Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
I am going to wrap this up now. Here a few of tonight’s highlights at a glance:
Theresa May tells the British People ‘I’m on your side” ...which side is that? Leave, Remain, or Resign?
The summary of Beth Rigby, deputy political editor of Sky News, is blistering:
May’s national address badly misjudged. She has further angered the very people she needs to win over, MPs. Never before has the power of persuasion and art of compromise been so sorely needed and so clearly missing
Revolt by pro-Brexit cabinet ministers forces PM to request only three-month extension from EU
Theresa May will ask for only a short extension to article 50 delaying Brexit by less than three months, after a revolt among pro-leave cabinet ministers and MPs that threatened her premiership.
PM forced to seek extension of article 50 as No 10 admits it is too late to leave with a deal
Theresa May will be forced to write to EU leaders on Wednesday and beg them to delay Brexit, with her cabinet deadlocked over the best way out of what Downing Street now concedes is a “crisis”.
The government had maintained until the last possible moment that Brexit could go ahead as planned on 29 March or after a brief “technical extension”.
President’s son and US national security adviser in apparent coordinated intervention
Donald Trump Jr and the US national security adviser, John Bolton, spoke out over Brexit on Tuesday in what appeared to be a coordinated intervention by the White House into British domestic politics.
Both the US president’s son and Bolton attacked British political leadership after Theresa May said she would ask the EU for a delay to the UK’s exit from the European Union; in line with parliament’s wish.
Britain’s aid budget must be about altruism, not narrow self-interest say the Rt Rev John Arnold and the Rt Rev Dr Christopher Cocksworth
Your article (Aid budget: Ex-minister joins calls for shake-up, 18 March) on the report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance offers an opportunity to reflect again on what we want and expect from our government.
In the suffering of men, women and children caught up in conflict, dealing with the worst effects of climate change or leaving their homes in search of a safer future, we see the face of Jesus Christ.
The Hong Kong MTR’s ‘rail plus property’ model keep fares cheap and makes the company completely self-sustaining. Could loss-making metro systems in other cities learn lessons?
“Once we build the railway, the value of land rises and we capture the increase in value,” says Jacob Kam, managing director and soon-to-be chief executive, of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation.
Prime minister likely to have to request long article 50 extension after Bercow intervenes
Theresa May’s government has been plunged into constitutional chaos after the Speaker blocked the prime minister from asking MPs to vote on her Brexit deal for a third time unless it had fundamentally changed.
Backing calls from the TaxPayers’ Alliance to face down ‘NGO cartels’ shows a profound misunderstanding of how the aid system works
Priti Patel is not known for her transparency or her subtlety.
The former international development secretary was forced to resign over misleading prime minister Theresa May over an undeclared “family holiday” to Israel that – among other things – saw her fail to tell the British embassy that she would be meeting with Israeli politicians and visiting the occupied Golan Heights, against all British government conventions for a serving minister.
I’m just back from the Downing Street lobby briefing. And it was a good illustration of the old rule that the length a briefing is in inverse proportion to its usefulness. (That’s because, if the reporters get a story, they want to wrap up quickly so they can file. If the briefing drags on, that’s because people keep asking questions in the hope that they might eventually get a useable reply.)
Here is the main takeaway.
Arriving at the EU foreign affairs council in Brussels this morning, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, said that he hoped there would be a third vote on Theresa May’s Brexit deal tomorrow. But, he added, “we need to be comfortable that we’ll have the numbers.”
He said there were “some cautious signs of encouragement” in that Tories who have opposed the deal up to now, like Norman Lamont and Esther McVey, now want to see it passed. “But there is a lot more work to do,” Hunt added.
The Kyle-Wilson amendment was drawn up by two Labour MPs, Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, who consulted with the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, over the precise wording.
Leak shows Brussels planning for PM’s defeat and making efforts to prevent her deal being unpicked
The EU is war-gaming for the fall of Theresa May amid a complete collapse in confidence in the prime minister after a week of chaos over Brexit, a leaked document seen by the Observer reveals.
In the run-up to a crucial summit of EU leaders where May will ask for a delay to Brexit, Brussels fears there is little hope that she will succeed in passing her deal this week and is preparing itself for a change of the guard in Downing Street.
Party’s leader in European parliament says it must be prepared to field candidates
The Conservative party has contacted all its MEPs to ask them to consider running for election in May if the prime minister’s Brexit deal is defeated on Tuesday.
Ashley Fox, the party’s leader in the European parliament, contacted MEPs to ask them to think about their options in the event that Theresa May’s deal fails again.
The Democratic Unionist party is to continue intensive talks to try to reach an agreement to allow it to back Theresa May’s Brexit deal, with discussions focusing on domestic legal guarantees that Northern Ireland will have no regulatory divergence with the rest of the UK.
Downing Street is hopeful that the support of the DUP is key to unlocking the backing of many Conservative Brexiters when May brings her deal to the House of Commons for the third time.
The Irish premier, Leo Varadkar, has said London needs to tell the EU about what purpose an extension would serve and how long it would last.
Varadkar said he welcomed Westminster’s vote to extend Article 50 as it reduces the likelihood of a cliff edge, no-deal Brexit at the end of the month.
There seems to be two emerging options – ratification of the withdrawal agreement followed by a short extension into the summer, or a much longer extension that would give the UK time and space to decide what they want to do, including considering options that had been taken off the table like participation in the customs union and single market.
I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response. This matter will be now discussed further at next week’s European Council meeting and hopefully we will have more clarity from London in the meantime about their intentions.
Why EUCO should allow an extension, if the UK gov and her majority in the House of Commons are not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock ? https://t.co/lj1Tm4kmIg
Cable has now released a statement on his impending departure:
I indicated last year that, once the Brexit story had moved on and we had fought this year’s crucial local elections in 9,000 seats across England, it would be time for me to make way for a new generation. I set considerable store by having an orderly, business-like, succession unlike the power struggles in the other parties.
So I wanted you, our members, to know that, assuming Parliament does not collapse into an early general election, I will ask the party to begin a leadership contest in May.
Gender-specific “Frauenticket” will be 21% cheaper than usual and available on 18 March in stunt to flag German pay gap
Women travelling on Berlin’s metro, buses or trams will pay 21% less than men next Monday in a stunt to boost the visibility of Germany’s gaping gender pay gap.
The city’s public transport operator, BVG, said its “Frauenticket” will be available on 18 March only, to mark Equal Pay Day in Germany. Under the slogan “Mind the pay gap”, it said its cut-price ticket was intended to flag the 21% difference between men and women’s average earnings, one of the biggest gender pay gaps in Europe.
Folks, it’s time to wrap up the blog for the night.
I’ll be back in a few hours to launch a new Politics live blog, bringing you all of Thursday’s Brexit and other political news. A reminder of what’s on the agenda for Thursday:
There have been some remarkable turns of phrase from commentators and politicians in their attempts to capture just what exactly has gone on in British politics in the last few days.
This is a turd of a deal, which has now been taken away and polished, and is now a polished turd. But it might be the best turd that we’ve got.
The House of Commons was a Benny Hill chase on acid, running through a Salvador Dali painting in a spaceship on its way to infinity.
A vague, and vain attempt to make sense of the great mad nights in British political history.
In 2012, Eliot Higgins began blogging about the news from his front room in Leicester. Seven years later, his investigative website Bellingcat has been responsible for revealing key aspects of some of the world’s biggest stories. And: Jonathan Freedland on the result of Theresa May’s meaningful vote
Eliot Higgins first became known for his investigations into the Syrian civil war, which he published on his blog Brown Moses. Higgins then went on to found Bellingcat, an investigative website that uses open source tools to expose the truth behind global news stories.
Higgins, who is the subject of a new documentary, tells Anushka Asthana how he and his international team of volunteers have gone about investigating some of the biggest stories of recent times, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK. He examines the importance of this type of work in an era of fake news and the impact it has had on his professional and personal life.
Boris Johnson, the Brexiter former foreign secretary, is speaking in the debate now. He says he had hoped that the EU would make the wholly reasonable changes the UK wanted. But the EU refused to do that.
Like Adam and Eve, they sowed a fig leaf that failed to cover the embarrassment of the UK, he says.
This deal has now reached the end of the road. If it is rejected tonight, I hope that it will be put to bed.
British PM secures ‘legally binding changes’ in Strasbourg talks with Jean-Claude Juncker
Theresa May has called for MPs to “come together” to back her deal after claiming to have secured the legally binding changes parliament wanted to ensure the EU cannot trap the UK in the Irish backstop and a permanent customs union.
But within minutes of the start of a late-night joint press conference in Strasbourg, those words rang hollow, as Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, conceded the EU had not agreed to the prime minister’s central demand.
Next month’s poll is a referendum on a prime minister who has triumphed by fuelling divisions
Israel is not a state of all its citizens, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu declared on Sunday. His words should be shocking, but in truth they made explicit the message of last year’s nation state law, rendering Palestinians in Israel second-class citizens. They would be shameful if he were capable of shame. Mr Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election in the face of a bribery and fraud indictment shows he is not. He has prospered by fostering division.
This latest act of cynical bigotry is simply par for the course. The same is true of Mr Netanyahu’s awful turn to far-right parties for support. Mr Netanyahu orchestrated the merger of the racist anti-Arab Jewish Power and the pro-settler Jewish Home parties to help them pass the electoral threshold and him put together a coalition. Jewish Power includes followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in Israel and is designated by the US and EU as a terror organisation.