Honourable Surrender

Many have tried and failed to define what it is to be British but we know, instinctively, what that sense of belonging to place, family and society means in terms of well-being and sense of security. Britishness is very difficult to quantify but it is there all the same. Struggling with the same concept, Churchill asked, in 1940, “people ask why we fight on,” and then answered himself, rhetorically, “they should soon find out if we stopped.”

Today, without an enemy at the gate, it is easier for professional politicians to ignore the indefinable and frame their arguments around evidence, however relevant that may be. I have often complained that politicians seem incapable of making difficult moral judgements preferring, instead, to rely on process and evidence provided by “independent” bodies. As Charles Moore pointed out recently, the word independent has become interchangeable with unelected.

So I fear for the Brexit process. I understand that in cosy one-to-ones, Ministers will be indoctrinated into to the Treasury truth and obliged to change their opinion about the future – with a heavy heart, they will declare that the economic evidence was overwhelming and that they had no alternative but to bow to the current trade orthodoxy? They will point to that likelihood that history will judge them on their assessment of the evidence and due process. Never mind that seventeen million of us voted, despite the dire economic warnings at the time, to take back our independence as a people.