Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 March 2019

There is an obvious solution to the Brexit problem. It is based on a recognition that we want out and that the EU leaders want the moral high ground. Give it to them. Get them to expel us from the European Union. It cannot be too hard for them to persuade the ECJ, or some new body invented for the purpose, to declare the United Kingdom in breach of ‘European values’, and kick us out. Then we would leave with nothing at all, except our liberty. We might even bribe them for the privilege. As it is, we are committed by Mrs May to paying £39 billion, but that is over several years, and involves much ‘doubt, hesitation and pain’. Why not offer them, say, £10 billion on the nail, in return for them punishing us? It would be a bargain for both sides. If only I’d thought of it sooner.

This column has, in the past, accused Mrs May of a lack of imagination. Now I take it all back. On Monday, in cabinet, she said she had to rule out the no-deal option because it posed ‘a threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom’. This makes her the most dangerously imaginative person ever to have held the office of prime minister.

On Tuesday night, Boris Johnson was ‘in conversation’ with me at a Daily Telegraph event at Methodist Central Hall. As soon as he stood up to make an introductory speech, a trick of the sound system meant that I — alone in the hall — could not hear what he was saying. So it was only when I opened the next morning’s paper that I found his plangent passage about how this week, ‘Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties… and beating the hedgerows with staves,’ but now would be doing none of these things because Brexit was postponed.

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