It’s beginning to look a lot like a Brexit conspiracy

Traitors, lemmings, rebels. Those are all insults hurled in the past week at certain Tory MPs for the heinous crime of standing by promises made in their party’s own manifesto during the 2017 general election.

Quick recap. “As we leave the European Union, we will no longer be members of the single market or customs union.” Yet, weirdly, Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, claimed yesterday that it was the Prime Minister, during the Brext negotiations, who was the one to set out the request for a deal based on a customs union. So, who exactly is the traitor?

I don’t generally set much store by talk of Establishment conspiracies. History teaches us that more things arise from cock-up than collusion. Still, over the past week, it has been hard to suppress a gnawing feeling that we are approaching the climax of a powerful and well coordinated plot to thwart the democratic will of the British people as expressed in the referendum on June 23 2016.

Those of us who voted for Brexit on that day did not want “a deal”. We wanted to leave the European Union and return to a situation where Parliament made the laws for our own people. Pretty clear, you might think. Since then, what we all thought of as “Brexit” has been tactically renamed “no deal” by the BBC and prominent Remainers, in order to make it sound scary and disastrous, when, in fact, it restores the perfectly normal state of affairs which applies in almost every other country on earth.