Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The question a second referendum must ask

Mostly I stay confident the Prime Minister’s team are playing a weak hand badly, but my confidence does occasionally falter. Then Downing Street does something really stupid (like expelling 21 of its own parliamentary party) and I’m reassured that these people aren’t clever at all.

This happened last weekend when I opened my Sunday Times to find there a personal attack on Sir Oliver Letwin by ‘senior sources’. These sources had scoffed to journalists that when, before the Commons vote on his amendment, Letwin was at Downing Street to discuss it, he was taking ‘conspiratorial phone calls’ on his mobile phone, giving him ‘instructions’ from David Pannick. Lord Pannick is the eminent QC whom Sir Oliver has sensibly consulted for legal advice. ‘One witness’ (claimed these sources) said Letwin walked through No. 10 ‘giggling like an eight-year-old and had to keep calling Pannick on his mobile to find out what he was allowed to do’. Lord Pannick ‘furiously denied the claims’, insisting he’d had no phone conversations with Letwin during that time, and adding that it would anyway not have been wrong if he had. Quite.

I experienced a moment of indignation on Letwin’s behalf, followed by a more cheering reflection: Downing Street is not thinking straight. Agree or disagree with Sir Oliver, few who know him see him as less than a deeply serious, capable and decent chap. How was sneering at him in the Sunday news-papers going to help bring him back onside for the ‘meaningful vote’, whenever it came?

A stray thought, anyway, from a columnist the drift of whose thinking is turning to the wording of a confirmatory referendum. You may think me premature: by the time you read this the Johnson deal may have passed the Commons and be proceeding to the slew of consequential legislation that would be needed.

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