Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

More of a general zoomed out piece about the UK and specifically London - it underestates the number of ways "allow" can be used and makes those words sound newer than they are. We had "bare" and "allow" in my school in countryside England 20 years ago so I imagine they've been round London for 40 years or so

But I liked this piece it seemed about the place I live and that I recognise - which is rare from the prestige papers in New York. The New Yorker journalist who did that Dick piece has apologised and said he got it wrong and is trying to fix it - which I admire - while the NYT thinks we holiday in swamps (I can only interpret this as someone misinterpreting people going to Hackney Marshes on a bank holiday) and have only just stopped eating boiled mutton. So it's nice to see a piece that seems related to real, modern London. Although I would quibble that I'm not sure cockney would be familiar to anyone who's heard Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins And obviously moving to Hampstead Heath is quite the version of London.

And just a lovely piece in general.

Separately the Year 3 project is really great - even if you've got no connection to any of the kids there's something uniquely hopeful and funny about kids at that age:

The Common Tongue of Twenty-First-Century London
Schoolchildren in the British capital have developed a dialect, Multicultural London English—and my American-born son is learning it.
By Rebecca Mead
February 6, 2022

For the project "Year 3," a collective portrait of London, Steve McQueen photographed students in the British equivalent of second grade.Photographs © Steve McQueen and Tate / Courtesy the artist / Thomas Dane Gallery / Marian Goodman Gallery

In the summer of 2018, my family moved to London, the city of my birth, from New York, my home for three decades. We wanted to be closer to my mother as she neared the age of ninety, and my husband and I were eager to expand the horizons of our son, who had just turned thirteen. My parents had moved to Weymouth, on the southern English coast, when I was just three years old, and so London was unfamiliar to me. Acquainting myself anew with the city, I walked its streets and visited its parks and museums with an exhilarating sense of novelty.

Not long after my family settled into a new home, near Hampstead Heath, I went south to the Tate Britain museum, on the bank of the Thames, to see an ambitious project undertaken by the British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. He had made a collective portrait of London by photographing its Year Three students—second grade, in the British system. All the city's elementary schools—public, private, faith-based, special-needs—were invited to participate, and more than fifteen hundred of them agreed to have photographers deputized by McQueen take a class picture. The result, called "Year 3," is an assemblage of more than three thousand images, featuring seventy-six thousand children.

"Year 3" was overwhelming in scale. Individually framed, and mounted on white, the photographs were stacked wall to wall, a dozen high, in the museum's lofty Duveen Galleries. From a distance, the regular arrangement of brightly colored rectangles looked like the board of a children's game. Close up, each rectangle resolved into a traditional class portrait, with the tallest children standing in the back row, and the smallest sitting cross-legged in the front. Many students wore school uniforms—blue blazers and gray shorts, gingham dresses and red cardigans—the outfits barely changed from those my mother wore when she went off to grammar school, or those I wore when it was my turn to enter the British equivalent of kindergarten.

I wished that my mother, who still lives in Weymouth, could have accompanied me, as she would have found the children as irresistibly appealing as I did, with their broad grins showing teeth that are still jostling into position: a boy in a soccer uniform, with a soccer-player haircut, cropped on the sides and long on top; a girl in a green hijab next to a girl with a white satin hairband. Aged seven or eight, they are on the cusp of an understanding of the world, and of their place as individuals in it. Though the project must have been logistically difficult, with all the paperwork and the permissions and the persuasion, it offered a brilliantly simple conceit: displaying the heterogeneity—class, race, nationality, faith—of young Londoners at the age when they first develop an awareness of their own differences, and of the structures that bring them together or keep them apart.

The museum was full of lively children scampering from one side of the gallery to the other, pointing at the images and chattering about the faces on the walls. An essential element of "Year 3" was that all the classes who sat for McQueen's photographers had the opportunity to come in to see themselves represented. You are the future of London, museum staffers told the students when they arrived—hundreds of them every day. Some of the children had never been to a museum. One purpose of the project was to instill in them the sense that the institution belongs to them, and not just to people like me, a middle-aged ticket buyer overhearing their squealed reactions: Look at this boy, picking his nose! Look, here are children with disabilities, in wheelchairs. Look, these children have a dog with them, a mascot—lucky them.


An essential element of "Year 3" was that all the classes who sat for McQueen's photographers had the opportunity to come to the Tate Britain to see themselves represented.Photograph © Steve McQueen and Tate / Courtesy Steve McQueen / Thomas Dane Gallery / Marian Goodman Gallery

London itself belongs to these students, whose parents and grandparents have come from all over. More than three hundred different languages are spoken by the children who attend London's schools, but, as I listened to their voices at the Tate, I was struck by how similar to one another they sound. Sociolinguists who study the way that Londoners speak have identified the emergence, since the late nineteen-nineties, of a new variant of English among the younger generations: M.L.E., or Multicultural London English.

In recent decades, large-scale studies have been undertaken of language use in Hackney, in East London. Historically, Hackney was occupied by white working-class residents, or Cockneys, whose basic elements of speech are familiar not just to Londoners who grew up with them but to anyone who has watched Dick Van Dyke effortfully twist his tongue in "Mary Poppins"—saying wiv for "with" and 'ouse for "house." The years after the Second World War brought an influx of immigration that resulted in Hackney becoming one of London's most decisively multiethnic neighborhoods. In one cohort of Hackney five-year-olds, who were studied between 2004 and 2010, there were Cockneys, but there were many more children with parents from Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Albania, Turkey, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and various African countries. Friendship groups were multiethnic, the researchers noted, and often included children who spoke a language other than English at home, or children whose first language was English of a postcolonial variety, such as Ghanaian or Indian English. In this diverse milieu, the children found their way to a new common language.

Speakers of M.L.E. use notably different pronunciations from speakers of Cockney: "face," which in Cockney sounds like fay-eece, for example, slides closer to fess. (In linguistic terms, the Cockney diphthong is replaced by a near-monophthong.) Some of M.L.E.'s features are lexical, with vocabulary especially influenced by the language spoken by people with Jamaican backgrounds—one of the first postwar immigrant groups to arrive in the East End. But the shifts in the language of London amount to more than the borrowing of vocabulary or changes in pronunciation: there are structural changes, too. David Hall, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London, has written of the organic emergence of a new pronoun, "man," which, depending on its context, can mean "I" or "me" or "him" or "them." As an example of generic-impersonal use, Hall gives the example "Man's gotta work hard to do well these days." To describe the second-person use, he cites a command that might be issued to an upset friend: "Man needs to calm down!" I asked Hall to meet me in a café in Mile End, in East London, not far from the university. Over coffee, Hall—who is young and bearded, and uses many features of M.L.E. in his speech—discussed other attributes of the linguistic variant, such as the dropping of prepositions with the verbs "go" and "come" in certain contexts.

"It has to be some sort of familiar or institutional goal, like 'I went pub last night,' or 'I went chicken shop,' " he told me. "It can't be 'I went art gallery.' "

This is a feature that M.L.E. has in common with modern Greek, he said, but it's hard to tell precisely in which foreign languages the novelties of M.L.E. are rooted, because it has emerged from such variegated and fertile ground. "It is difficult to say if there is a direct influence from Nigerian English, or Jamaican Creole, because they are all in the mix somewhere," Hall explained. Moreover, the London children whom Hall and other scholars have studied are influenced more strongly by the phonologies of their peers than by those of their caregivers. Starting at four or five years old, they pool a set of languages and linguistic features, and settle on some subset of that pool as their common language. They begin to speak like one another instead of like their parents. "Normally, kids, until they are eight or nine, will copy their caregivers, and then they will match the community afterwards," Hall told me. "But these kids are doing it very, very young. It is language change not from the outside but from the inside—they are building it themselves."


If McQueen's cameras had captured the chatter of the Year Three students as they shuffled into place and smiled, M.L.E. is one language that nearly all of them would have been familiar with. Hall explained to me that, when groups who speak in different ways come into frequent contact, people often shift the way they speak, eventually sharing speech styles and modes of pronunciation. If you have an extremely mixed group—one whose members speak, say, ten different languages—speakers will settle on linguistic features that allow them to do what they most want to do, which is communicate. "Ultimately, people want to sound like one another," Hall told me. Linguists use the term "accommodation" to describe the way that individuals change how they speak to align with one another. "It's not cultural appropriation, it's not rude, it's just what we do," Hall said. We accommodate ourselves to others' speech because we want to get along; we want to understand, and to be understood.

Soon after my son enrolled at his new school, a few blocks from our house, he started bringing home words and phrases that his new peers, at the onset of adolescence, use to demarcate themselves from their parents, claiming their status as the future of London. The vocabulary was new to his Brooklyn-raised ears, and to me, who had been absent from London for so long. Whenever he brought such words home, I turned them over with him, like fossils found among stones on a pebbly beach. ("Bare," perplexingly, means "plenty," or "a lot of." "Allow it" means "leave it alone.") Among his classmates are students with English surnames that sound as if they date back to the Norman Conquest or earlier, but there are also children with parents from Somalia, Syria, Bangladesh, Turkey, Poland, France, and Germany. Some of the students arrived in Year Three from Romania, speaking not a word of English; just listen to them now.

For a while, my son was the new outsider, the one who talked funny. Say "aluminum," his classmates demanded. Say "candy." Say "elevator." His American accent was long enough established that it now seems likely to be indelible, though over the past few years he has adjusted to his new context, to fit in. He now says "sweets" instead of "candy," "maths" instead of "math." He speaks of his teachers as "Miss" and "Sir," just as I did—the latter honorific now striking me as peculiar, because I'm hearing it on his democratic American tongue. When my son calls me on his phone after school, to say he'll be home later than expected, he says, "We're going shop," just like his new friends say it—the ones I can hear larking in the background behind him. He used the expression at first with a slight self-consciousness, but in a spirit of openness. Gradually, it has become his default. He is accommodating himself to London, this new city to which he has been translated.

In moving my son between two English-speaking countries, I have not made available to him the opportunity to become fluent in another language. Unlike his classmates with Romanian or Somali or French parents, he cannot move easily and unconsciously between two tongues. But learning to speak like a Londoner is granting him a certain flexibility. I have watched his growing comfort with this new language and am gratified: this expansion of range is, after all, one of the reasons why my husband and I decided to up and move.

When I reflect on the upheaval of moving countries in midlife, I am shocked by what the months of displacement, the anxiety of resettlement, and the disconcerting unfamiliarity of daily life have taken out of me. On a merely practical level, the experience is draining. In so many ways, it would have been easier to stay put. We have voluntarily given up comforts and continuities in favor of choosing a more open-ended prospect. My husband and I told ourselves that we wanted to make a change of our choosing, before unsought change was visited upon us. We chose to get ahead of the instability that we felt was inevitable, by destabilizing ourselves. We hoped and trusted that we would be stimulated by placing ourselves in a new context, that there would be value for us in seeing the world from a new vantage point.

But we knew, too, that there would be costs to our choice, and that moving would demand of us a reckoning with loss. The closer I am to my mother, from whom I was distant for so long, the farther I am from my beloved American family: my sister-in-law, my brothers-in-law, my husband's three adult sons. Indeed, we learned of the impending birth of our first grandchild only after we had moved to London, when my husband's oldest son called and we put him on speakerphone, his voice sounding thrilled and proud as we looked out of the window toward a garden wall along which a red fox creeps at twilight.

But my midlife is my son's youth, and the move has already shown him that the world is wider than it would have appeared to him had we never strayed from our old neighborhood, in brownstone Brooklyn, with its scrappy basketball courts around the corner; its friendly, progressive middle school and its constantly inflating property prices; its coffee shop where, on the sidewalks outside, dogs slurp at aluminum bowls of water while their owners stand in line waiting for their own carefully crafted refreshments. I have seen teen-agers grow up in New York, and I know how the competitiveness of the city—the urgency and drive and self-importance of it, the characteristics that so thrilled me as an ambitious new arrival in my early twenties—can leave a young person feeling defeated before she has begun. I have seen, alternatively, how New York can make a young person believe that there is no other place in the world significant enough to matter. I want to inoculate my son against such provincialism. I want to nurture his native cosmopolitanism.

I go to a party at the home of a new acquaintance, in Central London. It's like being transported back to a party from the eighties, the decade in which I first left England behind. Everyone is drinking whatever gets put into their hands. Everyone is smoking cigarettes that will leave my hair reeking by night's end. There is urgent, shouted conversation about art and politics and history. I fall into conversation with a woman, a filmmaker with some recent success. Reflexively, I explain my relocation. I cannot bear to be taken for just another Londoner—someone who never left and made a life elsewhere, though my British accent remains intact, belying my thirty years away, my American passport, my American fidelities.

I tell the filmmaker that I want my son to grow up with the ability to move comfortably among countries, continents, worlds. You want to turn your son into an Englishman, she replies, with a note of apparent satisfaction at having found such a neat formulation. God, no, I reply, surprising myself with my vehemence. That's the very last thing I want to do. My son is a complete American, born a New Yorker as the summer dawn broke over the East River, its rising red disk visible from the hospital bed in which I first held him in amazement. My son, blessed in childhood with a cheerful temperament, has what I think of as an American's optimism and an American's openness, even though he has been raised and loved by an English mother with her English instincts for repression and regret.

Those instincts may account for the aspects of my decision to move that I find hardest to explain to a stranger, or to anyone: the sense that I wanted to dislocate my son so that he would know what it is to yearn for elsewhere. I did not bring him to England in the hope of bequeathing on him an alternative national identity as an Englishman. My ambivalence about this chilly, moated island nation does not accommodate that fantasy of homecoming. I have known many city dwellers whose affection for the structures of their own childhood is so great that, upon becoming parents, they wish to replicate them, and thus yearn to move to the country or to the suburbs. I do not share this longing. Though I am delighted by the pleasures of introducing my son to the landscape of my childhood—to have him bounce on the same seafront trampolines as I did, and race along the same cliffside slopes—there is no sense in which I want to reduce his world to the narrowness of that from which I came.

What I do want to grant him from my own childhood experience is the corollary of that narrowness. I want to cultivate in him a sense of ambition and a quest to roam—attributes that, in my own adolescent experience, were nurtured by a sense of never quite feeling at home in my home.

By uprooting my son just as he was about to begin applying to high schools, I placed his childhood definitively within one retrospective landscape and offered him an unknown vista for his adolescence. I am excited for what this new territory will offer him. London is a good place to be a teen-ager, friends old and new have told me—there's a freedom offered by the city, with its sprawling streets and generous parks, its network of tubes and buses, its intersecting social circles. These days, I often walk past high-spirited gatherings of kids on Hampstead Heath—lounging on blankets with bottles of drinks that they aren't old enough to buy, playing music on loudspeakers that they aren't supposed to use here—and their vitality delights me. Their pleasures seem almost Arcadian; these hours whiled away in urban fields under open skies display a liberty that seems to me both wilder and more innocent than that offered by the sophisticated constraints of life in New York City. I want my son to have access to that range and freedom and sense of ownership. I want him to get to know London like a new language that he's mastered while his tongue is still flexible. But there's something else that motivates me. A sense of displacement is so constitutional to my own being that I seem to have been compelled to make it my son's inheritance. I have given him this questionable gift: a lost place to long for.

This is drawn from "Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return," out this month from Knopf.

[Valmy]

Damn. Is she raising a child or designing one

[ulmont]

Maybe something like this.



Only, you know, done by someone competent and not in 5 minutes on MS paint so it doesn't look like the logo of an Austrian fascist party.

Looks like something you'd put on a guitar with spraypaint.

[Josquius]

I've heard of this international English before. Albeit usually in a 3rd culture child context. Annoying quirks such as saying normally in the French sense whilst speaking English.
But yes, being in a more international environment is a big factor weighing on my thoughts of getting my kid elsewhere before senior school.

But the shifts in the language of London amount to more than the borrowing of vocabulary or changes in pronunciation: there are structural changes, too. David Hall, a linguist at Queen Mary University of London, has written of the organic emergence of a new pronoun, "man," which, depending on its context, can mean "I" or "me" or "him" or "them." As an example of generic-impersonal use, Hall gives the example "Man's gotta work hard to do well these days." To describe the second-person use, he cites a command that might be issued to an upset friend: "Man needs to calm down!" I asked Hall to meet me in a café in Mile End, in East London, not far from the university. Over coffee, Hall—who is young and bearded, and uses many features of M.L.E. in his speech—discussed other attributes of the linguistic variant, such as the dropping of prepositions with the verbs "go" and "come" in certain contexts.

So just like Swedish?
Basically man coming in to be used as we would once use 'one'?

[Sheilbh]

Cressida Dick resignation: Metropolitan Police Federation says it has 'no faith' in London Mayor Sadiq Khan

Oh no, how sad. Oh well.

Whoever is appointed next I think it has to be someone from outside the Met.

[Zanza]

Rees-Mogg backs post-Brexit push for UK to adopt other countries' regulations

Jacob Rees-Mogg has thrown his weight behind calls for the UK to unilaterally adopt other countries' product regulations post-Brexit to avoid creating new red tape for international trade.

Rees-Mogg, who is the new minister for Brexit opportunities, said proposals drawn up by the free market Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank should be welcomed by "anyone who believes in free trade".

The UK is set to enforce a new set of product accreditation standards from 1 January 2023, after continuing to use the EU's for the first three years post- Brexit .

This would mean that products would have to be assessed to new UKCA certifications instead of CE as the EU does not want to continue mutual recognition in the long-term.

The IEA report said the UK should unilaterally keep the EU's CE standards anyway and that this policy "should be adopted for all international trade where the rules of the exporting country meet the UK's standards".

The think tank claims that non-tariff barriers, like safety regulations, can mean the equivalent of a 20 per cent tariff on some goods.

"The UK has an opportunity to lead the world with a radical trade policy of recognising regulations, without requiring reciprocity, starting with the EU. This will transform the UK's trade policy, ensuring goods which emulate our own standards are traded freely into the UK without unnecessary regulatory barriers," the IEA's Victoria Hewson said.

Rees-Mogg added: "Anyone who believes in free trade will welcome this report. Non-tariff barriers are the delight of protectionists and should be removed wherever possible."

A true titan of political thought. I am sure Margaret Thatcher would be impressed by this radical opportunity to unilaterally accept product standards without reciprocity.

[Josquius]

It's simultaneously hilarious and depressing to see the reality glacier showing what anyone with half a brain knew all along :brexit is pointless.

[The Brain]

Taking back Control-Alt-Delete.

[HVC]

Next they'll change the passport colour to better match EU standards.

[Jacob]

So Boris is hanging on, it seems? His party shenanigans have slid out of the news and there isn't much in the way of talk of the Tories kicking him out either? Or is it just a bit of a lull?

[Sheilbh]

So Boris is hanging on, it seems? His party shenanigans have slid out of the news and there isn't much in the way of talk of the Tories kicking him out either? Or is it just a bit of a lull?

It's a lull. On the parties the police have sent Johnson a questionnaire about the parties he went to (they've sent them to 90 people in total) and he's using a lawyer to respond which is not normal for a fixed penalty notice. Apparently the best excuse they can come up with is that he attended briefly as a fucntion of his job - at least for three of them which were leaving parties. It's a pretty weak argument and the public have already made up their mind.

Johnson and his loyalists are already trying to position it as a PM shouldn't have to resign over a fixed penalty notice. They point - correctly - that in terms of the way breaches of covid are treated it's like a speeding offence or drunk and disorderly. Again I thin that's a weak argument. First of all an FPN shouldn't be a resigning offence, then surely it shouldn't be a "hiring a QC to help with the forms" offence. But secondly while that's true, it ignores the moral force behind the covid regulations - the reason they were in place, why the vast majority of people followed them and why people are so angry about this is very different from speed limits even if the actual punishment for breach is similar. Again I think the public have already judged - they're just waiting for confirmation or what they'd perceive as a cover-up.

The Tory timeline for getting rid of him would be after the May local elections so the new leader doesn't have a massive defeat in their first couple of months. My read is that Johnson is profoundly damaged and the longer he hangs on the more he taints the rest of the party and potential replacements - I think they would be better to move quickly and take the hit on local elections. Not least because it will look like they got rid of Johnson because he stopped winning, not because he'd done something wrong - and while that's absolutely true, it's best if it's not obvious. I think Tory MPs disagree. But in the meantime Labour are already spending a lot of time trying to tie Sunak and Johnson together - calling them "the Tory Thelma and Louise", "the loan shark Chancellor and his unwitting sidekick".

I also think Tory MPs are a little unclear on who comes next. Tory leadership elections basically work by the MPs whittling it down to two candidates who then go to the party membership - so a lot of the politics is in forming the coalitions and managing your backers first. Generally Tory leadership elections don't go to the favourite - the only time I can think of when the favourite at the start actually won was 2019 with Johnson. But I think the MPs like to have a bit of a sense of who is or might be coming next - I think there's a bit of hesitancy over both Truss and Sunak who are the front-runners which is making them a little more cautious/not wanting to go now.

There is a possibility he doesn't go - inaction is always the easiest option. But I think Tory MPs can read polls and are aware that if they leave it until after the summer then it's a bit like Brown in 2009-10. It's too late to remove him but they all know what's coming.

So my guess is he goes in May/June - unless the police fine him before then. Sunak or Truss are the most likely next leaders, but I think I'd probably put my money on a dark horse candidate like Nadhim Zahawi or Penny Mordaunt. One reason I still think this is that basically every other day there's one piece or other measuring up all the alternatives for the leadership - which is never a good sign for a sitting leader

Speaking of which - this makes the case for why it might be Penny Mordaunt:

Penny Mordaunt could prove the dark horse in the Tory leadership race to succeed Boris Johnson
AnalysisThe Brexiteer and former Defence Secretary is being quietly talked up by some MPs as a unifying figure

A Mordaunt premiership is an outside bet that is quietly catching the eye of some backbenchers (Photo: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
By Paul Waugh
Chief Political Commentator
February 14, 2022 12:55 pm(Updated 6:49 pm)

No matter how dire Partygate gets, one of the main reasons that Boris Johnson's allies are convinced he can weather the storm is that Tory MPs have little in the way of an obvious candidate to replace him.

Unlike previous regicide plots, there is no clear 'prince over the water' as Michael Heseltine was in Thatcher's reign, or Johnson himself was during the Cameron and May eras.

And given that the vacancy would be not just for Tory leader but Prime Minister, any contender would need Cabinet experience. With the drumbeat of war on the edge of Europe, it is no time for a novice.

The backdrop of tensions with Russia is one of the obvious reasons why Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has in recent days been mooted as a possible outside chance to succeed Johnson.

After outshining Dominic Raab during the fall of Kabul, he appeared this weekend to take a swipe at the former Foreign Secretary, tweeting he had cancelled his family holiday to focus on Ukraine.

That felt like a victory lap after party activists recently propelled him to the top of the ConservativeHome league table of Cabinet ministers' satisfaction ratings. Wallace knocked Liz Truss off the top spot after a year of her dominating the survey.

But there is another minister with extensive defence experience who is quietly catching the eye of Tory MPs too. Penny Mordaunt, the UK's first ever female Defence Secretary, has occupied two Cabinet posts, and has eight years of ministerial experience under Cameron, May and Johnson.

Crucially, Mordaunt also has the key requirement that many MPs believe is essential to become PM in the current Tory party: she is a staunch Brexiteer. Although Wallace and Truss are converts to the cause, both of them backed Remain in 2016.

Of course, the highest profile Brexiteer with Cabinet experience is Rishi Sunak, and with Michael Gove ruling himself out of running a third time, and Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg seen as too divisive, it's no wonder he's the bookies' favourite.

Yet among those MPs who remain unconvinced about Sunak and who think former Remainer Jeremy Hunt just can't win over a pro-Brexit membership, Mordaunt is being talked about as the fresh choice. Some say she could shake up a leadership contest – and maybe even come through the middle to win.

Last year, Mordaunt sparked chatter among colleagues about a possible leadership bid when she published a book on how to make the most of Brexit. An upbeat call for the country to unite and celebrate its unique place in the world, it managed to get endorsements from figures as varied as Bill Gates, Elton John and even Tony Blair.

That desire to unite the different wings of her party after its internal Brexit wars was symbolised by her decision to support Jeremy Hunt for the leadership three years ago.

Backing Hunt probably cost her a seat in Cabinet (Johnson sacked her before bringing her back as Paymaster General a few months later) but it underlined her reputation for taking a stand even if it carries political risk.

As Theresa May's equalities minister, she pushed hard to give women in Northern Ireland the right to abortion services (a law change due to become a reality next month), despite opposition from May's allies at the time, the DUP.

As a minister under Johnson, Mordaunt has proved similarly independent-minded. She voted with Opposition MPs to strengthen protections for victims of harassment or bullying by MPs. Last year, she held a meeting with the new Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, prompting a reminder from No.10 that there was a policy of "non-engagement" between ministers and the group.

She was one of the few ministers to publicly criticise Dominic Cummings over his 'Barnard Castle' breach of Covid rules.

When No.10 and the PM initially refused to condemn fans who booed England footballers for 'taking the knee' in the Euro championship, she spoke out. "I don't like booing. It's very clear what the football players are signalling. It's clearly a really raw issue for a lot of the team," she said. Days later, Downing Street followed suit.

That pattern was repeated last week when she became the first minister to criticise the "appalling" "intimidation" of Keir Starmer and David Lammy near Parliament in the wake of the PM's Jimmy Savile remarks. "This should be condemned by all," she tweeted, a remark seen as a plea for Johnson himself to speak out. Minutes later, the PM did just that.

It's not all been plain sailing for the Royal Navy reservist. Mordaunt's critics point to her blunder during the 2016 Vote Leave campaign, when she wrongly claimed the UK could not veto Turkey's application to join the EU. But she has few enemies within the party and won plaudits for her Commons defence of Michael Gove against Angela Rayner's claims of cronyism over Covid contracts.

Because Johnson didn't keep Mordaunt in the Cabinet when he took over as PM, she has not featured in any of those key ConservativeHome league tables since 2019. But when she was around that top table, she was frequently in the top two – a real sign of cut-through and affection among party members.

"I would not rule her out, she is properly serious and a real grafter," one veteran Tory says. "When you look at some of the others who are not ready to go, she is. The hard yards have been done. She could launch a quick campaign that could blow the socks off people." Her new Twitter photo, taglined, simply "Penny", already looks like a leadership campaign poster, some colleagues suggest.

Mordaunt has also been taking a firm stance on UK energy security, an issue that takes on increasing salience amid rising tensions with Russia.

Her role in a cross-party campaign against a plan to build an undersea electricity connector between France and her Portsmouth constituency paid off last month when Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng refused planning consent.

Tory donor Alexander Temerko, whose firm Aquind was behind the project, attacked Mordaunt as "an absolutely uncontrollable woman". She told her local paper she was "guilty as charged" on that count.

Speaking of "uncontrollable women", it hasn't gone unnoticed that Mordaunt tweeted on International Women's Day last year: "Margaret Thatcher wrote to me when I was elected to the Commons [in 2010], but more importantly five years earlier when I lost in 2005. She told me to get back on the horse."

Although the race for the Tory leadership hasn't yet started, the jockeying certainly has. While Sunak is clearly still the bookies' favourite, a Mordaunt premiership is an outside bet that is quietly catching the eye of some backbenchers. And as one MP told me last week: "Don't forget, we have a habit of picking outsiders. Remember Mrs T?"

Aside from the fact that I think a lot of Tory MPs will absolutely love that she's a Royal Navy reservist, I can't think of a better tagline for a Tory woman to run to be leader than "an absolutely uncontrollable woman"

Edit: Incidentally on the questionnaire - it doesn't mean you'll necessarily be fined. But it means the police think you broke the law and it's to allow you to call out any defence and/or mitigation you might have.

[Richard Hakluyt]

The tories may be tempted to let him cling on for quite a while. There is a lot of bad stuff in the pipeline...a Boris-shaped fatberg of bad news in fact...but one of the worst for the tories may turn out to be the cost of living crisis and its effect on pensioners (who are now the principal group keeping the tories in power, damn their eyes).

[Richard Hakluyt]

Rees-Mogg backs post-Brexit push for UK to adopt other countries' regulations

Jacob Rees-Mogg has thrown his weight behind calls for the UK to unilaterally adopt other countries' product regulations post-Brexit to avoid creating new red tape for international trade.

Rees-Mogg, who is the new minister for Brexit opportunities, said proposals drawn up by the free market Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank should be welcomed by "anyone who believes in free trade".

The UK is set to enforce a new set of product accreditation standards from 1 January 2023, after continuing to use the EU's for the first three years post- Brexit .

This would mean that products would have to be assessed to new UKCA certifications instead of CE as the EU does not want to continue mutual recognition in the long-term.

The IEA report said the UK should unilaterally keep the EU's CE standards anyway and that this policy "should be adopted for all international trade where the rules of the exporting country meet the UK's standards".

The think tank claims that non-tariff barriers, like safety regulations, can mean the equivalent of a 20 per cent tariff on some goods.

"The UK has an opportunity to lead the world with a radical trade policy of recognising regulations, without requiring reciprocity, starting with the EU. This will transform the UK's trade policy, ensuring goods which emulate our own standards are traded freely into the UK without unnecessary regulatory barriers," the IEA's Victoria Hewson said.

Rees-Mogg added: "Anyone who believes in free trade will welcome this report. Non-tariff barriers are the delight of protectionists and should be removed wherever possible."

A true titan of political thought. I am sure Margaret Thatcher would be impressed by this radical opportunity to unilaterally accept product standards without reciprocity.

Laughable, if also a bit tragic; but also the first step towards accepting reality and moving towards a more sensible position vis-v-vis the EU.

Next step; "there are these amazing things called the customs union and the single market, if we join them we can expect a huge increase in trade with the EU and a big reduction in red tape!!!" 

[Syt]

Seen in a job posting: "Location: UK or Europe" 

[Sheilbh]

The tories may be tempted to let him cling on for quite a while. There is a lot of bad stuff in the pipeline...a Boris-shaped fatberg of bad news in fact...but one of the worst for the tories may turn out to be the cost of living crisis and its effect on pensioners (who are now the principal group keeping the tories in power, damn their eyes).

True - but I think if they're thinking of an election in spring 2024 (I can't imagine anyone wants to move our normal election cadence to December ) then they need to give a new leader a run-in to establish themselves, differentiate themselves from Johnson and pass some legislation. The easier option is doing nothing and there's reasons to keep Johnson hanging around, but at a certain point it will trip into Brown territory of drifting towards the inevitable.

Plus if they believe the BofE's projections inflation is meant to be back to 3% and falling by the end of this year - although it's not clear the BofE believes their own projections which is a slight concern.

The other unknown is how many letters there already are so how many more it takes to trigger a no confidence vote. It feels like it's high enough that it could happen quite quickly and unexpectedly. But it feels like while May went on for another six months of absolute collapse after surviving the no confidence vote, we're already in that stage of jockeying by successors.

Edit: I see the Good Law Project lost another case on every substantive point, but won one technical issue (which they hadn't actually raised ) so are now spinning that appointments were "unlawful" - which is being feverishly retweeted and shared by people who are normally quite concerned about "truth" in politics