Tom Newton Dunn of the Sun on the Tusk Tweet

Tom Newton Dunn of the Sun has two interesting comments on Donald Tusk's comments about a special place in hell reserved for the leaders of the Brexit campaign.

He suggests that this may have been intended to give the EU Council political space for a concession to Britain.

Not sure this was a sound strategy given that the PM will have to get a deal including that concession through the House of Commons, where Tusk's tweet has inflamed passions further.

Very interestingly considering which newspaper he works for, Newton Dunn has also tweeted a thread in which he argues that, despite it being an unpopular view at Westminster, Tusk's criticism of the Brexiteers has some validity.

He wrote:
  • "The Leave campaign took the conscious decision at the start of the #EUref campaign in 2016 to keep both their definition of Brexit and any plan to deliver it vague
  • Why? So that they wouldn't fall into Alex Salmond's trap during the #indyref of getting killed on the detail. @matthew_elliott confirmed this at the time, and it was a masterful strategy that worked
  • The downside is, as we all now know, Britain has spent the subsequent 2 and a half years tearing itself apart over exactly what the 17.4m who voted for Brexit want from it
  • That, or a fair amount of it, could have been avoided if @BorisJohnson and others had argued on detail rather than sentiment, and we may well not be in this mess now
  • Two caveats: 1. some more honourable leavers, who knew a bit more about the EU, did try to argue on detail (eg @DanielJHannan or @chhcalling) but they received little attention from voters/us the media at the time 
  • Caveat 2 - consigning them to hell is a tad strong. Two and half years in purgatory is a more fitting punishment. Here endeth the thread."
Very difficult indeed to argue against any of that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more