The Spectator’s Notes | 7 June 2018

A distinguished retired EU diplomat from a small EU member state sends me a thoughtful letter. He complains that Brexit ‘has been handled in the most amateurish way by British politicians’. ‘When one removes something,’ he goes on, ‘one has to be ready with its replacement’: Mrs May ‘is far from clear in her plans, but those who criticise her are not any clearer’. All this is true, and it points to the weirdness of our current situation, which is that Brexit is not being executed by a government that wants it. In conversation, people often say ‘The Brexit supporters promised X’, and then accuse them of breaking that promise. This forgets the fact that they are in no position to break (or fulfil) any promise because, though they won the referendum, they have never controlled the government. Has it ever happened before that the key, destiny-defining policy of a British government has been carried out by leaders most of whose hearts are not in it? Perhaps in the second world war from September 1939 to May 1940.