The Tories deserve a lengthy spell in opposition

Brexit has many theme tunes but the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is as good as any. If only the Brexiteers could understand this; if only they could grasp that compromise means exactly that. But, consumed by their own monomania, they cannot for they are blind to everything except their own convictions. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man evidently guilty of believing too much in his own fan mail, sonorously declares it is time for Theresa May to go. Nick Timothy, a courtier whose chutzpah has few equals in recent British political history, decries what he terms the Prime Minister’s “capitulation” to Brussels or, as some of us view it, reality. Never mind that the Prime Minister’s two greatest mistakes have been her failure to tell Rees-Mogg where to go and listening to Timothy in the first place. 

It was Timothy who drew the Prime Minister’s catastrophic red lines, ruling out many of the post-Brexit options – Norway! Switzerland! – that had been happily embraced by enthusiastic pro-Brexit forces in the innocent days before the referendum.