Diary – 18 July 2019

By this time next week the Johnson era will surely have begun. ‘We can, we will, we must now escape the giant hamster wheel of doom,’ our new Dear Leader will have declared in Downing Street. Or something like it. He will be rewarded with headlines such as ‘BoJo gives us back our mojo’. We will all have been urged to believe in Britain again. Then the questions will begin. With the same deadlocked parliament, the same deeply divided party and country and the same intransigence, what will the new prime minister be able to achieve that Theresa May hasn’t? I’ve been examining the past three years of failed Brexit negotiations for a BBC One documentary called Britain’s Brexit Crisis. What’s clear is that Britain never had a plan for Brexit. David Cameron didn’t have a Plan B in case he lost the referendum, Boris didn’t have a Plan A for when he won it.