If we are going to play a blame game like David Cameron does in his memoirs, I would personally blame Mrs Pickleworth who lives in Sunderland, and the people like her who voted Leave in a frenzy of anti-European fantasies. She has never held a UK passport because the furthest that she has travelled is Bognor Regis, where she and her snotty nosed 14-year-olds stay in a B&B whose owner abides by the British National Front. “Interference begins in Calais,” she insists, “and besides, we don’t want no Turks here.” She dreams of a green and pleasant land, where money grows on trees and most of it can be plucked and distributed to the NHS. “I don’t want no foreign rule,” she concludes. And quite right too – let’s keep British rule because then at least we know where troubles and injustice are coming from.
I think in the end we ended up with very strong technical and economic arguments and the opposition had a very powerful emotional argument. I think the issue of immigration plus that emotional argument was a winning combination for them. The argument about control, it resonated with people, and when you asked them, ‘Well, what is it we’re going to control?’ it was this issue of immigration. – David Cameron
As a Mister Nobody who has to wait a lifetime to be able to write something remotely interesting, I’m just on the right side of 65 to be dispensed from writing my memoirs. But a long time ago I came to the same conclusions as David Cameron about why the Remain camp lost the vote. I wrote that,
“During the referendum, both sides tried to play on people’s fears: collapse of the financial markets on the one hand, mass immigration and its consequences, on the other. The contest was a foregone conclusion. Voters could hallucinate much better over the unavoidable invasion of the UK by European migrants than over the loss of a few pounds in the City.
For the overwhelming majority of those who voted “leave” on June 23rd,2016, money from the City has no smell, European migrants do.”
There was a huge difference between the image of thousands of dark-skinned EU migrants invading the East coast of England, and the gentle words of advice coming from a foreign president – a dark-skinned president, at that – telling the English how to vote. Since when has anybody told them what to do? The question I pose was answered in no uncertain way by Michael Gove when he said that, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.”
Michael Gove and Boris Johnson went hand in hand to down the Remainers who had no answer to less foreigners on street corners and more money in hospital wards.
Over the issue of whether or not we had a veto over Turkey, and over the issue of the £350 million on the bus, I think they left the truth at home. – David Cameron
They did indeed, indeed they did. And what’s more, they forgot to let the cat in. Left on the doorstep of number 10, Larry the cat, not exactly an expert in his own right, does know a thing or two about the goings-on inside Number 10. He can vouch that Michael Gove, described as “appalling,” by Cameron, is at it again, having been reunited with his pal, the equally “appalling,” Boris Johnson. Together, they have smashed their way through parliament, ripped holes in an already tattered Conservative Party and were ready to sever all ties with the EU by leaving the club without so much as a shadow of a deal.
Larry knows that politics is a cut-throat world and he doesn’t expect any favours from so-called “pals” who pretend to love him. If he needed any proof, it is the fact that Boris Johnson visited a fish stall in Doncaster and didn’t come back with anything remotely fishy for the moggy at number 10.
David Cameron should have been as cunning as a cat when he organised the 2016 referendum, by giving the vote to 16-year-olds, EU citizens in the UK and Brits who have been living on the Continent for donkey’s years.
Larry the cat from Number 10 accepts that if no one listens to experts anymore, who on earth is going to listen to a cat? He did warn president Obama and David Cameron that it was not a good idea to let an American – president or not – talk about Brexit and above all, advise on how the UK should vote. Listen they did not, and the Brexit vote was decided for good when the American president warned that the UK would be ignored when no longer in the EU.
I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done. […] The UK is going to be in the back of the queue. – Barack Obama
Is it possible that Boris Johnson put his personal political career before the interests of the country? Is it possible that Michael Gove be disloyal to such a point that he betrayed both his party and his political friends? If so, politics deserves so much better than this and the country merits others to govern, others who believe in ideas, who escape from Plato’s cave and return to free the prisoners with nothing but the truth that has nowt to do with personal gain.
Both then behaved appallingly, attacking their own government, turning a blind eye to their side’s unpleasant actions and becoming ambassadors for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism. As for Michael, one quality shone through: disloyalty. Disloyalty to me — and, later, disloyalty to Boris. – David Cameron
Truth be said, an EU referendum was always a disaster in waiting. I had feared such a vote a long time ago, in the light of my plans to move to France once I had qualified, in 1982. There had always been, and there will always be, a cloud of discontentment emanating from the UK and draping the office walls in Brussels, an impatient kicking of feet trying to break open the exit door of the European Union.