al-Baghdadi, luvvies and affordable housing: the worst predictions of the EU referendum

It’s that time of the week again, when I promised to round up the worst contributions to the Brexit debate.

The Prime Minister got the week off to a good start by claiming that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the famed head of ISIS, is a supporter of ‘Vote Leave’.  In fact the putative world Caliph has yet to come out for either side in the UK referendum, though the attacks in Paris last November suggest that the EU’s weak external borders and absent internal borders have been working out nicely for the terrorist chief.  As a result the smart money is on al-Baghdadi coming out for ‘Remain’, though I’m sure nobody in the ‘Leave’ camp would make such a tasteless claim.

A day later Michael Heseltine emerged as the PM’s hit-man by claiming in a BBC interview that Boris Johnson’s behaviour in the EU referendum campaign has been ‘preposterous, obscene’ and that he would be ‘very surprised’ if Johnson could become Prime Minister after this.  Whether this outburst has anything to do with Heseltine’s life-long advocacy for the EU, including an insistence that the UK join the Euro, is unknown.  The ostensible cause was what Heseltine deemed an inappropriate reference to the Second World War (an event of which Heseltine pretended Johnson had either not heard, or actively approved).  I suppose the unforgivable nature of Johnson’s reference stands in stark contrast to the entirely appropriate and dignified effort by Heseltine’s master, a week earlier, to posthumously recruit all the dead of the Second World War onto the ‘Remain’ side in the current referendum.

Heseltine also questioned Johnson’s judgement by declaring ‘I think that every time he makes one of these extraordinary utterances, people in the Conservative Party will question whether he now has the judgement for that role.’