When Theresa May delivered her Florence Speech a fortnight ago, my first reaction was “Is that it?” The speech had to outline something on citizens rights, the financial settlement to leave the EU, and on the Northern Ireland border, yet – especially on the last of these – it offered...
So Theresa May is going to make her highly awaited speech in Florence tomorrow. There has been plenty of analysis and speculation about what she is and is not going to include. Here – in a blog post I will update as more sources are available – are some of...
Theresa May is due to give a big Brexit speech this coming Friday 22nd September in Florence. With Boris Johnson having jumped the gun and penned his own Brexit vision a couple of days ago (fisked by me here), and with frustration on the EU side growing about the slow...
Boris Johnson has penned a 4000 word piece about Brexit for The Telegraph (Update: now posted to Facebook as well). It’s a premium piece on their site for some reason and you have to hence register to read it – I did that, and have read it, and this blog...
This week in the FT (€), Philip Stevens recalled the EU negotiation advice of Douglas Hurd, the UK’s Foreign Secretary under John Major. There is more to be gained from conciliation than from shouting argued Hurd, a sentiment I echo after years observing EU business. Yet this week something akin...
Imagine you have just been thrown into a tank at a sewage treatment plant. It reeks like hell, you have nothing solid to grip, and you’re flailing around madly trying to grasp something firm to hold onto, but you never manage. That’s what it has felt like to try to...
A sequel to this post is now available! “12 MORE ways to make it look like Brexit has happened“ It’s now two months since the UK’s EU referendum, but all has gone rather quiet on the Brexit front. The British voted for Brexit, not only has it not happened, but...
Brexit, and the economic and political consequences of it, is serious. So why then has the UK appointed its least serious front line politician, Boris Johnson, as its Foreign Minister? (backed up by the little better Davis, Fox and Leadsom) That’s the question that politicians and journalists across the EU...
It has just been announced that Prime Minister May has appointed Boris Johnson as Foreign Minister. Reactions are not positive – see Mike Smithson, Gareth Harding, David Rennie, Antonia Mochan, Jeremy Cliffe. And I agree it’s going to look awful and indeed be awful. Johnson was already a laughing stock...
I don’t care what side of the EU referendum debate you were on. This isn’t about that. This is about how much the referendum matters to you or not. And – importantly – how it seems to not matter to the very people who ran it. The story of referendum...
I have made the case for why progressives and federalists outside the UK ought to advocate Brexit (for the sake of the political integration of the rest of the EU), and I have also tried to examine in a bit more depth how the outcome of the vote might have...
Over a beer with some academic friends yesterday, conversation turned to Brexit. Boris Johnson will only become Tory party leader if Britain exits the EU was the consensus among my friends. It’ll be Osborne otherwise. I expressed my doubts yesterday, and have been pondering this more since, and have come...