of the […]
Archives for October 2019
Here’s the problem with the second EU referendum before a general election idea
An extension to the Article 50 period now seems inevitable. There was never any chance of a withdrawal agreement being reached and Johnson was never serious about trying to get one, nor was the EU going to bend for anything that made things worse than the May deal from their perspective. The government is pretending […]
The reason why the Brexit project continues to fail is because it is completely empty and cannot be made real
After the EU referendum result landed in June 2016, I was deeply distraught. I had been pro-European and argued the pro-EU cause well before it was in any way fashionable. Yet once May became prime minister and laid out her Brexit stall, it became obvious to me that leaving the EU was inevitable. We had […]
How the Brexit worm might be about to turn
My father is someone I’ve always thought of as a core Leaver. He once spouted the “Nazi Germany lives on within the EU” line to me – in 2009, so way before this was common currency. He liked Farage/UKIP and felt the Tories under Cameron were too liberal and cuddly. His feelings toward Theresa May […]
Boris Johnson has just handed Nigel Farage his general election campaign on a plate
In 2013, I went to a Bruges Group fringe at Manchester Town Hall, which was just outside of the Tory conference going on in the city at the same time. The panellists were Nigel Farage, Bill Cash, Peter Oborne and someone chairing I can’t recall. Bill Cash started and went on and on about how […]
Corbyn is standing in the way of a government of national unity. This is probably why
While the Tories were in Manchester at their national conference this week, the opposition met to decide next moves. The choice to be made was do they try and bring forward the date on which Johnson has to ask the EU for an extension, or do they vote to bring the government down and replace […]
What was Conservative party conference really like this year?
The big news on this, the final day of Tory conference, is that Boris Johnson has come up with a new fix on the Irish border situation. It’s all ready to present to the EU in what sounds like a “take it or leave it, continental scum” sort of manner. I didn’t think there could […]