Brexit
Diary
I’ve always maintained I go to Fermanagh for sanity, and after the past few months, I need a return to…
French democracy is in trouble – and the EU is to blame
France’s airwaves have been crackling with indignation this week, as politicians wring their hands at the record abstention in the first…
Revealed: How the UK-Australia deal was struck
The UK’s first bespoke trade deal agreed since leaving the EU was finalised with Australia over two dinners. One took…
Television, not social media, is fracturing our society
All it took for the Twitter mob to descend on me was a retweet from Michael Gove. Message after message…
Where’s the beef?
If Britain had been unable to agree a trade deal with Australia, then Brexit really would have been pointless. The…
Is the EU breaching its UK treaty by failing to protect LGBT rights?
Has the EU Commission lost any sense of moral value? This week, Hungary, an EU member state, voted to impose…
The EU’s debt bondage expansion
In the global market for government debt, worth an estimated $92 trillion (£66 trillion), it amounts to little more than a…
Brexit, lockdown and the fracturing of British politics
Is our society becoming less tolerant and more viscerally tribal? Or is our politics provoking people into committing more angry…
The protocol may be Boris’s greatest masterstroke
The jibes thrown at Boris Johnson over his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol — based on the obvious observation…
We don’t have to swap sovereignty for trade
A new court will be established with powers over both countries. Labour and product laws will be harmonised. Flags with…
Keir Starmer is alienating both sides in the Brexit debate
What is it with Labour and Brexit? An issue that during Theresa May’s premiership looked like it could rip the…
Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland problem
In an at times grouchy press conference, Boris Johnson tried to calm the row over the Northern Ireland protocol. The…
This G7 summit matters more than most
It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is…
Meat of the matter
Britain has already seen two ‘Brexit days’ — when it formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and the…
Biden proves that Trump was a true British ally
Now that Joe Biden has landed, many Brits may now be realising what a stalwart friend you had in Trump. Within minutes…
Joe Biden doesn’t understand Northern Ireland
Even a pessimist could be forgiven for being surprised by Joe ‘I’m Irish’ Biden’s ham-fisted intervention in the ongoing row…
Labour is in last chance saloon
If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and…
The DUP has been broken by Brexit
Are we witnessing the end of the DUP as the dominant unionist party in Northern Ireland? Tumultuous events in Belfast in…
The arrival of Godot
A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel…
Who cares if rail is public or private? Just make the trains run on time
The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate…
Bloc buster
David Frost on Brexit, Barnier and the backstop
The Australian trade deal is about more than just trade
What happens with an Australia trade deal won’t just reveal how serious this country is about free trade but also…
Boris must stand up to farmers – and back the Australia trade deal
Farms will be devastated. The countryside will be ruined. And we will all be forced to eat weird food that…
Will the DUP’s Edwin Poots win his war on the Northern Ireland protocol?
What to make of the triumph of Edwin Poots, the new leader of the Democratic Unionist party, who defeated the…
Welcome signs
While the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has no formal role in devising the bloc’s immigration policy, his…
