Is it the country that has gone mad? Or just a majority of members of the Conservative party?
They are the questions that rattle around my brain as the self-styled “sensible” candidate in the Tory leadership campaign, Jeremy Hunt, speaks to me for an ITV interview. He tells me it would serve democracy and save his party from possible extinction for the UK to leave the EU without a deal, even though he agrees with the Bank of England that the rupture from the EU could be almost as big a blow to our prosperity as the 2008 banking crisis. And he agrees with the Chancellor that the shock could increase the national debt by £90bn. And he agrees with the former Tory leader William Hague that it could lead to Northern Ireland and Scotland breaking away from the UK.
I say to him British people surely did not vote for a Brexit that – in his estimation – would impoverish them, shrink the nation and make us more insecure to an almost unprecedented degree.
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