CONTENTS

politics first | Diary
118
Brexit: Dave should
have declined
Hague and the
Chicago pizza
A ComRes poll for the Sunday Mirror
showed that 38 per cent of voters thought
Theresa May should face an early General
Election to give her a mandate to govern,
while 46 per cent didn’t. That was
surprising. Ask people if they’d like a say
on anything from corporation tax to capital
punishment and they tend to say they want
their say. But then the same poll gave May
stratospheric approval ratings last seen
when people actually liked Tony Blair. So
she’s clearly enjoying a particularly happy
honeymoon with voters.
The last time this Diary appeared David
Cameron was PM, George Osborne was
Chancellor, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow
Cabinet hadn’t walked out on him and
Owen Smith was a familiar face only to his
Pontypridd constituents. What a difference
a referendum makes. And how Cameron
must wish he hadn’t been talked into one
by William Hague at a pizza parlour in
Chicago’s O’Hare airport in 2012 on their
way back from Washington. If Labour’s
Clem Attlee or Tory Margaret Thatcher had
been around, they would have told him it
was crackers. They had a low opinion of
referendums, believing them of use only to
fascists. Hitler held four.
To the startled Brexiteers, the result was
a victory for democracy; to Nicola Sturgeon,
democracy was the loser as Scotland
overwhelmingly voted to remain. Now she
has to get around the awkward question of
whether Scots have a democratic right to
stay in the European Union by leaving the
UK when a democratic vote accepted by the
UK applies to Scotland as much as it does
to England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Good luck with that one, Nic. Or should
the whole UK have a democratic right to
change its mind about Brexit in a second
referendum as Owen Smith proposes? And
if the second result differs from the first,
should it be best of three?
Nigel Nelson
Nelson’s Column
Keeping an eye on The People
In a sense, that is how General
Elections work. Every five years, voters
have the opportunity to say whether
they have changed their minds since
the previous one. Yet as the Liberal
Democrats never tire of pointing
out, our political system is not very
democratic, with the result decided in
100 marginal constituencies. Nick Clegg
put proportional representation to a
referendum in 2011. But when the voters
were offered more democracy, nearly 70
per cent exercised their democratic right
to reject it. I suggested to Clegg during
last year’s General Election campaign
he would have been wiser to wait until
people were more comfortable with
coalition government and he thought I
might have been right. Clearly I wasn’t,
given the Liberal Democrat wipeout only
a few days later.
Strange beast, democracy. It may yet
deliver the White House to Donald Trump
and is already securing power for populist
parties across Europe. Winston Churchill
said: “Democracy is the worst form of
government – except for all the others.”
I tend to agree with that, with the caveat
that even democracy can sometimes get
it wrong. It did with Hitler, and took a
world war to put right. The Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea would appear
to live up to its name. In last year’s ballot,
there was a 99.97 per cent turnout and
they all voted for Kim Jong-un. A test of
democratic legitimacy would be to find
out where the remaining 0.03 per cent
are now.
Theresa May’s mandate to be PM is
0.00045 per cent as she got the job on
the say so of just 199 voters out of an
electorate of 44 million, so Britain is on
sticky ground to talk of leaders being
elected democratically. But that didn’t
stop May turning her Cabinet reshuffle
into a bloodbath and surprising everyone
by making Boris Johnson foreign
secretary. Jeremy Corbyn told me he
gulped in disbelief at the news. Yet the
more I think about it, the more politically
astute it seems. Had Boris stood against
her, he would almost certainly have
forced the Tory leadership contest to a
ballot of members, and quite possibly
won. This way, May keeps her enemy
close, and if Boris does mess up, that
will end him as a threat.
I do hope her promoting Chris Heaton-
Harris to government whip will not stop
his irreverent tweets. A recent offering
was: “The All-Party Parliamentary
Group for Time Travel next meets three
weeks ago.” And May made the Lords
say goodbye to its leader Tina Stowell.
Peers paid tribute to Baroness Stowell by
remembering how she entertained them
with an explanation of same sex marriage
law, which does not recognise adultery
as grounds for divorce if the cheating
occurs with someone of the same gender.
Had she been married to George
Clooney who had sex with a male
peer, she could only divorce him for
unreasonable behaviour. However, if
Mr Clooney then married that peer but
subsequently had sex with ex-wife Tina,
then the cuckold could cite adultery.
Baroness Stowell’s fascination with the
Hollywood heartthrob extends to a lifesized
cutout of him in her office.