Boris johnson

I don’t know if 'Leave' supporters will win. With the young abstaining and the old voting in a low-turnout referendum, it is just about possible that they could. But it is already dismally clear how they will react if they lose: they won’t accept the result. Nigel Farage was proud to admit that he would be a bad loser. 'In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way,' he told the Mirror. 'If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.' The old-fashioned among you might have thought that in any electoral contest the side with the most votes wins. How out of touch you fuddy-duddies are.  It is not enough to win a majority of the vote anymore.

You know you’ve not necessarily added a great deal to your argument when Ken Livingstone is telling you off for invoking Hitler. Boris Johnson finds himself in that rather awkward position today, with the former Mayor being scolded by another former Mayor for claiming at the weekend that Hitler was among ‘various people’ who tried to create a European superstate and that ‘the EU is an attempt to do this by different methods’. Livingstone insisted that while ‘what I said was perfectly true’ (that was that Hitler supported Zionism ‘before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews’, in case you’d forgotten) that Boris had got his facts wrong, and that ‘there was never a plan for a United States of Europe under Hitler.

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Boris Johnson has kickstarted his battle bus tour of Britain which he hopes will convince people to vote out of the EU. But before he hit the road, he made a direct pitch to Spectator readers in an exclusive interview. The former mayor of London set out his Brexit battle lines, as he spoke to James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson, saying: ‘It is unquestionably true that I’ve changed. But so has the EU. And of the two of us, it’s the EU that has changed more than me.’ Speaking on the podcast, James Forsyth tells Isabel Hardman that: ‘He knows that he is in the fight of his political life.

Is the Brexit campaign 'morphing into Ukip'? That's what Sir John Major will say he fears is happening later. In a speech at Oxford University, he'll argue that those calling for Britain to leave the EU are 'fuelling prejudice on immigration'. He'll also say that: 'As the leave arguments implode one by one, some of the Brexit leaders morph into Ukip and turn to their default position - immigration. I urge them to take care, this is dangerous territory that - if handled carelessly can open up long-term divisions in our society'. So does he have a point? It's definitely credible to see how some elements of the leave camp are focusing their positions around the immigration debate.

The right, as well as the left, is home to the kind of flaming conspiracy nut who, in Bertie Wooster’s words, make ‘strong men climb trees and pull them up after them’. In another life, the activists for Vote Leave might have joined the thousands of hollowed-eyed onanists who post abuse under newspaper articles from their parents’ spare rooms, or become columnists for the Mail; fringe figures, best ignored. But just as on the left of politics the fringe is becoming the mainstream, so on the right, brooding paranoids, who cannot face a hard fact or uncomfortable argument squarely, are moving in to take over the Conservative Party.

With the May elections over, the EU referendum campaign is now in full swing. David Cameron started the day warning that Brexit could put peace in Europe at risk. In his speech at the British Museum this morning, the PM also asked whether leaving the EU was a risk worth taking. Here's what he said: Boris hit back by making his case for voting out, saying that negotiating on behalf of the EU is like 'trying to ride a vast 28-man pantomime horse': He also sung 'Ode to Joy' in German: And Boris even appeared to forget the name of the city which, until a few days ago, he was the Mayor of: Whilst on the subject of the EU referendum, Tory MP Crispin Blunt said after careful consideration he was backing Brexit: But it wasn't all about the European Union.

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3" title="James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss Boris" startat=552] Listen [/audioplayer] After an eight-year detour into municipal government, Boris Johnson has now returned to national politics. The former mayor of London will mark this moment by going on the stump for the Leave campaign. He has some catching up to do: while never far from the public eye, he was absent from the Commons for seven years. Even when back in Parliament after the general election, Boris felt he could not take the cabinet job that was offered to him. But his time at City Hall hasn’t dented his ambitions; quite the opposite.