There was a good article in the Spectator by Nick Cohen yesterday about the People’s Vote campaign and how while they have done well to advance the cause of getting a second referendum seriously considered, they haven’t done a lot of thinking about what to do if a referendum actually happens. What ideas will the […]

In the 1969 film “Putney Swope”, directed by Robert Downey Snr (yes, Robert Downey Jnr’s father), the chairman of the board of an advertising company dies in the first scene. The board thus need to elect a new chairman. Putney Swope, the only black man on the board, is elected by accident – since the […]

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 […]

When Johnson stood in the Commons, having been unwillingly recalled there by a decision of the Supreme Court, and said things he must have known would rile Labour MPs on a personal level, I wondered what was going in his head. The Jo Cox stuff was beyond the pale, and I refuse to believe he […]

Beyond anything else, the Lib Dems switching to a policy to revoke Article 50 if a majority is achieved has meant that the party has been the centre of the political conversation for the past week in a way I can’t remember them being since the 2015 general election came and went. For the Lib […]

Several Tory rebels, from those 21 MPs who had the whip removed, have publicly stated that another EU referendum might be a way out of the current Brexit predicament. Behind closed doors, several are privately considering backing a referendum. This is what was always likely to happen when Johnson kicked them out of the Conservative […]

The political media like to converge on a consensus of events and to do so very quickly after something has taken place. Yesterday’s Boris Johnson rambling into a microphone for six minutes is no exception. What had been briefed heavily beforehand was that unless MPs give up on their quest to get legislation through the […]

Back in March of this year, an online petition went up on the parliament.uk website. Online petitions rarely gather that many signatures, partly because they often cover obscure topics, but also because most people have cottoned onto the fact that they are never taken seriously by parliament regardless of the numbers they attract. The one […]

Writing in the foreword of the 1946 edition of his own novel from 15 years previous, “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley said this: “For the last 30 years there have been no conservatives; there have only been nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left.” Huxley saw the First World War – […]

The big news yesterday was that the opposition leaders had managed to have a productive meeting about what do to try and prevent a no deal Brexit. Even Corbyn had been brought on side with a plan to attempt to halt it through legislation. Given the number of Tory MPs who would be willing to […]