Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

A summit of EU leaders seeking to fill a €75bn hole in the bloc’s budget left by Brexit dramatically collapsed after Angela Merkel led major contributors in rejecting a proposal that would have left them paying billions more. The meeting in Brussels was brought to an abrupt end on Friday evening with the leaders deeply divided, leaving the European council president, Charles Michel, to admit: “We need more time.” The UK’s departure has left EU states struggling to fund plans over the next seven years to tackle the climate emergency, aid poorer regions and continue to subsidise farmers through the common agricultural policy. The 27 heads of state and government must agree on a budget for the next seven years, and the European parliament must give its endorsement, before the end of 2020, to avoid the EU’s spending programmes grinding to a halt. “We are super, super late,” admitted one EU official. Michel, a former prime minister of Belgium, came under fire during the summit,...

Tony Blair has warned the next Labour leader against becoming trapped in a “cul-de-sac of identity politics” over issues such as transgender rights, as he used an event in London to reiterate his belief that the party must focus on making itself electable again. The former prime minister, who also raised the idea of a possible alliance with the Liberal Democrats as a way to regain power, said the Conservatives would emerge victorious from any battles over contentious cultural issues. “You’ve got to distinguish between the advocacy of certain things that are right, whether it’s about gay rights, transgender rights, whatever it is,” he said in a Q&A session after a speech to mark the 120th anniversary of the founding of the party. “You’ve got to distinguish between that and launching yourself politically into a kind of culture war with the right. If you go, ‘Transgender rights is our big thing’, and the right goes, ‘Immigration control is our big thing’, you’re going to los...

We have officially reached the Hunger Games stage of this Democratic primary season. The stage where you can grab the “horse-faced lesbian” weapon and hurl it at an “arrogant” billionaire within the first minutes of the show starting. It’s the stage where a young midwestern mayor can trash the experience of a midwestern senator, who turns right back at him and says, “Are you trying to say I’m dumb or are you mocking me here?” So much for all that midwestern niceness. There’s a reason why the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday turned into such an epic Donnybrook. It’s called the primary calendar, which is inexorably counting down to the Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks. At that point, one of the candidates on stage will emerge with a delegate lead that puts an end to all the quadrennial talk of a brokered convention. At this point, that candidate looks like Bernie Sanders. In the meantime, his five rivals on the debate stage have engaged in an entirely ...

Boris Johnson’s top Brexit negotiator David Frost gave a major speech at ULB Brussels University on Monday evening where he set out the British government’s plans for a UK-EU trade deal. This is an edited transcript of his speech: Thank you much everyone for that very kind introduction. It is a really huge pleasure to be here at your university. I would like to say thank you also to the Institute for hosting me, and your distinguished President, Ramona Coman, for being kind enough to host me here tonight. Your institute here has really made a huge contribution to the study of European politics and European integration – and long may that continue. My aim tonight is to try to explain a bit better why people like me think as we do – how we see the world and why we think Britain is better off out of the European Union. And I want also to give you a bit of insight about how that might influence the British positioning in the negotiation that are to come. Let us go back once aga...

A controversial new adviser to Boris Johnson resigned on Monday night after MPs and experts accused No 10 of condoning his controversial claims that intelligence is linked to race. Andrew Sabisky, who was brought into Downing Street by Johnson’s senior aide Dominic Cummings as part of his appeal for “misfits and weirdos”, became the subject of intense media scrutiny after details emerged of his views on subjects ranging from black people’s IQs to whether benefits claimants should be encouraged to have fewer children. But amid mounting criticism within the Conservative party after No 10 stood by the appointment, Sabisky said that he would be stepping down as a “contractor” to No 10. He tweeted: “The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help [the government] not be a distraction. Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor. I hope No 10 hires more [people with] good geopolitical forecasting track records and that media learn to stop selective q...

Boris Johnson has spent his career disguising cunning plans as unintended blunders and dressing up stupid errors as Machiavellian strokes. So there has been much understandable confusion about whether the defenestration of Sajid Javid was by accident or by design. In the immediate aftermath of his resignation, Number 10 didn’t much object to suggestions that the prime minister engineered the chancellor’s removal by ambushing him with a demand to sack all his special advisers, a demand that the prime minister knew the other man could never accept. This version of events appalled a lot of Tory MPs and generated much finger-pointing at Dominic Cummings, who I won’t call the prime minister’s Rasputin because he likes the label too much. It then suited some of Mr Johnson’s friends to spin that it was not a cunning plan at all, but an innocent cockup. Not: ha, we screwed Javid. But: oops, we lost Saj. On this account, the chancellor reacted with more hostility than anticipated when, to...

Europe’s middle classes will only remain reconciled to the European Union if it becomes more integrated, with an effective defence policy, a larger budget and integrated capital markets, and is shorn of vetoes that slow decision-making, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said. Setting out his 10-year vision for Europe on Saturday, Macron said he still wanted to see the UK involved in defence, but urged European countries to recognise that in terms of social welfare, Europe had a different values to the US. The continent, he said, was reaching the hour of truth, the moment when it must decide about greater integration and commonality. He warned: “If the Franco-German tandem do not come up with a perspective for the middle classes, that will be a historic failure.” Referring to the weakness of the west, Macron admitted he was impatient, if not frustrated, to hear a German response to his call for a strategic dialogue on a more integrated Europe. Asking for a clear answe...