It’s not often that browsing the genteel aisles of Waterstones reminds you of madmen storming the Capitol in buffalo-horn helmets, but that’s the buzz I got as I briskly scanned the History shelves. I happened on a slender volume called How To Stop Brexit, written by Nick Clegg. I’d never heard of the book (a realisation that probably attaches to quite a lot of books by Lib Dem leaders) so I pulled it out, with curiosity. The text, I thought, must be a new thing, written since we finally Brexited and Clegg joined Facebook. But no: it was published in 2017. It seems I was holding a kind of revolutionary pamphlet, advising Remainers how they might ignore Britain’s largest ever democratic vote, and get it reversed, thus evading the will of the people.
Ignoring and reversing a democratic vote is particularly piquant right now as the world remembers, much more vividly, what happened in Washington DC a year ago: when angry Trumpites marched through the American capital, intent on annulling the US presidential election, and reinstalling The Donald.

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