MLA: ‘I was in the same year as Prince William and Kate, but we mixed in different circles'
From his time studying at St Andrews to working at Number Ten during the Brexit referendum, SDLP's leader of the opposition at Stormont, Matthew O'Toole, reflects on his journey to Parliament Buildings and sets out his hopes for future
Matthew O'Toole took the scenic route to a career in politics, but says building a better Ireland for his three children remains one of his greatest motivations.
He's worked as a barman, a journalist, a Downing Street press officer, and now an elected politician and leader of the SDLP's opposition team at Stormont.
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The Independent
11 hours ago
- The Independent
Quicker queues at EU passport checks? Simon Calder's assessment of claims that millions of Brits will win access to e-gates
British travellers to Europe have never had it so good: that is the narrative from the government ever since the UK-EU 'reset'. Ministers from Sir Kier Starmer downwards have been happy for holidaymakers to infer that they will have a better experience at European Union borders this summer – and that the UK government deserves credit for improving our travelling lives. Much of that optimism is based on British citizens being able use passport e-gates. But what is the reality? Some background: after the 2016 decision to leave the European Union, Boris Johnson's government negotiated for the 'Venezuela outcome' as far as British travellers are concerned. We chose to became 'third-country nationals' – a designation proudly shared with many others, including Venezuelans. The practical consequences for British holidaymakers crossing borders were clear, because the UK helped create the European rules. Previously only one check was necessary when travelling between the UK and the Schengen area (the rest of the EU minus Ireland, plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland): that the passport was valid and that it belonged to the holder. E-gates are brilliant at this. They compare the information encoded in a passport with the traveller's face to verify that the document belongs to that individual. They are also linked to a central database to confirm the document's validity. The post-Brexit changes that the UK requested, and to which Brussels agreed, include: Having our passports stamped on the way in and out of Europe Giving up access to the fast track for citizens of the EU and wider Schengen area Having border guards check we have not outstayed our 90-day welcome Each individual border transaction therefore takes much more time, leading to extremely long queues if border resources are thin. The most recent half-term was miserable for thousands of families, whether flying in to the Spanish island of Tenerife or flying out of Faro in Portugal. New arrivals and homeward-bound passengers experienced two-hour waits at times. This was gruelling for new arrivals – and expensive for some departing travellers, who missed their flights despite having arrived in good time at the airport. Faro airport, at least, will improve – with British travellers now able to use e-gates. But that is only part of the story. These are the key UK government claims, and my assessment of each. 'Millions more Brits arriving in the Algarve are set to benefit from e-gates ahead of the summer holidays' Source: Cabinet Office press release. Assessment: Configuring e-gates at the Portuguese airport to connect to UK government systems will speed things up a bit for many British passengers. Border staff will no longer need to verify the traveller's identity. All good, then? Not quite. Families with young children will still need to queue to see an official. And after passing through the e-gate, every British passport must be stamped by a human border guard. In theory he or she should also check that the traveller has not been in the Schengen area for more than 90 days out of the past 180 days. The claims for Faro airport get increasingly ambitious: '[E-gate access] will speed up journeys for the approximately 10 million British travellers who use the airport each year' Source: Prime minister 's official spokesperson. Assessment: Complete tosh. Around 2.5 million UK citizens visit Portugal in a typical year. Counting flying in and out, that is 5 million border crossings – covering Lisbon, Porto and Madeira airports as well as Faro, plus those who arrive by land and sea. But let us generously assume that half of those British visitors are using Faro airport. That is still one-quarter of the figure given by No 10. I have told the Cabinet Office this, and asked to see its working. Now let us look at some wider assertions … 'British holidaymakers will be able to use more e-gates in Europe, ending the dreaded queues at border control' Source: Government announcement. Assessment: The first part of this claim is demonstrably true. Besides Faro allowing UK visitors to go through e-gates, many other European authorities are moving in that direction because, as mentioned, it is an extremely efficient way of handling part of the border bureaucracy. Each EU nation makes its own decisions on how to operate its borders. Some are choosing to introduce e-gates for third-country nationals in order to accelerate the arrival and departure process. The second part of the assertion is fanciful. While 'dreaded' is not quantified, it is reasonable to say anything longer than a half-an-hour is unwelcome. There will doubtless be squeezes in arrivals halls over the summer that result in hour-long queues. At Tenerife South airport, at times in summer nine inbound flights from the UK are scheduled within a single half-hour. If they keep to schedule, there will be a sudden influx of over 1,600 people – the vast majority of whom have British, rather than EU, passports. Resourcing to allow swift processing for peaks such as that would be unreasonably expensive for border authorities. 'The Prime Minister has been clear that there should be no reason why European countries cannot go further and faster on this now' Source: Foreign Office minister Baroness Chapman of Darlington, speaking in the House of Lords. That's a big claim. European countries may well have good reasons for not going 'further and faster' on rolling out e-gates for British holidaymakers. They may wish to commit money and effort to things that will benefit their citizens, rather than helping the UK clear up one of the many messes brought about by the British decision to leave the EU.
Telegraph
14 hours ago
- Telegraph
Sarah Vine's memoir is fascinating, embarrassing and fundamentally tragic
The 'misery memoir ' was a genre one thought peculiar to the early years of this century. However, with this strange book, Sarah Vine, formerly Mrs Michael Gove, has resurrected it. Its title, How Not to Be a Political Wife, seems flippant, and one expects, when beginning it, to experience some sort of extended stunt. What one gets is in turns interesting, embarrassing and, fundamentally, mildly tragic. Ms Vine's contention is that she married a journalist and ended up with a politician; that politics is horrible; and it ruined her marriage and, to a great extent, her life and her children's. How far this is true must be up to each reader to judge. Because of the detail into which the author chooses to go, it seems to this reader that certain factors had shaped her life and her character long before her husband arrived. But first, the interesting stuff. I must come clean: I have long been a friend of Michael Gove, admire his considerable political and intellectual talents, and feel he has had a deeply unfair press. The service this book does to history is to put the record about him straight. First, he was vilified by David Cameron and his cronies for supporting Brexit in the 2016 referendum. It was, as Ms Vine emphasises correctly, a battle between a man with principles and a group of careerists who hardly knew the meaning of the word. Second, he was reviled by much of the Conservative party for his so-called 'betrayal' of Boris Johnson just after the referendum, when Johnson, running for the leadership, was showing precious little loyalty to him. All Gove had done was realise, before it was too late, that Johnson was the incompetent liar, charlatan and trickster his grotesque premiership proved him to be. I and others who knew what went on have defended Gove for years for this reason; it is good that this book puts it all on the record. I hope Theresa May, whose apparently saintly personal reputation also gets the kicking it deserves for her outrageous treatment of Gove in sacking him for 'disloyalty', reads this part of the book at least: maybe she will find a belated sense of shame, though one doubts it. The book also, though, shows just what a cesspit our politics became in the 14 years of Conservative rule from 2010 to 2024. What fills cesspits filled a succession of administrations. Cameron, the first of a succession of unremittingly dire prime ministers, was the ultimate cronyist. He adopted this method of management because his political life was, as Ms Vine definitively shows, all about him and his survival in office; never about what he could do for the country. As some of us wrote at the time, Cameron's addiction to his yes-men and women prevented him from calling on some of the older, and wiser, members of his party who might have given him advice superior to that of his cronies. This, too, is made plain in this book. Cameron's narcissism also made it impossible for him to see a link between his disloyalty to Gove – whom he demoted from Education Secretary despite his being the most successful holder of that office in recent memory – and Gove's decision that his principles about the EU might override any personal loyalty from him that Cameron merited. The embarrassing aspect of this book is the detail into which Ms Vine goes about her background: her being loathed at school, her mental and physical health and the effect her ex-husband's career had on her and their children. Describing her upbringing she portrays her father as a monster. In her acknowledgements at the end of the work she begins with 'my father, for f------ me up so brilliantly'. If we haven't realised it by this stage, what we have just read turns out to be a book by the thinking man's Meghan Markle. It has taken 'courage' (as she says in another acknowledgement: and I am sure it did) to lay all this personal upset bare, and doubtless she has found it therapeutic. Will her own children thank her, in years to come, for going into such detail about what they unquestionably suffered because of their father's prominence, and all the unhappiness it brought them? Doubtless Ms Vine thought she was being cathartic on her own account, and vicariously on theirs. Only time will tell. And then there's the mildly tragic aspect. Ms Vine exposes a chip on her shoulder the size of Yorkshire. Wounded deeply by her dear friend Samantha Cameron – about whom, to her credit, she says no bad word – turning on her viciously at a dinner party around the time of Brexit, she harps on about the class differences between her and the Camerons and their pretty repulsive cast of chums. She should pull herself together: 'Dave's' father was a stockbroker, not the Duke of Devonshire. It's indicative of the lack of a sense of perspective in this book, and which one fears is typical of the Markle school of thought. Most tragic of all is Ms Vine's reference to a 'friendship group' that abandoned them when her husband stood up for himself and his beliefs. I am not sure I have ever met anyone over the age of 14 who has a 'friendship group': but it's just another way of saying that the Goves were sucked in to the bunch of cronies around Cameron, though never so deeply that they could not be expelled again, in what reads like an act of social projectile vomiting. The whole thing is repellently infantile, and it's depressing that impostors such as the Cameron clique were ever allowed near power. I suspect no man reading this book (and I must plead guilty on that front) will perceive all its nuances, because it is (again from its title) presumably aimed mostly at women. One certainly rarely senses that Ms Vine is writing with the idea that a man – other, perhaps, than her ex-husband, about whom also she says no bad word – is among her readership. Perhaps other wives who have suffered because of their husband's careers will obtain something valuable from it. It is not a particularly literary book (if you want that in this context, read Sasha Swire 's diaries about the same period) but it will prove undeniably useful to those unfortunate historians who have to write about this ghastly period in decades to come. Otherwise, Ms Vine might have been far better advised not to write it at all.
ITV News
16 hours ago
- ITV News
Badenoch: 'We will likely need to leave' the ECHR
Kemi Badenoch says she believes Britain will "likely need to leave" the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Delivering a speech on Friday, the Conservative leader said she was launching a review into Britain's membership of the treaty, which underpins human rights law. "I have always said, that if we need to leave the convention, we should - and having now considered the question closely, I do believe that we will likely need to leave," she said. But Badenoch insisted she was launching the review to prevent a similar situation to Brexit: "We saw that holding a referendum without a plan to get Brexit done, led to years of wrangling and endless arguments... We cannot go through that again," she told reporters. The ECHR was a dividing issue in last year's Conservative leadership election, with Badenoch's rival Robert Jenrick championing the idea that Britain should pull out. Critics of the treaty want to leave it because they believe it has been used to frustrate attempts to deport migrants from Britain. Hitting out at the influence of the treaty on the British legal system, Badenoch said it has become a "sword used to attack democratic decisions and common sense". "This use of litigation as a political weapon is what I am calling lawfare. It isn't just damaging our security, it's also damaging our prosperity", she told reporters. The commission looking into leaving the ECHR will be led by Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, the shadow attorney general. Five 'common sense' questions will be asked by the investigation, branded a series of 'tests' by Mrs Badenoch. These include whether the UK can 'lawfully remove foreign criminals and illegal migrants to their home country or elsewhere — even if they have family here or claim they could be at risk if sent home', and if the Government can stop veterans being 'pursued by vexatious legal attacks'. The Commission will also look at whether British citizens receive preference ahead of migrants for 'scarce public services', if prison sentences 'actually reflect Parliament's intentions', and how to prevent 'endless legal challenges' to planning applications. The Conservative leader will set out whether she plans to leave the ECHR at the Tory conference in October, when the investigation will report back. Elsewhere, the head of the Council of Europe warned that rising migration may result in changes to how the ECHR operates. Alain Berset, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, told The Times: 'We are witnessing a world where things are changing rapidly. 'It is accelerating. We see this, and it means that it is normal that we must also adapt to this. We need adaptation. We need discussion about the rules that we want to have, and there is no taboo.'
