Diplomatic incident

I do hope the British Foreign Secretary summons the Luxembourg Ambassador for an explanation and does not invite him to sit down.

I suppose asking for him to be recalled and not replaced might be counter-productive and Pooterish.

The American Ambassador in London told the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council lunch at the Carlton Club that,

“He knew he was walking into a trap. He knew this was a set up. Of course he knew, but he’s British. He said: ‘What the hell. I can do this’. 

I thought the people in Luxembourg accomplished something that maybe even Boris couldn’t accomplish — show this is not where [the British] want to be, over there, when they treat us like that — your prime minister! The people who built the greatest empire, the people who held off the Nazis, who contributed so much to the progress of mankind, you can go down a long list — they don’t need a lecture from anybody on how to run their country, and that includes Brussels.”

Of course Luxembourg (a ravishing little place) is not really a country but a minor German princely state, which the Dutch king ruled in his personal capacity rather as English Kings were Electors of Hanover. Half Luzembourg's inhabitants are foreigners, a large proportion of them working for spendthrift EU organisations. I suppose it is reminiscent of The Mouse That Roared, with Luxembourg playing the role of Grand Fenwick but, unlike Grand Fenwick, Luxembourg doesn't have the bomb.

Philip Guedalla said that in Luxembourg you feel a weight lifted from your shoulders because you are in a small country. That ceased to be true when she became one of the Six, the first six EEC members. Now to feel the weight lift from your shoulders you have to leave the EU and go to places like Serbia, Ukraine or Moldova, where people speak freely and think like human beings.

Are British courts still politically neutral?

The broadcaster David Dimbleby covered the results of the referendum and tried not to show how badly he took it. Today he is covering the Supreme Court hearing to decide whether Her Majesty’s Government acted in bad faith when they advised the Queen  to prorogue Parliament. He said:

“I lived through Suez, the miners’ strike, I lived through the poll tax debate and the trouble then. I lived through the Iraq demonstrations — I’ve never seen the country so divided as this. The next six weeks are clearly critical. I’ve never known the country so seriously riven by argument.”

But the Court has no window into men's souls, to quote the first Queen Elizabeth. Is lying to a Queen, though a very bad thing to do, illegal? And can the mixed motives of ministers, or anyone else, be pinned down and dissected satisfactorily? 

The answer to the latter question is obvious.

Former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption, whose judgment seems to have been coloured by his strongly Remain views, which I suspect he shares with almost all the

Luxembourg Prime Minister shows his contempt for ours

I almost never despise anyone but I despise Theresa May, for so many reasons. The least of those is that, instead of broadcasting to the nation from her desk at 10 Downing St as Prime Ministers used to do (think Chamberlain in 1939 or, on TV, Eden in 1956), she chose to stand outside in front of journalists and then answer their questions.

Press conferences are an American custom and work over there. Like grey squirrels, and many other things, they should not be imported into England. They are not needed in a parliamentary system. They take power from the House of Commons and from the Government and give it to unelected pressmen and women. The press are not simply craftsmen doing their best to get the story. They write the story to suit their own ends.

This is why I regret that David Cameron took part in a debate on TV in the 2015 election and was very sorry that Boris took part in televised debates in the leadership contest. He has now received his come-uppance in the extraordinary rudeness he received form the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. Yes puny Luxembourg, which Englishmen died to free from Germany in the war.

Boris foolishly agreed to give a joint conference with the Luxembourg PM. A noisy crowd assembled to jeer at him made up of English Remainers living in Luxembourg but organised

Brexiteers are fighting against the thereapeutic caliphate for liberty and the people’s will

American Christopher Caldwell is the best political analyst writing today. His latest article on Brexit is very good. 

These quotations are from an article about that article, by Greg Sheridan in the Australian, headlined 'Brexiteers fighting for liberty and the people’s will'.

The clash is between two conflicting world views. One is a postmodern, undemocratic, technocrat state in the service of what a German author calls the Therapeutic Caliphate, or what we might less exaltedly call the left-liberal crack-up, a la the EU, which has as its purpose the eradication of national identity and the transformation of human nature. The other is a civic vision that recognises the universal quality of humanity but puts the nation-state at the heart of democratic and civic loyalty, and which honours traditional sources of wisdom and authority, and traditional forms of democracy....

I couldn't agree more him or with Mr Caldwell, who gets to the heart of why it is important for the world that Britain brexits successfully. 

Cald­well argues that Remainers faithfully represent the modern European constitutional tradition. This is a tradition that empowers a technocratic elite, built on documents with plenty of abstract nouns that inevitably give great legislative power to judges. The pincer movement of bureaucracy, ruling-class ideological uniformity and judicial activism restricts the space for normal democratic decision-making.

He writes:

“These shift power from electorates and parliaments to managers of information, inside government and out. From thousand-year-old constitutional ideas to five-year-old ones, from habeas corpus to gender identity. Because it was Britain that did most to construct the ideal of liberty which is now being challenged, Brexit clarifies the constitutional stakes for the world as nothing else.”

David Cameron's political religion is liberal internationalism

David Cameron may be a uxorious man. At any rate, the two most disastrous follies in his six years in power were the fault of his wife. She persuaded him to enact single sex marriage and to destroy Libya. It used to be called petticoat government.

His wife sounds very likable by the way, an upper class, hippyish art student who smokes and likes a drink, but she does not sound very Tory. Endearingly, she needed a gin and tonic at 9 a.m. on the morning after the referendum. 

The other Mrs. Cameron, his mother, tried very hard indeed to persuade him not to bring in single sex marriage but failed. It's a bit like the history of a royal court.

Mr. Cameron is a Tory of the Macmillan and Heath tradition and, despite his bringing his party back to power after thirteen years, on the whole is an argument against that tradition, which led to the authoritarian and even more left-wing Theresa May. 

Boris belongs to it too, but at least unlike her he dislikes the nanny state.

Had Mr. Cameron not been a convinced believer in the EU he could have campaigned to leave it, after his attempt to renegotiate our membership failed. Had he done so, he might have achieved a successful, very soft Brexit and be considered as memorable a Prime Minister as Margaret Thatcher. 

He might still be Prime Minister, though in his memoirs published in the Sunday Times today he says that he found the referendum campaign so draining that he could not have carried on as Prime Minister for more than two more years. He does not have Margaret Thatcher's stamina, her hunger for power or anything like her self-belief.

But though he and George Osborne seemed to have few very obvious principles

Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan

@DanielJHannan

Everyone agrees that David Cameron made a terrible blunder by holding a referendum. Everyone except, you know, the general population.

God be with you, Balliol persons

Undergraduates and graduates at Boris Johnson's college Balliol are organising a petition to ban him from his old college, because he prorogued Parliament.

Miss Lester, who is the women's officer of the Balliol Middle Common Room, said: 

"The demographics here have completely changed since Boris Johnson was a student. He does not represent our views and we don't want this person to be invited in as an alumnus, or have power within the college."

Balliol is the left-wing college at Oxford, just as King's is at Cambridge, and for a hundred years has had a different demographic from the rest of the university: there were always more working class men and some non-white undergraduates, even a century ago.

When a cinema audience in Oxford watched a scene in the film Sanders of the River where black men paddled a canoe, an undergraduate famously yelled out

'Well rowed, Balliol!'

Boris is pledged to take the UK out of the EU because of the referendum. Another Balliol
Prime Minister, Edward Heath, took us into the EEC in 1973 without a referendum and

David Cameron is the perfect example of how the EU poisons roots

Another quotation from David Cameron's interview published in the Times last night.

"I think the issue of immigration plus that emotional argument was a winning combination for them. The argument about control, it resonated with people, and when you asked them, ‘Well, what is it we’re going to control?’ it was this issue of immigration.”

Some said he should have tried an emotional argument himself. 

“Well, when I tried to make the argument, which I believe very strongly, that the EU has helped to foster positive relations between countries who weren’t always positively inclined towards each other, it was written up as ‘Cameron predicts World War Three’. It just didn’t work.”

The fact that, even after thinking about the matter obsessively for three years, David Cameron does not understand why his fellow countrymen wanted to rule themselves shows how deeply the corruption went. He imagines that immigration is the only issue that made people vote Leave and one knows he thinks that means Leavers are xenophobes and racists.

It sounds very much as if he thinks Leavers are swivel-eyed loons, a description of Conservative party members widely attributed to, though denied by, his close friend and protégé, Lord Feldman, or the "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" which was David Cameron's description of UKIP members.

This reminds me that I once discussed the EU years ago with a very clever Englishman in Bucharest and told him that I did not like England being ruled by foreigners. He replied

Isn't that racist?

The intrusion of Britain's judges in politics is increasing and is to be deplored

Richard Ekins, Professor of Law at Oxford, is appalled by the Court of Sessions' decision yesterday and demolishes it in the Spectator.

"In addition to seeming internally inconsistent, the Court’s ruling appears to be grounded in a novel elevation of very general constitutional principles into actionable propositions of law. So the Court’s summary refers to parliamentary scrutiny of the executive being ‘a central pillar of the good governance pillar enshrined in the constitution’. But there is no such free-standing pillar. What is the source of law for the claim that ‘good governance’ is legally actionable? The Court might answer that it stems from the principles of democracy and the rule of law. But the courts do not have free licence to uphold ‘democracy’ writ large and, save in special circumstances, they uphold the rule of law by applying settled law, not by departing from settled law in the name of some abstract principle.

"Today’s decision by the Court of Session is a mistake. It forms part of a continuing, worrying trend for politically motivated litigation to secure some success in our courts, a trend which it is to be hoped the Supreme Court will bring to a halt."

Judges are impinging on political decisions. Many other decisions are delegated to committees of experts or taken over by committees of international organisations, whose decisions become international law and are treated as if they have an almost sacred status. 

Members of Parliament are no longer independent men and women allowed to do as they please, to have jobs in the real world, if they choose, and to saunter into the House to hear and make speeches and chat. Instead they became social workers and bureaucrats and they too sit on committees and make reports. 

Politics becomes reduced to facts and figures and these are things about which experts are best equipped to make judgements. People who are interested in conservative ideas like the nation or sovereignty seem in this world at best rustic hicks, not very bright, at worst charlatans or demagogues.

Yellowhammer is not news and the Court of Sessions will presumably be overruled

The British political crisis lurches on.

Boris Johnson is already fighting an election campaign which consists of promising to take the country out of the EU on 31 October and promising to spend large amounts of money. The latter is not as bad as it might seem to conservative minded people, as borrowing money costs almost nothing and public spending is necessary to help buoy the economy when Brexit happens, if it does.

The PM will announce today that the Government will buy five new British-built Royal Navy frigates, but this is overshadowed in the news by yesterday’s Scottish court ruling that his advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament was illegal and the publication last night of the government's Operation Yellowhammer document, forced on him by Speaker John Bercow’s procedural coup in the House of Commons and another lost vote.

Boris does not have the confidence of Parliament but he is not allowed by the House to call an election and he does not want to resign (that would mean Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister, an idea that would not be quite as nightmarish, immediately after he takes office, as it is now). 

The Yellowhammer paper talks of "reasonable worst case assumptions": food price rises, reduced medical supplies and even riots on the streets, if the UK leaves the EU without a deal. This is not news, as the Sunday Times leaked this document on August 18th.

John Bercow is making up the rules as he goes along – he would say to strengthen the House of Commons against the executive, but is this sufficient justification? 

His critics point out that, though he has to be politically impartial, he has said that he opposes Brexit. He is a noisy scourge of racism and sexism and I am afraid It is not possible to imagine him so helpful to a House of Commons fighting the Government in order to restrict abortion or immigration.

Preventing prorogation is a very British coup attempt

In a big surprise the Court of Session in Edinburgh has ruled that proroguing Parliament was unlawful.

We don't know the full reading - we just have this note.

"The Lord President, Lord Carloway, decided that although advice to HM the Queen on the exercise of the royal prerogative of prorogating Parliament was not reviewable on the normal grounds of judicial review, it would nevertheless be unlawful if its purpose was to stymie parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which was a central pillar of the good governance principle enshrined in the constitution."

As Ian Hislop once said, “If this is justice I'm a banana.”

I know the Scots have Civil not Common Law but how is this decision justified? Much more importantly will the Supreme Court in London confirm or overturn it next week?

Today's judgment may make sense in Scottish law, for all I know. Civil Law, starting from cloudy general principles not from knotty empirical details, is incomprehensible to Anglo-Saxons. This lack of comprehension is the main reason for Brexit - European law is Civil Law and Europeans start from first principles when they think. They and the English will never understand each other.

English barristers say it has no chance. Let's hope not for the sake of democracy. The High Court in London meanwhile has delivered its full judgement after rejecting Gina Miller’s anti-prorogation case last Friday, maintaining that advice to the Sovereign about prorogation is ‘non justiciable’. 

Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson ('the Prince of Darkness') advised Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs last week and helped put together the Remain alliance in Parliament that first passed the bill preventing Government taking the UK out of the EU without Parliament's approval and then prevented the Government calling an election in October.

We are seeing, to adapt the title of Chris Mullins' book, a very British attempted coup .

According an anonymous source quoted by Daily The Telegraph, "Blair and Mandelson are

Robert Mugabe: A Nation Mourns

I read stories everywhere about Mugabe being a hero who went wrong. Peter Hain is one person purveying this false idea. 

Mugabe was nothing of the sort. He was a Communist butcher and terrorist who plundered his country as was always predictable.

Had he been a man of the right how differently the media would write about him, but many journalists who are now conservatives thought Mugabe a hero during the war with Ian Smith. There was no reason for them to have taken Smith's side but liking Mugabe, even in one's teens, shows abominable judgment.

The Week in Westminster

I was delighted to discover that The Week in Westminster is still running on BBC Radio Four. Apparently it is the fifth longest-running radio broadcast on British radio, after the Daily Service (which began on 2 January 1928) but is the world's longest-running radio show. It started on 6 November 1929 four months after Ramsay Macdonald had become Prime Minister for the second time and shortly after young women (flappers) had been given the vote.

Saturday's edition was absolutely brilliant, without any pro Remain or pro Leave bias, and much better than anything else I read, heard or saw on the British political crisis. I rarely listen to the radio, or wireless as they called it in 1929, but I shall make a point of doing so. 

I wonder if it was as good about Mr. Macdonald.

BBC teaches children that there are over 100 genders

According to The Times, in a film made by the BBC to be used in schools to teach 9-12 year-olds the personal, social and health education (PSHE) curriculum (part of the National Curriculum in England and Wales) a young boy asks: “What are the different gender identities?” A head teacher praises him for asking a “really, really exciting question”.

The film cuts to a teacher called Kate Daniels, who explains to two other young children: “We know that we have got male and female, but there are over 100, if not more, gender identities now.”

She says that some people are “bi-gender” and feel that they are two genders at once. “And then you’ve got some people who might call themselves gender-queer, who are just like: ‘I don’t really want to be anything in particular. I am just going to be me.’”

The British Royal College of General Practitioners recognised six genders in a recent statement: male, female, gender-neutral, non-binary, gender-fluid and gender-queer.

Brexit insights

Sir, Daniel Finkelstein (Comment, Sep 4, and letters, Sep 5), while agreeing that the Leave vote should be honoured, writes that “it’s a legitimate and democratic position to argue that we should only leave when we have an acceptable deal”. Yet the EU has said that the deal it offers cannot be changed, and parliament has rejected that deal thrice — by larger margins than Tuesday’s vote. If an “acceptable deal” is simply not available, Finkelstein’s argument is undermined.

He also writes, of a no-deal Brexit, that “even if it comes out all right, it’s a hopeless long-term position”. But those serious commentators who advocate it, such as Martin Howe QC, are not proposing it as a long-term position. They see it as enabling the UK to negotiate new free trade deals, with the EU as well as with other countries. That is something virtually excluded by Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement and political declaration. One hears politicians denouncing no deal as if it were a nihilistic refusal ever to negotiate. In fact, both Mrs May’s deal and no deal are ways of entering the next phase of negotiations — with potentially different outcomes.
Sir Noel Malcolm
All Souls College, Oxford

A literary joke

Eccles

@BruvverEccles

·

4h

Cameron is a swot and a gurly who sa "hello clouds, hello sky". I diskard him.

Quote Tweet

Sam Coates Sky

@SamCoatesSky

· 20h

Exclusive - Sky News reveal what Boris Johnson said about David Cameron in private cabinet papers after obtaining an unredacted copy of documents disclosed to court

Preventing prorogation is a very British coup

In a big surprise the Court of Session in Edinburgh has ruled that proroguing Parliament was unlawful.

"The Lord President, Lord Carloway, decided that although advice to HM the Queen on the exercise of the royal prerogative of prorogating Parliament was not reviewable on the normal grounds of judicial review, it would nevertheless be unlawful if its purpose was to stymie parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which was a central pillar of the good governance principle enshrined in the constitution."


As Ian Hislop one said,

If this is justice I'm a banana.

I know the Scots are Civil not Common Law but how is this decision justified? Much more importantly will the Supreme Court in London confirm or overturn it next week?

Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson ('the Prince of Darkness') advised Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs last week and helped put together the Remain alliance in Parliament that first passed the bill preventing Government taking the UK out of the EU without Parliament's approval and then prevented the Government calling an election in October.  

We are seeing, to quote the title of Chris Mullins' book, a very British coup attempt.

According an anonymous source quoted by Daily The Telegraph: 

“Blair and Mandelson are pulling the strings. Mandelson is the puppet master, he has had meetings via proxy with all the parties involved in the Remain alliance and sends emails with ideas. Blair’s people have been speaking to Jo Swinson’s people.”

Blair and Mandelson have decades of experience of getting what they want and represent the establishment. 

This, it is said, is why Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind about an election on 15 October, despite having called fifty times this year for an election, genuinely thinking one would put him in Number 10 and having indicated he would support a motion to dissolve Parliament once the Benn bill (to prevent the UK leaving the EU without a deal on 31 October) had received the royal assent  

The Government had agreed to drop opposition to the Benn bill in the Lords because they thought that Corbyn had agreed to an election. When it turned out that he had not why did Boris not at that point resurrect the filibuster in the House of Lords or advise the Queen not to give the bill Royal Assent?

I am not sure but it is the Remainers, not the Government, who are tearing up the Constitution, led by the Remainer Speaker John Bercow. 

The British Constitution is not one document but many laws, understandings, conventions and the procedures of the House of Commons contained in the book Erskine May: Parliamentary Practice. The House of Commons had no right to decide its own order of business and what bills to initiate and debate - that was for the Government - until Bercow rewrote the rules.

He did so so that the House of Commons, which was elected in 2017 pledged to make sure the referendum decision of 2016 Brexit was implemented, could prevent the Government carrying out the pledge.

Whether Corbyn broke his word about an election on 15 October or the Government failed to nail the agreement down I don't know, but I think we would have heard were it the former. 

Boris, for his part, lied when he pretended prorogation had nothing to do with Brexit and I think he lied when that he said that he did not want an election. Lies by a Prime Minister are absolutely not acceptable and these ones were not even important or convincing lies. 

I am reminded of Reginald Maudling, when he was his assistant, complaining timidly to Churchill that a passage in a speech had read out to him was not true.

'In a long and distinguished career in public life I have never been dissuaded from saying anything because it was not true.

'But I think, sir, that this will be seen not to be true.'

'Ah, that is very different consideration.'

and the great man drew a red pencil line across the offending paragraph.


Why did Boris not prorogue Parliament until 1 November, thus showing the EU leaders that the Government would not be defeated in Parliament if it sought to leave the EU without a deal, as Tony Blair assures them would happen, and so encouraging them to do a deal?


Possibly because it would look undemocratic , but certainly because former Attorney General Dominic Grieve successfully carried an amendment to the Northern Ireland Executive Formation Bill by one vote, requiring Parliament to be sitting to receive fortnightly reports by September and again by October 14. The amendment passed the Commons because one Government whip forgot to vote. 


Had that Whip done his job Boris could have had unfettered power to prorogue till November 1 and leave without a deal. 

Dominic Grieve is certainly clever enough to have thought this up for himself but I think he has been liaising with Tony Blair.


A prorogation till 1 November might have enabled Boris to get a good deal, but I no longer think it is what Boris wanted. I think he always preferred an early election where he would pledge himself to making a substantively new deal or leaving the EU by 31 October with no deal. He hoped to win, leave the EU somehow and have a parliamentary majority for five years.

An election is not possible while Parliament is prorogued because it requires a resolution of the House of Commons supported by 434 MPs.


Boris prorogued Parliament for as long as he could, either to enable him to negotiate with the EU without being undercut by Parliament or to trigger a rebellion and early election. But it has all gone horribly wrong for him and for Leavers.

However over the next five weeks with or without Parliament much can happen and will.