Channel 4 News Political Editor gives his take on the latest news and gossip from the corridors of power in Westminster and beyond.
Gary Gibbon has been Channel 4 News Political Editor since 2005. He gives his take on the latest news and gossip from the corridors of power in Westminster and beyond.
Gary has worked on four general elections for Channel 4 News. His interview with Peter Mandelson in 2001 triggered the Northern Ireland Secretary's second resignation from the Cabinet.
In 2006, he won the Royal Television Society Home News Award with Jon Snow for the scoop on the Attorney General's Legal Advice on Iraq. Gary also revealed details of Blair's pre-War meeting with George Bush n 2008 and won the Political Studies Association Broadcast Journalist of the Year award.
A third runway for Heathrow has been on and off the government’s to-do list for decades. Today it was back on, after the cabinet approved controversial plans to expand the airport. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling told MPs that the “time for action is now”, with a Commons vote in the next few weeks. Tory MPs…
Looking back through the Commons archive on Heathrow expansion is a bracing experience. Alistair Darling at the Transport Department in 2003 warns that future generations won’t forgive governments “10 or 20 years from now” if they haven’t acted on airport expansion. Ministers like Philip Hammond complain about the damage to local communities if Heathrow is expanded. On and on it goes. Today was…
MPs will only get one day to discuss and vote on all 15 Lords amendments to the EU withdrawal bill, after the government decided to cram the entire bill into a single session. Critics have accused the Prime Minister of trying to “railroad” her plans through parliament.
“The next 10 days are going to be tempestuous,” one Conservative MP said. He was talking about the attempt to overturn all the Lords’ amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill on Tuesday next week. One of those defeats might not necessarily be on the substance of Brexit, but on the time allowed for debate (the first vote…
Theresa May has started a round of diplomacy with her own backbenchers ahead of critical votes on the EU Withdrawal bill. And another Brexit row is brewing after the Government published an attack on the EU for attempting to exclude Britain from the Galileo satellite project.
After a meeting with pro-Remain MPs threatening to rebel and defeat the government over Brexit, Mrs May met with pro-Brexit MPs also threatening to rebel and defeat the government over Brexit. Mrs May has to calculate which side really means it and which side she is more in agreement with. She must then discover whether…
The former Director of Vote Leave Dominic Cummings has tonight broken a period of silence to call Theresa May’s strategy on Brexit “botched ” and “stupid” . For good measure Mr Cummings sprays his customary political machine gun around some fellow Brexiteers too. He reserves his greatest ire for Mrs May, Philip Hammond and senior officials Olly Robbins…
The veteran MP and former London mayor, Ken Livingston has announced he’s resigned from the Labour party. His party membership has been suspended for the last two years after he claimed that Hitler supported Zionism. That prompted claims of anti-semitism that Mr Livingstone denies.
As recently as this Easter, the Labour leader’s team was signalling internally that it didn’t want to expel Ken Livingstone from the Labour Party. But the heat of the anti-Semitism row in the party and its impact on the local elections seems to have changed that calculation. Ken Livingstone’s continuing suspension was seen by some…
The thorny question of the Irish border after Brexit was on the agenda when the Prime Minister met the Irish Taoiseach at a summit today. Mr Varadkar warned that a possible Brexit deal could collapse if Britain doesn’t say how it plans to keep the border open. And if a collapse led to a hard…
Professor Jim Dornan is a world renowned gynaecologist living on Northern Ireland’s “Gold Coast,” the prosperous stretch of County Down peppered with picture window residences. He’s one of Northern Ireland’s great and the good. He’s celebrated in his field. He’s from a unionist background. As it happens, he’s also father of the actor Jamie Dornan,…
Fresh from his Washington trip, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has criticised Downing Street’s favoured proposal for a post-Brexit customs partnership. “Crazy” was the epithet he chose to describe the plan. On top of that, a vote in the House of Lords further threatens to derail the government’s hopes of a smooth journey to Brexit…
“Be kind to your kids, they choose your nursing home”. It’s this sentiment that best sums up some new ideas being touted today aimed at bridging Britain’s yawning inter-generational wealth gap. As millennials stuggle with high housing costs, less job security and lower pay, older peopIe often hang on to substantial sums of accumulated wealth.…
Brexiteers say they told No. 10 this was a line in the sand some weeks ago and only held their fire until the end of the local elections. They are now in full insurgent mode telling the Prime Minister in public what she can do with her Partnership idea. I mentioned last week how the Foreign…
The report doesn’t spell out the threat of what might go wrong if the parallel worlds and forgotten inter-dependence themes continue but you sense that they worry a mounting anger amongst younger voters and disenchantment with the political system is not a political desirable even if you can’t be sure how far and how quickly it travels.