Martin Kettle's Blog, page 42
May 1, 2019
May was right to sack Gavin Williamson. No one will be sorry to see him go | Martin Kettle
There have been spectacular resignations of British defence secretaries: Michael Heseltine over the Westland affair in 1986 comes immediately to mind. But there has not been a spectacular sacking of a defence secretary in the modern era – until now, with the firing of Gavin Williamson. The contrast does not end there. Heseltine was a genuinely major figure who quit over his belief in backing British and European defence suppliers. Williamson is a genuine minnow who got himself fired because of his ambition.
‘No government can be successful which cannot keep its secrets,' the Labour premier Clem Attlee famously said
Related: Gavin Williamson sacked as defence secretary over Huawei leak
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April 24, 2019
There will be no soft Brexit now. It’s no deal, revoke or another vote | Martin Kettle
A compromise solution was possible once, but not any more. For pro-Europeans, the choice is starker and simpler
Ever since the Brexit vote in June 2016, many of us pro-Europeans have had to live with a dilemma. On the one hand, we regarded the vote to leave the European Union as a disaster for our country. On the other, we accepted the galling reality that it was the democratically expressed view of the majority. Three years on, I still think we were right about Brexit. But we still lost the vote.
At times in the past five months, a pragmatic compromise has seemed tantalisingly viable
Related: Labour says Theresa May unwilling to offer key Brexit concessions
Related: 1922 Committee rejects rule change for Tory leadership contests – live news
Continue reading...April 11, 2019
Whatever happens next, the nationalist right has lost the battle for Brexit | Martin Kettle
MPs’ reflex reaction to the new six-month Brexit delay was a very human one. They decided to take a break. They have awarded themselves an Easter chill-out, starting tomorrow, following the most punishing peacetime session of parliament in modern times. They need it. We all need it. Theresa May certainly needs it.
But they and we also need to use the Brexit break to relearn the art of thinking straight and seizing the moment. The delay imposed by the EU on Wednesday night was not simply another familiar can-kicking exercise. Instead it may mark a pro-European turning point in the battle of Brexit. It is a moment not of enduring impasse but of real opportunity.
For the right, the aim was to bend the Tory party to their obsessional will. Instead they have wrecked their party
Donald Tusk has proposed a 'flexible extension' to Article 50. Under the plan the UK’s nominal last day in the EU would likely be 10 April 2020, but Britain would be expected to leave well before then, as soon as a withdrawal agree had been ratified by the UK parliament.
Related: What does a Brexit delay mean for politics, business, citizens and the EU?
Continue reading...April 3, 2019
Britain needs a Brexit compromise. Forging one could be the making of Corbyn’s Labour | Martin Kettle
The national tragedy of Brexit sweeps on. In the end, Theresa May’s opening to Jeremy Corbyn to help solve it may prove to have been just another brief episode in its awful unfolding. But even the greatest tragedies occasionally have space for epic moments of boldness and inspiration, when a moment can be seized and an outcome reshaped. This could – perhaps – be one of them.
The appeal to Labour may soon prove to be little more than another of the tactical feints that May sometimes attempts in search of a Brexit solution. Through thick and thin, the prime minister has doggedly tried to get her deal through with Conservative and DUP votes. Occasionally, though, she has tacked a little towards the centre. When she does, her main motive seems to be to frighten her rebel rightwingers back into her hard-Brexit pen, rather than to reveal any lurking centrist convictions or because she accepts she has no alternative.
This is in some ways a 'speak for Britain' moment too. Moreover, it is one that Corbyn needs
Continue reading...April 1, 2019
After this failure by MPs, Britain could now stumble into a pointless general election | Martin Kettle
Theresa May could roll the dice one more time, but the Brexit landscape looks as muddy and bleak as the western front
Until just after 10pm on April Fools’ Day, when John Bercow began to announce the results, it was still just about possible to persuade oneself that there might be an modestly uplifting ending to parliament’s long battle of Brexit. After a debate from which most Tory Brexiter MPs ostentatiously stayed away, it felt as if an all-party revolt of pro-European MPs might be about to drag Theresa May’s government unwillingly into a different kind of Brexit. But it was not to be. In the event, that effort has failed by just three votes. It probably might as well be three hundred.
The might-have-beens are agonising. If just two MPs had voted differently, the outcome would have been reversed. If the Scottish nationalists, the Liberal Democrats, the Independent Group of MPs, or even the DUP – all of whom might in some circumstances plausibly have found their own reasons to support Kenneth Clarke’s customs union motion – had voted differently, then the Brexit landscape would have changed.
Related: Brexit indicative votes round 2: what happened and what next?
Continue reading...March 27, 2019
May’s exit won’t halt Britain’s slow drift into a kind of Brexit civil war | Martin Kettle
This crisis would have tested a Cromwell or a Lloyd George. It will not be resolved by a new leader but only by parliament
Be clear which of the current crises in British politics matters more in the long term. This isn’t easy right now, when the prospect of a Conservative leadership contest inevitably triggers a Tory party and media frenzy. Nevertheless, Brexit is the root of the matter. That fact didn’t change after Theresa May addressed the 1922 Committee tonight, and it isn’t going to go away. The Tory succession battle is ephemeral by comparison.
It has long been obvious that May would not see the year out in Downing Street. Her announcement merely restated this more plainly, and without giving a date for her departure. The leadership battle later this summer is a direct consequence of the unresolved Brexit crisis that May has created over the past three years – but it is not in any way the solution to it.
Related: Brexit Westminster is like the Crystal Maze on crystal meth
Related: Farewell to the worst prime minister bar none – until the next one | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...March 20, 2019
UK politicians ignore mass public protests at their peril | Martin Kettle
It is still just about possible, with a sustained deployment of the imagination, to conceive of a set of circumstances in which Theresa May might still be able to regard her Brexit policy as a success. If, for instance, she agrees in Brussels on Thursday on the conditional short extension offered by Donald Tusk on Wednesday ; if she gets her third “meaningful vote” motion past the Speaker next week; if her MPs take Tusk’s offer seriously; if she proves better at persuading enough of them to back her deal than in the past, then – just possibly – it may all seem to have been worthwhile. Or at least it may do so for about 48 hours, until the leadership challenge begins and the policy conflicts of the next – and longer – phase of Brexit negotiations with the EU start to split her party yet again.
Related: Britain is in a hole – Europe, we need you to dig us out | Timothy Garton Ash
Related: May’s latest screeching U-turn makes her utterly unfit to lead | Jonathan Freedland
Continue reading...March 19, 2019
OAE/Schiff review – nothing less than a revelation
Royal Festival Hall, London
Brahms’s First Piano Concerto was reborn thanks to the OAE’s incisive playing and András Schiff’s characterful phrasing
Before the performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto that made up the second half of this concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, András Schiff made a short speech to the Festival Hall audience. This was, he said, “music that you think you know, but we don’t know it well enough”. Those words could serve as the motto for the onward march of the historically informed performance movement, of which the OAE and Schiff are leading but mercifully undoctrinaire advocates. They were absorbingly vindicated in the performance that followed, which in many respects was nothing less than a revelation.
At its heart was the Blüthner grand piano, built in Leipzig at around the time of the work’s unhappy 1859 premiere, and imported for the occasion, apparently from Amsterdam, on which Schiff played Brahms’s dark and leonine concerto. Straight rather than cross strung, the Blüthner instrument lacks the resonant power, especially in the bass, of more modern pianos. Yet it produces a muscular and ringing sound of its own, and with Schiff also directing an orchestra of less than 60, the concerto emerged as a piece reborn.
Continue reading...March 13, 2019
Theresa May is truly on the ropes. But there may yet be life in her deal | Martin Kettle
And so the Brexit options facing Theresa May tighten again, remorselessly and painfully, and with more pain to come. A day after a second decisive defeat for her withdrawal deal with the EU, and amid threats and chaos in the Westminster lobbies, MPs narrowly wrested control from May by four votes over the possibility of no deal. Then in a second vote they drove the message home again, this time by an unambiguous majority of 43.
Related: MPs reject no-deal Brexit by majority of 43 in second vote
Continue reading...March 11, 2019
LSO/Haitink – the clarity of the music-making never faltered
Barbican, London
The conductor may be 90, but the years fell away in a sparkling two hours of cogent Mozart and magisterial Bruckner
As befits a man of 90, Bernard Haitink walks more uncertainly to the rostrum these days. But, once he raises his baton, the years fall away. Haitink conducted the London Symphony Orchestra for nearly two hours in this first of two Barbican concerts to mark his latest significant birthday. Yet, even at 90, he still stood to conduct for long periods, including the whole of the first movement of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, the gestures unfailingly crisp and relevant, and the clarity of the music-making never faltering.
It was typical of the self-effacing side of Haitink that he began the evening by ceding the limelight to the Viennese pianist Till Fellner, in Mozart’s E flat Piano Concerto, K482. Yet there was no attention-seeking anywhere in this collaboration. Fellner played with studied simplicity rather than the glittery show that this dazzlingly varied score might seem to require, while Haitink showed why he has always been such an attentive accompanist – an underrated part of his art. The muted strings at the start of the andante slow movement, played with minimal vibrato, were a reminder that Haitink, though very much a Mozartean of the old school, has always been open to learning from other styles.
Continue reading...Martin Kettle's Blog
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