Brexiteers, your enemy is the government

Twenty-nine years ago this month, the Vote Leave campaign got underway. Nigel Farage was still making his anti-establishment way as a City broker and a young Michael Gove was heading northwards to work on the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Instead, it was the founder of the movement who did the honours. Margaret Thatcher travelled to Bruges, to the College of Europe, the Europhile madrassa that has radicalised generations of youth to the cause of ever closer union. There in the belly of the beast she smartly explained why Britain was marvellous and wouldn’t it be better all round if the Continent was more like Blighty.

The Bruges Speech was in effect Maggie’s repudiation of the European project, an effort to which she had once committed her energies and one particularly garish jumper. She did not propose withdrawal but she had, unwittingly or otherwise, arrived at an analysis that would come to dominate Conservative thinking on Europe.