Remain

According to archaeologists and all the papers last week, the 11th-century villagers of Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, used to mutilate their dead, chopping off their heads and breaking their legs to minimise the danger of zombie resurrection. ‘Imagine being afraid,’ I chortled while reading this, ‘that the undead might put you in mortal danger!’ Whereupon I flicked forward a couple of pages and came across Michael Howard’s plan to defend Gibraltar by sending a gunboat. Personally, I’m against the idea of war with Spain. Although I say that cautiously, because we Remoaners must not hold back the will of the people. Indeed, such is the way of things these days,

In an age when people pride themselves on their cynicism, it’s almost touching to remember that one of the most powerful forces in politics is still optimism. We may routinely dismiss politicians as self-serving vermin, but when the time comes, we generally choose the self-serving vermin who tell the best story of a brighter tomorrow. Better a smiling cockroach than a gloomy one. Optimism is one of the great fault-lines that run beneath the Brexit debate, one that helps explain why the Brexiteers are making the running and why those who still stand opposed to Brexit still have a lot to learn. Simply, the Brexiteers are setting the pace because

On this week’s bumper episode, we say farewell to the EU, look at the most high-profile mismatch in boxing history, and speak to two living legends: actor and director Simon Callow and explorer John Hemming. First, with the trigger pulled on the Brexit starting gun, we gathered to reflect on the process so far and how divorce proceedings are likely to go. In this week’s magazine, James Forsyth advocates for ‘a Brexit that works for everyone’ and he joins the podcast to discuss this, along with Fraser Nelson and Hugo Dixon, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Remain-supporting InFacts. In James’s piece, he imagines the future, writing that: “On 29 March 2019 the Queen should

On 23 June last year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.  As I have said before, that decision was no rejection of the values we share as fellow Europeans.  Nor was it an attempt to do harm to the European Union or any of the remaining member states.  On the contrary, the United Kingdom wants the European Union to succeed and prosper.  Instead, the referendum was a vote to restore, as we see it, our national self-determination. We are leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe – and we want to remain committed partners and allies to our friends across the

John Bercow is a curious little poppet. He’s come a long way since his spotty days of undergraduate hangem’n’floggery in the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation banned by Norman Tebbit for being too right-wing. Today he’s more likely to be found welcoming one acronym or another to Parliament or accosting the word ‘progressive’ and roughing it up.  Bercow, now handsomely perched in the gods of the liberal establishment, has defied the axiom that we become more conservative as we grow older. (Then again, if you start out in the Monday Club and keep going right, you’ll end up in Rhodesia by Friday.)  We need to understand this change of heart

The rearguard Remain campaign is now living in a parallel universe. In the past 24 hours we have heard endless whining about Sir Ivan Rogers’ departure and how it will mean disaster for our trading relationship with the EU. We’ve had more claims that inflation is going to surge. The poor Christmas results put out by Next have been taken as a sign of a post-Brexit economic slump when they are really just part of a change in the patterns of retailing, with online sales growing at the expense of those in shops. Meanwhile, come yet more genuine good news on the economy. Yesterday, the Markit/CIPS Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI)

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: Our leader article from June, in which the Spectator backed Brexit The Spectator has a long record of being isolated, but right. We supported the north against the slave-owning south in the American civil war at a time when news-papers (and politicians) could not see past corporate interests. We argued for the decriminalisation of homosexuality a decade before it happened, and were denounced as the ‘bugger’s bugle’ for our troubles. We alone supported Margaret Thatcher when she first stood for the Tory leadership. And when Britain last held a referendum on Europe, every newspaper in

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Matthew Parris’s article, written two weeks before the referendum, in which he called on Spectator readers to vote ‘Remain’ Like almost everyone, I’ve piled angrily into this fight. But as the debate nears resolution I feel ashamed of all my furious certainties. In the end, none of us knows, and we shouldn’t pretend to. So I’ll try now to express more temperately six thoughts that persist as the early rage subsides. From the first three you’ll see that I’m beginning to understand that for many the EU is now a whipping boy. ‘Europe’ has become

It’s rare that an opinion poll brings a tear to my eye. But this week one did. It was the CNN/ComRes poll published on Monday. It found that 47 per cent of British adults would vote Leave if the EU referendum was held today, and 45 per cent would vote Remain (eight per cent said they didn’t know how they’d vote). This means, as the CNN headline put it, that ‘Six months on, Brits stand by EU referendum decision’. Leavers haven’t budged. Regrexit is a myth. Even after months of being branded as idiots, libelled as racists, and charged with bringing about a hike in hate crime and possibly the

Now that almost six months have passed since the EU referendum, might it be time for old enemies to find common ground? Matthew Parris and Matt Ridley, two of the most eloquent voices on either side of the campaign, meet in the offices of The Spectator to find out. MATTHEW PARRIS: Catastrophe has not engulfed us yet, it’s true. But I feel worse since the result, rather than better. I thought that, as in all hard-fought campaigns, you get terribly wound up and depressed when you lose. Then you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. But my animosities — not just towards the Brexit argument,

Wounded Remainers in Britain and the Hillary set in the US love banging on about ‘post-truth politics’. Lies are everywhere, they say, falling from Trump’s weird mouth, plastered on the side of Brexit buses. And apparently these lies invaded voters’ minds and made us do the unimaginable thing of voting against the EU and failing to vote for Hillary. We was hoodwinked by falsehoods! All of which would be a tad more convincing if it wasn’t for one thing: it’s actually the Remainer and Hillary cliques that have gone full post-truth, even descending into the cesspit of conspiracy theory. Yesterday in the House of Commons, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw did

So, the Remoaners have at last got a piece of economic news they can try to crow about – the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose last month from 0.9 per cent to 1.2 per cent, sparking a round of ‘I told you so’s’ on Twitter – one even describes it as a ‘cost of living crisis’. One suspects he wasn’t around in 1975 – incidentally the year that Britain voted to stay in what was then the Common Market – when inflation topped out 26 per cent. Except the CPI figures don’t really tell you what the Remain lobby wants to tell us at all. Remember how a few weeks

Trying to write the first draft of history on the EU referendum and the leader-ship mess that followed had both its dramatic and its comic elements. My phone never stopped ringing with Eurosceptics keen to tell me why their contribution to a meeting that had previously escaped my notice was the decisive factor in securing victory. But when a vote is so close — 52 per cent to 48 per cent — then it would not have taken much to push the result the other way. Donald Trump’s victory adds some credence to the idea that Brexit was pre–ordained, part of a wave of history. But the campaign turned on