OK, so it has been agreed. The Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration were signed off today in Brussels. Now Theresa May has to take this back to London and get it through the “meaningful vote” scheduled for 11 December sometime between 10th and 12th December in the House of Commons....
The latest European Council has come and gone. No progress was made on Brexit. Indeed no progress has been made for months – at least since February. Tusk and May repeated the tired soundbites that progress had indeed been made, but no-one believed it. Meanwhile news emerged that Davis has...
Ladies and gentlemen, Stories of my imminent departure from government have been filling newspaper column inches for the past few days. I am here today to confirm to you that this is indeed true. I am resigning from Theresa May’s government. And of course my reasons are connected to Britain’s...
As today’s predictable fuss about the border in Ireland post Brexit rumbles on, it has brought a deeper and more troubling issue into view. The British Government is now not actually trying to do Brexit, at least in a practical sense. Note that I do not mean here that the...
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...
This morning Oliver Robbins was moved from Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) to become EU Adviser to Theresa May, based in the Cabinet Office. This afternoon it was announced that DExEU’s Director of Trade and Partnerships Antony Phillipson is departing for New York. At a...
29th March: Theresa May notifed the EU of the UK’s intention to leave the EU through the Article 50 procedure. Then 29th April the European Council agreed its negotiation guidelines for Michel Barnier, the chief Brexit negotiatior on the EU side. A summary of the guidelines – that committed the...
Regular readers of this blog know my own views about Brexit – seen from the UK side I have found the whole thing foolish from the start. But over the past few weeks I have been asking myself a different question: why is the Brexit process going quite so badly?...
So Tory backbenchers are rebelling about Euratom (the European Atomic Energy Community). They want to stay in it, despite Brexit, according to The Evening Standard. And enough want to stay in it so as to deny Theresa May a majority, apparently. Dominic Cummings, the supposed brain behind Vote Leave goes...
In these febrile political times since the UK’s General Election it feels like something could break any moment in Britain’s arduous EU departure process. Rather than the inexorable track towards a Hard Brexit (with the threat of “no deal”) that looked likely prior to 8th June, the past few weeks...
British politics is messed up. Brexit shows it. The previous PM Cameron promised an in-or-out of the EU referendum back in 2013 if the Conservatives won the General Election, despite the fact that EU matters were considered rather unimportant by voters at that time. He promised this would happen by...
One of the lines that Theresa May (and her defenders in the UK press) keep repeating is that she needs a greater majority in the General Election on 8th June to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations. As I see it (and explain in more detail here) the rest...