The Spectator’s Notes | 7 March 2019

A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express, a steam train, on 30 March, the day after Brexit. The train will traverse Wales and England, starting at Swansea and ending in Sunderland. In an unspoken rebuke to the metropolis, it will not travel via London. The train will, says the invitation, commemorate ‘the UK’s exit (or non-exit) from the European Union’. This is the opposite, I suppose, of the European train which people like the late Sir Geoffrey Howe constantly exhorted us to climb aboard. What to do? The most likely situation on the day is that we still will not know our country’s fate. I’d love to watch Brexit get up steam, but what if, thanks to Theresa May (with a bit of help from Chris Grayling), we pass our time in a siding near Crewe?

The news that former Paras who took part in Bloody Sunday in 1972 may be charged with murder, contrasts interestingly with the fate of the INLA terrorists who blew up and killed Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher’s right-hand man, in the car-park of the House of Commons in 1979.