Sign up here to receive the daily news briefing in your inbox every morning with exclusive insight from the BrexitCentral team Boris Johnson to unveil Tory manifesto to “get Brexit done” Boris Johnson will today unveil his “early Christmas present” for Britain when he reveals the Conservative election manifesto to “unleash the country’s potential”. Ahead of the manifesto launch, Mr Johnson appealed to voters to “not let Corbyn steal your Christmas” by winning with Scottish Nationalist Party support on December 12. He said: “Imagine the Friday 13th horror show if the Corbyn-Sturgeon coalition of chaos is triumphant – more dither and delay, two more divisive referendums and economic ruin. We cannot let this nightmare before Christmas come to pass.” He said: “As families sit down to carve up their turkeys this Christmas, I want them to enjoy their festive-season free from the seemingly unending Brexit box-set drama. “That’s why my early Christmas present to the nation will be to bring the Brexit bill back before the festive break, and get parliament working for the people. “The Conservative manifesto, which I’m proud to launch today, will get Brexit done and allow us to move on and unleash the potential of the whole country.” Emphasising the importance of getting his Brexit deal passed after the Remainer Parliament forced the election by blocking it, he said: “Imagine the relief the whole nation will feel if we do this – if a Conservative majority is returned on 12 December so we can get Brexit done. Uncertainty ended, investment unlocked, a nation moving forward once again.” – Sunday Express Corbyn would take a sledgehammer to the economy, warns Boris Johnson as he prepares to launch the Tory manifesto in – Mail on Sunday No-deal planning will resume after the election if Tories win, senior Treasury minister says No-deal Brexit planning will resume after the general election if the Conservatives win, a senior Treasury minister has said. Rishi Sunak, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the Telegraph the Cabinet would continue its work to prepare for a hard Brexit because “there are all sorts of scenarios that might happen”. This comes despite Boris Johnson saying no deal will be off the table, and that the chances of Britain not having a trade deal in place by the end of 2020 are “absolutely zero”. Mr Sunak, who attends Cabinet, took part in nearly all the government’s daily no deal planning meetings, codenamed “XO” and chaired by Michael Gove. Asked if the no deal planning meetings could resume before Jan 31 – the date the UK is set to leave the EU – Mr Sunak said: “Yep.” He added: “We hope we come back with a majority, in that case we will want to get this deal through, so in theory no deal should not be something that needs to happen. But there are all sorts of scenarios that might happen.” – Telegraph (£) Jeremy Corbyn defends neutral Brexit referendum stance Jeremy Corbyn has defended his promise to stay neutral in a second EU referendum, saying the stance is a sign of “strength and maturity”. The Labour leader has drawn some criticism for saying he would not take sides in his proposed public vote on a new Brexit deal he would negotiate if he becomes prime minister. The Conservatives accused Mr Corbyn of “deciding to be indecisive” on the biggest issue facing the country, while Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson accused him of an “absence of leadership”. Asked about his stance on an election campaign stop in Sheffield, the Labour leader said he was offering a “sensible way forward” which can unite the country. “I think being an honest broker and listening to everyone is actually a sign of strength and a sign of maturity,” he said. “My role as the Labour prime minister would be to ensure that is carried out in a fair way, that the offers put are fair, and that I will carry out the result of that referendum. I think this is actually a sensible way forward that actually can bring people together.” – Sky News …as Nigel Farage blasts his stance Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has said the Labour election campaign is ‘bombing’, as polls show his new party is stripping Labour of votes in key battlegrounds. Mr Farage was speaking about Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to remain ‘neutral’ in a mooted second EU referendum as he visited market stallholders in Hartlepool today. He said the Labour leader’s stance, which he revealed on BBC’s Question Time on Friday, showed a ‘failure of leadership’. Speaking as he stopped for a drink, Mr Farage said: ‘Brexit is the defining issue of our day and the leader of the Labour Party is going to abstain from that. ‘I find that astonishing. It’s a failure of leadership. It’s also a reflection that he knows his own parliamentary party are Remainers… so he’s still trying to stay on that fence and it’s not working. ‘And I think, frankly, people would say just come down on one side or the other and I think my feeling is the Labour campaign is bombing and that last night made it worse.’ – Daily Mail Farage reveals Brexit Party rebrand plan… Nigel Farage has revealed plans to rebrand the Brexit Party as the Reform Party with an agenda of “draining the swamp” of Westminster politics. The Brexit Party leader has warned the political establishment that getting Brexit done is just the beginning and that his party’s long term future will be about reforming Britain’s broken political system. But in the short term, the veteran anti-Brussels campaigner has not ruled out taking on a role as an EU commissioner if asked by Boris Johnson. Asked whether he would take on the role he laughed but added: “They haven’t joked. Shame I know Brussels well.” Mr Farage was speaking to the Sunday Express on a visit to the key battleground seat of Dagenham and Rainham traditionally held by Labour but now a target for both the Brexit Party and Tories. But Mr Farage sees parallels between his party and where Labour was in 1900 when it emerged as a new party and eventually was in government by 1924. He said: “We might need to rebrand as the Reform Party. Definitely our appetite is for political reform. This country wants political reform. It’s sick of the whole bloody system. Sick the whole lot. We talk about [Washington as] the swamp and we are beginning to talk about Westminster in the same way.” – Sunday Express …and hints at resignation if Brexit Party fails at polls Nigel Farage has hinted that he could stand down as leader of the Brexit Party if it wins no seats at the election. As he unveiled manifesto pledges designed to reverse a recent slump in the polls Mr Farage said that he would continue to campaign for Brexit in “whatever role” he had. Asked if he would stay on as leader if the party failed to return any MPs to Westminster, he said that he was “absolutely committed to the complete reform of our political system . . . and whatever role it is in I’m going to go on campaigning for years to come for many of the things that are in that document [the manifesto].” – The Times (£) Opinium poll gives Conservatives 19-point lead with 47% vote share… The Conservatives have taken a commanding 19-point lead over Labour with less than three weeks to go before voters head to the polls, according to the latest Opinium poll for the Observer. The news comes as Boris Johnson launches the Tory election manifesto on Sunday, a moment seen by many Conservative MPs as the most dangerous of the campaign. It was Theresa May’s botched manifesto in 2017, which included an unpopular social care policy dubbed the “dementia tax”, that played a major part in the collapse in her poll ratings. The Tory share of the vote now stands at 47%, with Labour on 28% and the Lib Dems falling back to 12%. Also struggling is the Brexit party, which has collapsed to 3%. Underlying the Tory lead is the party’s success in attracting support from Leave voters: three-quarters of them say they would vote Conservative. The results suggest that the first week of televised debates between the party leaders has not made an immediate impact on the race. The Tory lead stood at 16 points last week, three points lower than now. However, Opinium is now taking into account the fact that some parties – primarily the Brexit party, which has pulled its candidates from Tory-held constituencies – are not running in every seat. Opinium also asked voters who they would back if all parties were running in their seat, which gave the Tories a 16-point lead – the same as last week’s poll. – Observer Seven Brexiteers at risk of losing seats – Sunday Times (£) …and a Deltapoll survey shows Tories on 43% and Labour on 30%… With 19 days until polling day, there is still no sign of the Labour surge which started at this point in the 2017 Election and wiped out Theresa May’s majority. Today’s Mail on Sunday Deltapoll gives Boris Johnson a 13-point lead, with the Tories on 43 per cent and Labour on 30 per cent, at the end of a week in which Jeremy Corbyn has set out his manifesto policies. Mr Johnson’s lead has shrunk by two per cent, but he will be heartened by the continuing collapse in Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party – now down to just three points and posing a much lower risk of splitting the Tory vote in their target marginals. Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats have rallied from 11 per cent to 16 per cent, but Tory strategists will not be too concerned as long as the party continues to vie with Labour for pro-Remain voters in marginal seats. What might alarm them is the narrowing in the leadership ratings: Mr Johnson is now only 24 points ahead of the Labour leader, down from 45 points at the start of the campaign, with a rating of minus ten. But voters are clear who they would rather spend Christmas with – 47 per cent say Mr Johnson, with just 27 per cent plumping for Mr Corbyn. – Mail on Sunday …as Electoral Calculus “poll of polls” suggests PM set to win a 64 seat majority Boris Johnson is on course for a 64-seat majority having successfully “squeezed” the Brexit party, new analysis claims. The Conservatives are currently polling at 42.8 per cent support, which looks set to deliver the party 357 seats. The poll of polls by Electoral Calculus found that the election seems to be split down Leave and Remain lines, taking in research from five different surveys from Nov 14 to 19, polling over 7,500 people. Martin Baxter, managing director of the political forecasting website, said: “On the Leave side, the Conservatives have successfully squeezed the Brexit party, notably after the stand-down of Brexit candidates in Conservative-held seats.” However, the research seems to suggest that Labour are “finding the going a bit harder on the Remain side”. Jeremy Corbyn’s party are currently polling at 30 per cent support, 11 points down from the 2017 election, losing them a predicted 55 seats. The Brexit Party are polling at just four per cent, and are not expected to pick up any seats according to the analysis. Meanwhile, the research shows the Liberal Democrats have doubled their support since the last election, when they secured 7.6 per cent of the vote. They are now polling at 14.8 per cent and look set to gain seven seats, taking their Commons total to 19. – Sunday Telegraph (£) Matthew Elliott: Leaving the EU is still the safer choice – and Boris is the man to make it happen Framed at home, I have a chunk of wall from the Vote Leave war-room, which will be familiar to anyone who watched Benedict Cumberbatch’s tour de force, Brexit: The Uncivil War. It is the piece of plasterboard where Dominic Cummings scrawled our key messages: “Europe Yes, EU No”, “Our money, our priorities”, “Take control” and “Safer choice”. Our campaign successfully argued that, in a vote with no status quo on the ballot paper, Leave was the safest of the two future paths. This general election also presents voters with only two realistic options. The first is a hung Parliament where Labour re-enters government with the support of the SNP, who will want a referendum on Scottish independence. The second is a Conservative majority and a mandate for the PM to ratify his deal and progress to the future trade talks and his domestic agenda. A Leave vote overturned via a second referendum, under the first of these scenarios, would massively prolong the uncertainty. The EU is markedly different from the bloc we campaigned to leave over three years ago. Without the UK at the table, the new European Commission, under Ursula von der Leyen, will pursue faster integration – including revisiting its long-desired aim of tax harmonisation and the phasing out of national vetoes to all EU tax policies. Brussels has previously attempted introducing a common consolidated tax base, standardisation of VAT, a levy on financial services and a new digital tax. Emboldened by Angela Merkel’s dwindling influence, Emmanuel Macron now favours a joint eurozone budget, the creation of a new EU finance minister role, and a body with oversight of EU-wide economic policy. And the EU’s increasingly protectionist tendencies were highlighted last month, when the US won the largest arbitration award in World Trade Organisation history against the EU, for illegal subsidies to Airbus. This is the EU we would remain trapped inside with a minority Labour/SNP government. Whereas a Tory majority would enable Parliament to approve the PM’s deal speedily, allowing our trade negotiators to begin formal trade talks with major economies. Progressing to phase two will give firms the signal they have been waiting for to release the investment they have had to withhold during this political impasse. – Matthew Elliott for the Sunday Telegraph (£) Daniel Hannan: Without the unbelievable modesty of one man, Brexit would have been impossible If you had been in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on Thursday, you’d have seen what looked like a quintessentially Establishment rite. The ancient church was full of Conservative MPs pausing their election campaigns to attend a memorial service for Lord Spicer. The drum corps from Spicer’s old school, Wellington, rapped out a sombre salute. His grandson sounded the Last Post. This, you’d have thought, is what it looks like when the Tory tribe masses to honour one of its chieftains. On paper, Michael Spicer was the most traditional of Conservatives: public school, Cambridge, a minister, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, a knight, a Privy Counsellor and a peer of the realm. But the bare facts of a man’s CV can be misleading. Under those well-cut grey suits breathed a fierce radical, a serial disrupter. When he was at Wellington, Spicer took so strongly against one of his headmaster’s decisions that he organised a prefects’ strike, forcing the man to back down. At Cambridge, he founded Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism (Pest), which stood for what were then considered highly liberal positions on social policy, though they are nowadays pretty mainstream. He went on to create the world’s first economics modelling consultancy. Always the innovator, he was the only Conservative MP whose ministerial career began when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and ended on the day she left office. As much as anyone, Spicer made Brexit happen. He led the Eurosceptic movement from the early Nineties until the 2005 general election, founding the European Research Group in 1993. You didn’t know that? I’m not surprised. The characteristic of his career was an almost unbelievable modesty. – Daniel Hannan MEP for the Sunday Telegraph (£) Martin Baxter: The Conservatives have successfully squeezed the Brexit Party Our poll of polls for The Telegraph shows a Conservative lead over Labour of thirteen per cent on average. That would be enough for a comfortable Conservative majority of around 64 seats. The numbers suggest that this is the Brexit election. Voters seem to have mostly sorted themselves into Leavers and Remainers and they are much readier to switch parties within those groups, than they are to change group. On the Leave side, the Conservatives have successfully squeezed the Brexit Party, notably after the stand-down of Brexit candidates in Conservative-held seats. The Conservatives now have the support of nine times as many voters as the Brexit Party. Labour are finding the going a bit harder on the Remain side. They have been partially successful in squeezing the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, but a significant core of those voters seems reluctant to support Jeremy Corbyn. The combined support of the Lib Dems and Greens, at around 18 per cent, is much larger than the gap between Labour and Conservatives. If Labour could win those votes, it would transform their position. Although an overall Conservative majority is quite likely, there are several plausible events on which the ship of Tory hopes could founder. There are still eighteen days until polling day, and the previous election showed that public opinion can change a lot during the campaign. If Labour can gain ground on the Conservatives, then the projected Conservative majority will shrink, and could disappear entirely. Secondly there is still some difference of opinion between pollsters. Although the average Conservative lead is 13 per cent, this disguises a chunky variation which runs from 10 per cent (ICM Research) to 18 per cent (Kantar). The former of these would give only a modest Conservative majority while the latter would herald a landslide. Lastly, there is the possibility of tactical voting. The scope for tactical voting on the Leave side has been diminished by the slump in Brexit Party support, but there is still considerable potential for it on the Remain side. Polling suggests that many Labour or Lib Dem voters are prepared to hold their noses and vote for the rival party in order to keep the Conservatives out. If this happens in large numbers, with around 50 per cent of pro-Remain supporters voting tactically, it could be enough to remove the Conservative majority. – Martin Baxter for the Sunday Telegraph (£) John Curtice: The three reasons why the Conservatives cannot yet assume they are home and dry This is beginning to look like an election the Conservatives should not lose. The party has gradually squeezed the life out of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. As many as two-thirds of those who voted Leave are now backing Boris Johnson and his Brexit deal. That has given the party a double-digit lead in the polls that, if it transpires in the ballot boxes, should be sufficient to give the Prime Minister a comfortable overall majority. So, what could possibly go wrong? There are three reasons why the Conservatives cannot as yet assume they are home and dry. First, the party still enjoys the support of nearly one in five of those who voted Remain in 2016. Without them the Conservative lead in the polls would disappear. Yet, in focusing on “get Brexit done” Mr Johnson has said little that seems likely to help keep them on board. So far, Tory support among this group has held steady during the campaign – though there has been no sign of any marked increase, unlike the position among Leave supporters. Many Tory Remainers are traditional pro-business Conservatives whose support for the party would not usually be in doubt. And the radical agenda put forward by Jeremy Corbyn this week will doubtless do little to attract them. Nevertheless, the polls suggest that, since the last election, more than one in five Tory Remainers have switched to the Liberal Democrats – and that that proportion could be much higher in some of the pro-Remain seats in London the Liberal Democrats are targeting. As a result, Tory support is still down on 2017 among Remain voters as a whole. Mr Johnson cannot afford for his support to fall much further among this group. The Conservatives’ seemingly comfortable poll lead would soon be reduced if the Remain vote were to coalesce behind Labour, rather than be split between Mr Corbyn’s party and the Liberal Democrats (who still have just under 30 per cent of the Remain vote). Labour have already had some success in that direction; there has been as much as a seven-point swing from the Liberal Democrats to Labour since the election was called. Only the parallel Conservative success in squeezing the Brexit Party vote has ensured that this swing to Labour has not eroded Mr Johnson’s lead. In any event, even if Remain support continues to be divided across the country as a whole, it might still coalesce locally if Remain voters vote tactically for whichever party seems best able to defeat the Conservatives in their constituency. Here there was a warning signal from Ipsos MORI last week. – Sir John Curtice for the Sunday Telegraph (£) Brexit in Brief ‘Wretched’ reason UK didn’t quit EU in October, says constitutional expert – Sunday Express