Why didn’t Cameron realise the ‘strength of feeling’ about Brexit?

In his memoirs, David Cameron admits that he ‘did not fully appreciate the strength of feeling’ in favour of Brexit, before and during the referendum. The fascinating question is, ‘Why?’ The issue of Europe had been dividing his party from at least 1988 (and had earlier roots). It was part of his modernisation not to ‘bang on’ about Europe, but this was an evasion, not a policy. If a leader does not address a vital question, others will, if he gives them the chance.

You cross a windswept plaza, go down a steepish stair and then descend three floors below the ground. You are entering the astonishing, 21st-century Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, only a few miles from where it began when the German battleship the Schleswig-Holstein bombarded the Westerplatte in September 1939. The first notice you see reminds you that this war was the result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact the previous month, and that Poland was the first and greatest victim. As Evelyn Waugh puts it at the beginning of the Sword of Honour trilogy: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ Eighty years on from the month in which Germans from the West and Russians from the East crushed Poland, it is sobering for an Englishman to see how marginal — although we declared war for the sake of Poland — Britain was. The deep tunnels of the museum exhibit distressingly the utter, yet unutterable destruction. We were, by comparison, bystanders.