‘Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action,
but not the execution of any human design.’
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

03 October 2017

On the Record | Boris Johnson emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster

Please see my latest wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘As Tories meet in Britain Boris Johnson is emerging as Brexit’s biggest booster’:

Brexit. Brexit. Brexit. And Boris Johnson. That’s what’s on as Britain’s Conservative Party meets this week at Manchester, England. Poor Theresa May, prime minister and leader of the rancorous Tories. She is persona non grata for many delegates, although most are too polite to say so. Once enjoying the respect, if not the love, of the party whose lead she assumed when David Cameron resigned office to let others oversee the United Kingdom leave the European Union, Mrs. May is now reviled as the leader who called an unnecessary election that was hers to win and then to lose.

Which left her humbled before Parliament to manage a minority government propped up with discordant Irish unionist support. The embattled Prime Minister is routinely dissed as the one-time “Remainer” who seems set to bottle Brexit. Into this leadership maelstrom swirls the Foreign and Commonwealth secretary, Mr. Johnson.

A Telegraph article in mid-September was Boris Johnson’s first salvo over No. 10’s transom, in which he lays out his “glorious Brexit blueprint.” He conjures up all manner of exploits, from regulatory and tax reform to technical and financial innovation, where Britain will triumph again. And he drives home the case for Brexit, as the patriotic response to an evolving Euro-federalism — “an attempt not just at economic but political integration of a kind that the British people had never bargained for” — that was the impetus for the “Independence Day” referendum results of June 2016. “That plan is simply not for Britain,” Mr. Johnson writes, “and we should have been more honest about it years ago.”

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.

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Readers of these DMI updates will be aware that yours truly has been away on ‘sabbatical’ since early August — momentarily setting aside my journalistic responsibilities to devise a scholarly agenda (focussed on natural law and ‘spontaneous order’ in the political and economic realm) for research planned in the months ahead. But as the summer heat beats retreat at autumn’s advance, it’s time to re-enter the fray. Brexit, as much else in the Anglosphere political world, is ‘hotting up’ once more.

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