My experiences as Single Market Minister confirmed my analysis of my earlier years. I had to spend most of my time trying to stave off laws and regulations we did not want, seeking to dilute, delay or derail. It meant constructing qualified minorities of states sufficient to force change to a badly drafted power grab, or to secure delay.
As I reported to the Lords I discovered the promised Emergency brake to stop them imposing very bad laws on us was never going to be used and in due course lapsed through never being applied. As single market Minister I saw just how far the EU had got with its power grab, how powerless the UK was unless we could muster some support from other countries. The proposals were usually carved up by the Commission with German and French backing, and too many of the smaller states just went along with everything for fear of getting a bad reputation as trouble makers.
Press and public were excluded from our debates about all these new laws. The press usually declined to publish my read out of what had happened as they feared the EU Commission would cut them off from their briefings if they dared report what had actually happened in a Ministerial meeting. Apparently other Ministers often said different things in the meetings compared to what they reported back home. I had no problem with the press knowing what I said and what I was doing in the meetings as it was the same as the account I gave to Parliament and press back home.
I was moved on from the job at the time the EU decided on a major push to get every country to sign up to the Euro. This was a massive power grab which would change everything. I began my fight inside the UK government against it, and with others persuaded the PM to negotiate and secure an opt out from joining. When the PM refused to promise to use the opt out to ensure we would never to go in to the Euro I took up his challenge when he resigned the leadership and made the case against the Euro and for other changes of policy.
The leadership election did secure the promise from the PM that he would hold a referendum before entering the Euro. More importantly this extracted from Mr Blair the same promise. I knew then the pound was saved, as polls showed the UK public were so much wiser than many of their MPs with big majorities against the Euro. They also showed a Labour government was inevitable. John Major had badly crippled the UK economy by his EU zealotry putting us into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which predictably gave us both boom and bust, ending badly for many businesses and homeowners and destroying the Conservatives as an election winning party for more than a decade.I had failed with Nicholas Ridley to stop ERM membership despite writing a report before joining the government forecasting boom or bust from ERM participation.
In the Shadow Cabinet and on the backbenches in the Opposition years I was one of the voices that persuaded the party to oppose each of the centralising power grabbing Treaties Labour signed up to. We wanted the incoming Conservative government in 2010 to renegotiate, pointing out that we did not agree with the big Treaty changes and many of the extra EU laws of the 1997-2010 era. Having Liberal democrats in the coalition 2010-15 prevented anything serious being done about the EU.
I and my friends ran campaigns and organised votes from the backbenches to secure a referendum on continued membership, as we had by then decided the EU was so changed from the EEC on the UK prospectus in 1975 that the people should be allowed to cast their judgement on our membership of this Federal governmental body. It was when I and a few friends at a meeting with the PM explained we were close to half the Conservative MPs being willing to defy a 3 line whip to vote for a referendum that the PM agreed to include one in our next Manifesto. It was the most important change I had ever helped secure. I always assumed the public would vote to leave as it was such a crippling deal being in the emerging superstate.
April 6, 2026
Lord Redwood, an excellent record but it sounds like the introduction to your memoirs. I do hope you are not considering retirement.
KBO.
Reply Certainly not planning retirement from Lords when I have only just joined! This material from memory lane is party of my campaign against re set. Labour wants to take us back to our dark EU soaked past so need to confront the disasters of that past. They dont want to talk about ERM or collapse of fishing and farming in CFP and CAP
April 6, 2026
Nicholas Ridley famously said European economic and monetary union was a ‘German racket’.
He was forced to resign afterwards though.
April 6, 2026
But he became very popular as a result of speaking out. He is a greatly underestimated and under appreciated servant of the British people. He added to the already great name he inherited from his famous forefather. An impossible task one might have thought.
April 6, 2026
N.Ridley was the perfect counter-example to a fixation on grades prevalent with some here: a third in mathematical moderations (1947) and a second-class degree in engineering (1951) and that after attending Winchester, Eton and Balliol College.
As for his achievements I’ll let people decide on his handling of the Argentines and Falklanders (pre-1982) or his leading role in the poll tax in 1989.
April 6, 2026
The discussion started with his opinions on the EU.
He has been proved right.
So hefner all your off topic criticisms add nothing.
April 6, 2026
Just a reminder of how successive governments have tied us to the EU. Today wind generation has collapsed and we are Importing a massive 33% if our electricity at £125 per mwh. This level of reliance on imports had left us at the mercy of being blackmailed by the EU.
I believe this is deliberate and one of the reasons the government is adamant it won’t use our own resources.
April 6, 2026
Yes. All part of the plan to make us inter-dependent on the basics (energy, food, manufactured goods and defence). We do not need to import energy: the decision to do so is for political reasons and nothing else.
April 6, 2026
A great shame the Tory party did not take far more notice of Sir John’s wise advice over 40+ years. The country would perhaps be several £trillions better off by my estimates (the EU, the ERM, tax levels, energy policy, immigration levels, red take levels, free trade, benefit levels, more free markets, fewer socialist traffic lights… In 2000 we had a GDP per cap of circa 90% of the USA and energy prices that were similar. Now our GDP per cap is more like 60% of USA levels and energy price nearly 4 times those of the USA.
April 6, 2026
Red tape rather!
April 6, 2026
“A great shame the Tory party did not take far more notice of Sir John’s wise advice..”
For one awful moment there I thought you meant Sir John Major. 😅
April 6, 2026
Good morning.
Is this the former Soviet Union, JR ? Because it quite like it to me.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s when membership of the then EEC was on the cards, we were told lies and dragged in without a vote. Only once in were we given a chance to to rubber stamp membership of what we were, and still are, lead to believe is a trading union. Today the same old ruse is being played out. Only this time is piecemeal rather than whole.
Membership of the EEC / EU is good for lazy politicians who do not want to take responsibility. Also. If something is so good, why then lie about it ?
April 6, 2026
@Mark B +1 well put…
April 6, 2026
Good Morning,
A very interesting account. I get the impression that a large majority of MP’s on both sides were, (and probably still are) in agreement with joining the EEC/EU. How many in the present PCP would vote remain now? Clearly a majority of the PLP and others would vote to rejoin. This leaves Reform as the only viable party to proceed with the fight for freedom and democracy.
I read Starmer has found ways to give more money to the EU without debate or vote, running into the £ Billions. No money for new defence projects but plenty for foreigners and his pet projects. He’s clearly not working for national interests.
Reply It is the Conservative party heading the opposition to re set.Reform MPs rarely turn up for that.
April 6, 2026
Reform plan to scrap any deals Starmer does. They are busy working on their own policies and see little point in trying to argue against Labour’s huge majority. This is the only way to change course from more EU integration. Let’s hope they get elected. I, for one, don’t want to go through the betrayal our politicians have put us through since the referendum to end up back in the EU on worse terms. Even though we accepted a rotten deal, none of the dire predictions the Remainers forecast came true. This goes to show how little they knew.
April 6, 2026
So they have learned nothing from the example JR and other Spartans demonstrated so clearly and on multiple occasions.
You always argue, you always vote, on this blog JR spoke about the BOE bond losses and was told to stop whistling in the wind. He continued and the spark took hold …
Reform will implode, so it not important really.in the latest poll the Greens have overtaken them and of course Farage himself has very poor ratings, barely beating Starmer.
April 6, 2026
None of the dire predictions came true? We’re losing 8% of GDP year on year by being out of the single market. Billions of pounds. A dire prediction that has come 100% true. That’s what happens when you walk away from your biggest export market
Reply This is a bad lie. We lost nothing coming out of EU. What the 8% figure said was we could be 8% better off out by adopting US policies and performing inline with US instead of staying close to EU slow growth models
April 6, 2026
Without doubt sir, you had a leading role and played an important part both in securing a referendum and subsequently campaigning for Leave. For all of that I am most grateful.
Now it seems we have to stop Starmer & co from undoing it all.
April 6, 2026
You saw how “powerless the UK was unless we could muster some support from other countries”. And did you muster that support? Obviously not. All you are doing here is confessing how you lost the arguments when you went to Brussels.
Reply I often did get support to delay or dilute, but what a waste of time having to do that.
April 6, 2026
I think we all apreciate your years of work in Britain’s interest. The forces ranged against you have been huge, including most of the British establishment.
We seem to have no anti-EU coalition though. Tories (not trusted anyway after your Europhile colleagues disgraceful actions), Reform and in particular, latecomer Restore are set to split the vote.
During the referendum there was a concerted effort to unite in the fight. Have you thought about ways of uniting the EU opposition at this critical time?
Reply Yes, I work with people from other parties and of none to coordinate opposition to EU sell out.
April 6, 2026
See the Spectator Debate on line. The Tory Dilemma
speakers:
James Heale, Deputy Political Editor, The Spectator
Daniel Hannan, Conservative Peer
David Davis, Former Brexit Secretary
Victoria Atkins, Shadow Cabinet Member
Paul Goodman, Journalist and Politician
My view is prob. a farily loose deal will be done shortly before the election in circa 3 years time.
April 6, 2026
The British people are 60% against rejoining in the latest GB News poll which announced that ‘2 in 5 were in favour of rejoining’.
April 6, 2026
The New Statesman has published an article highlighting the insanity of the Net Zero SCAM. Red Ed will be livid.
(I guess Sakara Gold has/will be unsubscribing from that as well.)
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2026/04/what-the-iran-war-will-cost-britain
April 6, 2026
Currently of the UK’s demand of 27.7GW, 9.1GW is being imported, with the ~25GW of wind turbine installation only 4.88GW is being generated. If renewables are so good, why aren’t they being used more? Rather than giving them subsidies, they should be fined for failing to supply.
April 6, 2026
Indeed total insanity. Solar and Wind in the UK give us about 8% (far less if you allow for the extra fosll fuels needed to produce, maintain and connect these “renewables” and inefficiencies cause by their need for constantly available on demand back up. Circa 5% perhaps more realistic so basically renewables are almost totally irrelevant. Ed Miliband is either a deluded dope or an evil blatant liar.
He keeps talking of would not affect “World prices” (claiming UK drilling for gas or oil thus makes no difference). Natural Gas in the US has not really gone up at all since the IRAN actions in the UK the trading prices have risen by up to 60%. World prices sure Ed.
So will he now correct his mad statements and “delusions” or were they lies?
April 6, 2026
Even the New Stateman my goodness they will be support Trump soon – have they finally found a sensible and honest engineer or physicist? How do I read it without paying as I certainly do not want to encourage their usually socialist lunacy.
April 6, 2026
Is the New Statesman on PressReader free with my Library card I wonder? It is about time I got some value back from the State.
Or JSTOR perhaps with my Camcard? If not perhaps I will just have to read it in a Waitrose then buy something else!
April 6, 2026
What next will the BBC admit their Manmade Climate Alarmist propaganda for the past 20+ years was a vast “exaggeration” and a hoax? A weeks ago the BBC were going on about the vast harms done by expensive energy to farming, food costs, industry, fertiliser… this as now they think they can blame Trump rather than the main real cause of Ed Miliband and May’s Net Zero!
April 6, 2026
Interestingly in the first paragraph of this article ‘Britain gets very little oil or gas at all through the Strait of Hormuz’.
And then, lower down: ‘After the years of North Sea plenty, no serious provision has been made for what happens when our gas and oil are no longer abundant’.
Which series of governments have been responsible for that?
I would encourage all readers with access to that article to read it. It is much less simplistic than what Donna means it to be, particularly about climate change, nuclear power availability, social and industry tariffs, …
And the conclusion: ‘Other countries do not, as Boris Johnson once claimed’, look to Britain to find out how to do it. They look to us with our high prices as a case study on how not to do energy policy’.
April 6, 2026
Those without access you can get a sizeable chunk of the article via The Daily Sceptic
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/05/the-price-britain-will-pay-for-the-iran-war/
April 6, 2026
Our oil and gas in the North Sea are abundant Hefner, we are stopped from getting it by a few madmen who need to be sectioned.
Milliband was interviewed by Campbell and Stewart, both unsound, but Milliband managed to make both of them laugh at him.
Cruel really, I was taught never to laugh at the afflicted.
April 6, 2026
John, we commend you for the solid position regarding the EU you maintained during the disastrous forty six years we were aligned with that European project.
Yur help to secure the referendum will always be seen as a positive step enabling us to extract ourselves officially from that project even though the establishment and the institutions did and continue to do all they cann to thwart that decision taken by the nation.
In a strange twist of how these things happen, it should be remembered it was the prospect of another coalition government with the LibDems that persuaded Cameron it would be safe to include in the manifesto a referendum obligation. Cameron knew he would be able to claim the LibDem coalition condition to join his government would have required the removal of that manifesto obligation. For him the offer of the referendum was always a token. He was sure it would be withdrawn by coalition events after the election.
His majority in the 2015 election provided by co-ordinated campaigning by the better off out parties was a shock to him and blocked his plan to withdraw the manifesto obligation.
The rest is history, with thanks to your own efforts to restore sovereignty, even though every administration since 2015 has failed that basic instruction.
April 6, 2026
I know Blair wasted millions planning to convert all the DWP payment computer systems to enable switching from pounds to euros. This expense was most probably replicated across all financial institutions and government departments. What a waste of taxpayers’ money. He always planned to join the euro but never went through with it. Whether this was because the public would have been against it or the UK financial situation didn’t meet the entry criteria, I don’t know.
April 6, 2026
The big question that looms above all of this is ‘WHY’
Why were all the political parties, the BBC, the civil service and the general establishment so willing to surrender our soul to an unexplored and under-evaluated entity that would go on to fully take us over in too many ways, and all but ruin us?
Was it the fear that the UK was no longer a global player and could not compete in world markets such that we needed to hide under the envelope of something bigger?
The 70’s had been a painful time, and they got worse. It was my good fortune to get a job in Germany in 1975 so I escaped the worst of it. I didn’t escape the scathing remarks about how awful British cars were though as well as other exports which lacked quality.
Politically and economically the UK was a basket case, so it is easy to see how some would have lost faith in our country. By the end of 1974 major factories were stood idle and despair abounded.
But lo and behold Thatcher came in and turned everything around, so there was nothing intrinsically wrong, we were just led down the wrong paths by socialism. The labour party has a lot to answer for – they eventually ran out of ways to tax us and fell on their sword.
Not being satisfied with the Wilson/Callaghan era of despair, we then had Blair’s many faceted horrors that left us with a society dripping in wokism. Major also has a lot to answer for, for his failures in negotiating EU treaties and that awful run on the Pound that allowed labour to get elected.
So how on Earth did we manage to elect another labour government to take away our freedoms, promote for ww3 while instilling two tier justice and slipping us back under EU control!
Have we learned nothing!
The EU is NOT the answer, neither is socialism, but unless we start fighting effectively, the 70’s, and worse, will be upon us, and our future decimated.
April 6, 2026
They still dream of One World Government. Norris McWhirter asserted that they ‘wanted a bigger stage on which to dance’.
Sacrificing their nation is the price for becoming a ‘World Leader’ – you have heard the phrase but probably did not understand the true meaning.
April 6, 2026
“In the Shadow Cabinet and on the backbenches in the Opposition years I was one of the voices that persuaded the party to oppose each of the centralising power grabbing Treaties Labour signed up to.”
The Shadow Cabinet years did of course involve only Trade and then Transport from 1997 to 2000. Many of us were surprised at the time that those years were brief and never involved the Treasury, and we could scarcely believe that William Hague – an overt proclaimer of patriotic credentials at the time – made those choices. We are now somewhat the wiser.
Reply And I was Shadow Business, then Shadow Environment and local government for Hague.
April 6, 2026
Lord Hague now Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Oxford and indeed Cambridge do tend to go for such types nowadays – Lord Patton before him – who was surely even worse!
Hague was quite promising as a child – what went wrong?
April 6, 2026
Yes, and why did he resign so suddenly to just get out of parliament?
April 6, 2026
At the 2001 GE, the Conservatives only had a net gain of one MP (from 165 in 1997 to 166 in 2001). Hardly a brilliant result for the Leader of the Opposition when Labour scores only decreased from 418 to 412 MPs.
April 6, 2026
Given that the “UK Public are so much wiser than MPs” do you think moving to a more direct democracy – Switzerland – would be better than our current system of very few people that represent us and many that are absolutely against us (UK Public)?
Reply More referendums can help. I agreed with the majority on every one apart from the first EEC one, where the establishment conspired to misrepresent the nature of the Treaty we signed.
April 6, 2026
Jazz:
Yes, more referendums would definitely help to improve our democracy. It is the only way for an administration to overcome the BBC, civil service, quangos, institutions, charities and the judiciary. A majority in Parliament is insufficient as all of these are quite capable of putting spanners in the works which includes HR spanners when so-called “human rights” are in fact designed to be the opposite of democracy.
April 6, 2026
It is critical to ensure that they question is clear and fair with an answer that cannot be denied.
No small task.
After the experience of the USA and Andrew Bridgen, we also have to be cognisant of the importance of sticker to our scrutinised count.
Also no small task.
April 6, 2026
Indeed Lynn,
I enjoy reading your comments.
My first question would be very clear, “Should we allow the Europeans to have any of our fish” Yes or No.
No guesses as to how I would vote.
April 6, 2026
Yes I believe you and I would be with the majority.
Just on environmental issues it’s critical to wrest our fishing waters from the kakhanded Continentals.
April 6, 2026
What would help if the general public were more engaged with politics. The apathetic middle ground doesn’t bother to vote, and then complains about the government others have voted for.
April 6, 2026
They are not apathetic, try have nobody for whom to vote.
April 6, 2026
DA :
As Jazz suggests above, referendums definitely “engage the public”, as for once they are feeling their vote can count/ make a difference.
April 6, 2026
Lord Redwood – I like most people understand the concerns. I like others wish to see all efforts to undermine democracy removed. But I also recognise that so far this century the House of Commons, its 650 MPs have fought the people and the nation at every turn. It could be suggested they simply don’t wont the imposition of managing, they are desperate to take orders from the unelected unaccountable elsewhere – the traitors to freedom and democracy.
Then factor in a Lawyer that is hell bent on destruction, creates two tier justice and interpretations of what he wants rule to be, who has the support of the majority in Parliament – expecting less than full capitulation, surrender would be a remote idea.
April 6, 2026
Lord John, so much your description of the way the EU works is replicated by the CAGW scam and its “solution”, Net Zero. “Power grabs”, “staving off laws and regulations we do not want”, “press and public were excluded from our debates about all these new laws” (“settled science”), “ministers often said different things in the meetings compared to what they reported back home.” In both cases there are two groups in favour of both EU membership and CAGW/Net Zero. For the first group it is an ideology, a religion, and for them, as Jonathan Swift said, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into in the first place”. And for this group there is no cost for them which is too much to save the planet. Then there is a second group who know full well that both bring impoverishment and control and wish to pursue these ideologies as socialism depends upon making and keeping people poor. We need a referendum on Net Zero.
April 6, 2026
I think Net Zero is in its last throes.
We need a referendum on the reintroduction of the Death Penalty.
April 6, 2026
This country now depends on your wisdom Sir John as this seems to be the most undemocratic Government we have had, they sign deals without even Parliament knowing what they are proposing. The fact Starmer is signing us up to this E.U. re set is quite alarming. Surely Starmer can not re join without another referendum so any deals negotiated can be removed at the next election with a change of Government.
April 6, 2026
We need to scrap the Royal Prerogative. Then the Pm would not have the power to act unilaterally in this unacceptable manner.
April 7, 2026
And what is your preferred solution for replacing it?
April 6, 2026
Lord Redwood – please, please, please, just keep up the good and excellent work of drumming out this message. I fear the greater majority in Parliament is desperately wanting the opposite so as they can keep sitting on their hands taking the money and doing nothing – as others keep saying it is a lazy cabal.
It is clear the anti USA narrative being forced down everyone throats is part of the project to get us back under the EU’s yoke. lets all hate the USA! They are turning POTUS’s suggestion that the US Taxpayer shouldn’t be picking up 80% of the defence bill for the EU when the EU is the largest by population sector of NATO by miles, and has the means to spend and defend its self. Our political shouty groups are turning that into meaning that the USA is our greatest enemy.
On defence its the old EU move when they can use the USA taxpayer as their patsy, why shouldn’t they.
On defence lets not forget while we were in the EU the UK Government, in neglect of its first duty, handed the UK’s safety and security to the EU by ensuring the EU mainly the French(and that meant the French Government) took control of the UK’s defence industry. The 2 majors that didn’t get absorbed, BAe & Rolls Royce now get all their major defence contracts from the USA the UK is just a minor purchaser. The however, of course is if based on ownership majority shares in these companies is from the USA, it is not the UK that should be seen as owners in the purest sense. The US government is spending more with these 2 companies employing more UK citizens than the UK government ‘today’ spends or is thinking of on the UK’s defence.
April 6, 2026
Lord Redwood, you confirm my previous comments about our PMs and MPs, the HOLs, and the press all lying to us about the EU. Excluding the press from meetings and Ministers saying something different about the meeting, rather than giving a true account, just shows how long and deep the lying has been.
Add to that the current dimwit of a PM determined to take us back in at any cost, and then MPs wonder why their reputation stinks! Boris Johnson was useless; he kept giving the EU deadlines, then gave them another one, all of which they ignored. Why have we not had a PM with the bottle to stand up for the UK? The EU has a massive trade surplus with us, surely if we said 100% tafiffs on all EU exports to the UK, they would have been much keener to do a proper deal. This PM needs to be tried for treason!
April 6, 2026
Then we could start charing the experts and regulators who coerced the unsafe and ineffective Covid vaccines into even children, the young and even people who had already had Covid! Then perhaps look at those refusing to release the data (under the FOI request) that would clearly show the level of the net harm done – as they clearly should do and would do were it not so damning.
April 6, 2026
100% tariffs on imports means massive inflation and huge price rises in consumer goods.
April 6, 2026
Only if they are not produced in the U.K. Trump has been triumphant, placing tariffs carefully to protect home industry and to encourage industry to come home for the gigantic market. Markets are not all about numbers, they are about spending power of each number, so the USA is prime.
I see Mercedes is investing $40 billion in the USA – helps if you provide energy at competitive prices too.
April 6, 2026
You do need to write your memoir please JR. It will be an instruction manual for future generations who will otherwise be lambs to the slaughter. I am currently trawling your website for the posts on running a department. We hope to return a huge number of quality non-professional MPs, and they have to hit the ground running. They will have experience and substance, but the nuances of Parliament must not catch them out.
Perhaps you would publish a paper, How to be an MP, a Minister, a Secretary of State and even, please, how a Prime Minister should conduct business.
We owe you a very great deal. More than we appreciate.
April 6, 2026
Of course, this and these questions would not have arisen, if when we voted just to ‘leave’ and nothing else we just left. Instead we actually moved further left, go further embedded sent the EU our money, and retained their laws and rules
April 6, 2026
Not all of them and we are very much better off than before.
This is a massive battle, Britain, the home of democracy and capitalism must be defeated for the Globalists to win.
Did you really think it would be just a matter of 5 votes? We had to trap the Politicians into the referendum you know, it felt like watching a murmuration of our nation, proof that we are made from the same stuff, have the same interests and instincts.
That demonstration impressed the whole world. Putin has remarked about it. Everyone stopped laughing at Britain and understood that the British people remain as they always were.
We must be shot of the puppets.
April 6, 2026
We wanted the incoming Conservative government in 2010 to renegotiate…[but] Having Liberal democrats in the coalition 2010-15 prevented anything serious being done about the EU.
Many have memory-holed what happened after the 2010 election. It would not have been unthinkable for the Tories to operate a minority government, and call a further election from a position of strength. But suddenly it was ‘arranged’/’decreed’/’enabled’ for there to be an EU-type coalition government nobody voted for. The LibDems had lost 5 seats, the Conservatives had gained 96, yet the Tories were persuaded (virtually forced) into coalition with this left-wing party.
The persuader was Gus O’Donnell, an unelected civil servant who a year later admitted: “When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration … I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.”
April 7, 2026
Cameron was planning a coalition with the LibDems long before the General Election was held.
He wrote an article in The Guardian in 2009 calling for one. It was subsequently reported that it was how he intended to prevent the Tory Europsceptics from pushing for a renegotiation.
Civil Service plans for the coalition were being made long before the election was held. (I was a CS at the time).
April 7, 2026
Donna, thank you, that is a fascinating bit of info, and throws a lurid retrospective light on the 2010 election, and on Cameron. So his pre-election withdrawal of his previous commitment to hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon and EU membership , which lost him polling support and perplexed so many Conservative members in doing so, was made in order to reduce the size of the Tory vote and give him the opportunity of getting into a coalition with the LibDems?
I suppose if he’d miscalculated, Gordon Brown would have sought a coalition with the LibDems – as he at one stage tried to do in the days after the election, IIRC, in which case Cameron would have continued to snugly sit in opposition…
April 6, 2026
“Apparently other Ministers often said different things in the meetings compared to what they reported back home.”
This is serious. A democracy cannot function when the electorate are not given the full truth and all the facts. The Lib Dems often have candidates in different constituencies with different manifestos. But at least they use the English language. We now have the Green Party promoting themselves in Urdu and Bengali meaning that it is all too easy for candidates to be saying one thing to one group and something else to another group. For the sake of democracy this should not be allowed. Only English should be used as this is our common and official language.
April 6, 2026
“It [the decision to hold a referendum on EU membership] was the most important change I had ever helped secure. I always assumed the public would vote to leave as it was such a crippling deal being in the emerging superstate.”
This shows true democracy in action and that consequently the correct decision is the result.