The Damascene moment in my personal Brexit journey came not when my pen hovered over the referendum ballot on 23 June 2016, but a month earlier. In Amsterdam for a British commercial property jamboree, I was about to speak on a panel with the pro-Remain pundit Steve Richards and the ultra-federalist Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. ‘What you need here is a tub-thumping pro-Leave rant,’ I told the organiser. So that’s what I attempted, including some low jibes at the glowering Belgian, who for comic effect I claimed was my cousin. Then I called for an out-or-in show of hands and lost it (this was an audience reliant on European investors) by roughly 500 to five.
Afterwards I thought: did I really offer a blueprint for freedom and prosperity or was that just undergraduate knockabout? And that’s when I jumped off the Leave bandwagon. But I’ve been listening carefully to serious Brexiteers’ analysis of the outcome. I’m persuaded by Roger Bootle, author of The Trouble with Europe, that the ‘net negative’ impact of Brexit so far is largely down to the failure to deregulate our own economy (we’ve gone the other way) and to maximise trade with the rest of the world.
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