It’s time for ‘reality-based’ politicians to start addressing Brexit

Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’.

There are two things that seem worth noticing about this. The first, which is very encouraging, is that the meeting involved people who were both pro- and anti-Brexit in the first place, and that it included people on both sides of the House and neither. There will have been an inbuilt check, therefore, on the group polarisation effect. This wasn’t just a bunch of Remainers sitting about, like at the north London dinner party of cliché, taking competitive pleasure in pointing out how wrong their political opponents turned out to be.