Rachel Sylvester of the Times is a brilliant journalist. I am proud to have given her her first Lobby job. But I cannot help smiling at her columns as she searches desperately for signs that a party which she thinks virtuous — centre-left, pro-European, with ‘open’ values — could rise from the dead (this, literally, is her metaphor in Easter week). Rachel’s current candidate for Messiah is David Miliband, who lives in New York. She quotes ‘one friend’ of his as saying, ‘David is still attracted to Britain.’ That is big-hearted of him, but the bigger question is, ‘Is Britain still attracted to David?’ One must recognise how deeply Blairism lies in ashes before one can find a phoenix to rise from them. The first step, I suggest, is to forget about stopping Brexit. It is as futile as trying to stop black majority rule in Rhodesia in the 1960s: there may be some difficult consequences, but the change has to happen. A Unilateral Declaration of Dependence (UDD), trying to arrest Brexit and maintain Brussels rule would be no use. Rachel dimly perceives this. ‘Opposing Brexit would be part of the new movement’s agenda, but not its whole identity,’ she writes. The Remainer politician with first-mover advantage will be the one who declares that Brexit cannot be stopped, and proposes a lovely, moderate future all the same, instead of claiming the country has none. He/she has been amazingly slow to come forward.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes, which appears in this week’s Spectator
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