BREXIT UPDATE: Boris Johnson for Prime Minister

It is impossible to doubt that, if the referendum were to be held again today, the knife-edge “Leave” majority would be reversed and “Remain” would win handsomely. Brexiteers in their thousands would reverse their choice, appalled by the unimagined magnitude of the economic catastrophe brought down upon us by Cameron’s folly—recklessly playing Russian Roulette with the country’s long-term future in the interests (as he himself admitted) of short term political appeasement within his own party.

It is said that to call a second referendum would be undemocratic. I argued in these pages that to call a referendum in the first place violated the principles of representative democracy. We are a parliamentary democracy, not a mob-rule plebiscite democracy (yob-rule, one might say, in the light of Nigel Farage’s oafish grin). No Prime Minister would invoke “democracy” in calling a referendum to bring back hanging and flogging. So why hand over a much more momentous and complex decision to a populace whose level of sophistication may be judged from the number who googled “What is the EU?” the day after voting to leave it?