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. In his forthcoming biography of Neave (The Man Who Was Saturday), Patrick Bishop draws attention to the fact that Harry Flynn, a man suspected by the police of involvement, is alive and well and was last heard of running a bar in Majorca. He is not being pursued. Throughout the 40 years since the assassination, Neave’s family has never been made privy to any information known to the authorities, on the grounds that this might prejudice any reopening of the case. It has not, however, been reopened. All efforts by Bishop to study Home Office and Met Police records have been blocked. Why the zeal in the first case, the foot-dragging in the second?
The departure of Jonathan Dimbleby from Any Questions? is sad for me.
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