Brits don’t quit,’ said David Cameron two weeks ago, to which the obvious rejoinder is: ‘Oh but they do!’ The list of quitters since the referendum seems to grow every day, the latest being Nigel -Farage. Everyone made the same joke when they heard he had resigned — ‘How long for?’ — but when I bumped into Suzanne Evans earlier this week she told me he was still in charge. ‘I think he was giving notice of his intention to resign, but hasn’t put a date on it,’ she said. She was paying close attention, given that she became the interim leader the last time Nigel quit and lasted precisely three days.
I hope it’s permanent this time, if only to disprove Enoch Powell’s famous maxim. To go out on such a high, having achieved the summit of your ambitions, is quite something. What other party leader in the modern era has departed at their moment of greatest triumph? It can’t be done in a normal democratic contest because to pull off a comparable feat you’d have to resign straight after leading your party to victory, which would be a bit odd. It’s only possible after winning a referendum.
The general view on quitting is that it’s a bit pathetic, but few would dispute Farage has made the right decision and a case can be made for the Prime Minister, too. -Leavers and Remainers are split on this. Some Leavers, like me, believe Cameron could have stayed on and, had he done so, minimised the panic caused by the result. It will all be all right, of course, but a sense of continuity after such a dramatic moment in Britain’s -history would have been a welcome -palliative.
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