From Rhexit to Brexit

We are all of us to some degree prisoners of our own experience. Experience may teach, of course — may counsel or illuminate. But it is also capable of trapping us. We make connections in our imagination between what we saw then and what we see now, and when these memories are of a personal kind and unavailable to others, we’re inclined to treat them as something special: our private mentors. Sometimes that mentoring will be inspired, sometimes mistaken.

I once (in the months before last year’s general election) decided to block my ears to opinion pollsters warning that the Tories were hopelessly bogged down, and instead followed my own hunch. That in this case my leap in the dark paid off will forever incline me to prefer my own judgment to the advice of the polling industry. But next time, of course, I may be wrong.

For Margaret Thatcher, the consequences of sticking to her guns and ignoring every prophet of doom when Leopoldo Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands, enormously — I believe permanently — reinforced her confidence in her instincts and her contempt for backsliding male colleagues.