On the day Theresa May signed her Brexit withdrawal agreement with Brussels, Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned. She tried to dragoon Michael Gove, a leader of the Brexit campaign, into taking the job. Dominic Cummings, the erstwhile campaign director of Vote Leave, persuaded Gove to resign rather than take the job. It was mayhem. That day Cummings texted a friend in Westminster to say: ‘Sometimes nothing happens for years. Sometimes years happen in days.’
The phrase was originally Lenin’s, though he referred to ‘decades’ rather than years – but it was apt for the almost revolutionary cascade of events unleashed by the EU referendum of 2016, which we are still living with eight years later. When Sajid Javid announced he was standing down as an MP after serving as a minister for a decade, he said he felt he had lived through a lifetime of political tumult in ten years.
Once, it was Blair vs Brown every week.
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