I don’t have time this week for my normal long post, but in any case last Friday’s largely continues to cover the current political situation, dominated as it is by Boris Johnson’s lawbreaking, lying, and refusal to resign over them. It is a scandal described by the eminent, and generally measured, political historian Professor Lord … Read more
The refusal of Boris Johnson to resign, despite being the first sitting Prime Minister ever to have broken the law and despite all the lies he has told about having done so, is shocking, but not surprising to even the tiniest degree. Nor is the spectacle of his ministers wheeling out embarrassingly feeble defences of … Read more
A few weeks ago, when it was revealed that the government does not keep records on delays and lorry queues at Dover, I remarked in passing that it was like babies playing peek-a-boo. Not realising that things exist even when they can’t see them, they get immense amusement from the sudden appearance of that which … Read more
It came with a whimper not a bang, but finally this week a government minister – Chancellor Rishi Sunak, no less – admitted at least some of the truth about Brexit. Speaking at a Select Committee hearing this week he, almost casually, said that “it was always inevitable there would be a change in our … Read more
The peril of writing a blog which is contemporaneous with events is that it can suddenly be overtaken by those events. Actually, in the years I’ve been writing this blog that has happened surprisingly rarely, but it certainly did with last week’s post. There, I wrote about how Brexit was seemingly in the process of … Read more
It’s hardly surprising that the Ukraine war continues to command media and public attention, displacing most other news, including Brexit news. But perhaps there is more to it than that. In a recent post I speculated that there was an emerging sense that the war had made Brexit seem strangely pointless and outdated, linking to … Read more
This week, in one of his regular and excellent analyses of the Ukraine War, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, makes an interesting observation about Vladmir Putin. His background is that of a spy, rather than soldier, and as such he “has an instinct for the covert, the fabricated … Read more
I want to begin this post by saying, unequivocally, that of all the many dimensions of the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, Brexit is very low on the list of things to give attention to. Like, I would suppose, most people I have been horrified by the Russian invasion but also inspired and deeply moved by … Read more
Since its use on the very day after the referendum, it has become a cliché to say that Brexiters are like ‘the dog that caught the car’, achieving something they had never expected and then did not know what to do with. That was obvious from the very first hours after the 2016 vote, when … Read more
In today’s Daily Mail one of the most longstanding and hard line Brexiters, the former Tory Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, yet again put forward a series of arguments against the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP). It was no doubt timed to coincide with today’s ‘stocktaking meeting’ of the Joint Committee overseeing the NIP and … Read more