Leading article

This week's lead article, as read by Lara Prendergast Helga Hunter met her husband Michael when he was a Scots Guardsman serving in Münster in 1968. She moved back with him, and they have lived in Britain ever since. Last week, she was astonished to receive a letter from the Scottish National Party saying that she is still ‘welcome in Scotland’ and faces ‘no immediate changes’ to her status due to the Brexit vote. But as a German national, she now faces ‘great uncertainty over how events will unfold’. To the SNP’s enemies, this seemed a deplorable scare tactic intended to fuel indignation and stoke demand for a second independence referendum. It’s certainly deplorable. But in fact, the scare tactic came from Downing Street.

Midway through his final cabinet meeting, David Cameron realised — with some horror — that it had turned into a political wake. Theresa May had just lavished praise upon him, and his eyes had moistened. Then it was George Osborne’s turn: the Chancellor was a bit more humorous, but no less affectionate: ‘Being English, David, you’ll hate all this praise,’ he said. ‘You’re quite right,’ Cameron replied. ‘I am English, and I don’t much like it.’ Fearing that every member of his government was about to deliver an elegy, he brought the meeting to an abrupt end. Defining Cameron’s legacy is an important task for the Conservatives if they are to build on it.

During the referendum campaign, it seemed at times as if a competition was on to issue the most hyperbolic claim of what might happen should the British public vote to leave the European Union. Now politicians and commentators are competing to come up with the most hysterical assessment of the British decision to leave. Leading the field is Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, who declared that ‘England has collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’ In other words: without us, you’re nothing. Politics in collapse?

David Cameron bet everything on winning this European Union referendum. He lost. His resignation was inevitable, but the timing was not. Indeed, scores of pro-Brexit Tory MPs had signed a letter asking him to stay as Prime Minister - or, at the very least, not walk out of No.10 on the morning after the vote. Yes, he would not be the best person to lead Brexit talks – but these talks could be several months, perhaps years away. So there was no reason to rush for the exit and plenty reason not to do so. Brexit vote was always going to create uncertainty in the financial markets. Adding political uncertainty, in the form of a Prime Ministerial resignation, was never going to help.

This week the Prime Minister devoted a speech to what he regarded as six lies being told by his opponents in the EU referendum campaign. He later confessed that the idea for the speech had come to him while watching the news at 9 p.m. the previous evening. It would have been better if he had contented himself with shouting at the television, rather than adding yet more rancour to what has become a slanging match. Most voters tune into an election campaign only in its final few weeks; those who do so now will find nothing but hysteria, hyperventilation and obloquy. Where, it is often asked, are the facts? If we can distil the arguments down to the most salient points, what are they?

A Ryanair plane in a Stansted hangar was not the best backdrop for George Osborne’s claim that the economic argument about the European Union is now over and that his ‘consensus’ has prevailed. In recent years, Ryanair has lost its status as the fastest-growing budget airline in Europe: that honour goes to Norwegian Air, which has thrived outside the EU. And on the day of the Chancellor’s speech, a group of Ryanair passengers had announced their intention to take out a lawsuit against the company for what they see as unfair tricks to disguise the true cost of tickets. The Chancellor does the reverse of Ryanair: he tries to frighten us about the imaginary costs and charges of a ticket to Brexit.

The Leave campaign was right to pour scorn on David Cameron’s warning this week that Brexit could threaten Europe’s military stability and lead to war. Boris Johnson mocks the Prime Minister about his prophecy on page 14. If Cameron really believed that Britain leaving the EU could lead to war in Europe, why on earth did he risk having a referendum at all? Why was he suggesting until a few weeks before his negotiations with EU leaders that he would consider voting for Brexit if he didn’t get his way? It’s easy to tease the increasingly shrill alarmism of the Remain campaign. But it is harder to say how exactly leaving the EU would make things better.

Strange as it may seem, there are still people around David Cameron who regard the Scottish referendum campaign as a great success. Yes, they say, the nationalists didn’t like the original ‘Project Fear’ — the attempt to frighten Scotland into voting no — but it worked. Alex Salmond was defeated by a 10 per cent margin — proof, it’s argued, that relentless negativity works. Those who complain about it are either losers, or too squeamish to win. Andrew Cooper, chief of the Scottish ‘in’ campaign, said afterwards that the only criticism he would accept is that it was not negative enough. This attitude is a poison in the bloodstream of the Conservative party.

So far the campaign for the EU referendum has resembled a contest as to which side can spin the most lurid and least plausible horror stories. On the one hand, the ‘in’ campaign claims that we’ll be £4,300 worse off if we leave; that budget airlines will stop serving Britain and that we will become more prone to terror attacks. Not to be outdone, the ‘out’ side warns that we will be crushed by a fresh avalanche of regulation and immigration, and more prone to terror attacks.

Looked at from the narrow perspective of how to deal with the lethal business of human trafficking across the Aegean, this week’s deal between the EU and Turkey shows some encouraging signs. Slowly, the EU seems to be realising that the surest way to stop migrants dying in unseaworthy boats is to adopt similar measures to those used by Tony Abbott the former Australian Prime Minister: turn back the boats, and deport those who land illegally. The Australians paid Malaysia to help handle the migrant problem. The EU is paying Turkey more than £4 billion over the next three years to contain 2.5 million refugees. The problem, however, is that Turkey is being offered more than money.