Eu

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no--brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the small print, sift the evidence and take a considered view.

Stop me if I haven’t got this right. But as I understand it, as a result of the deal that the EU struck with Turkey earlier this week to get it to keep more migrants who’d otherwise end up in Greece and then Germany, the EU will now be expediting the process whereby Turkey becomes an EU member even though only three per cent of it is actually European. So…in order to stem a flow of migrants that could, at worst, amount to over a million people this year, we are admitting to the EU a country with a population of 75 million, any of whom would then have the right to live and work anywhere in the Union. It seems like an odd sort of cost-benefit calculation; I’d just bung them the cash, myself.

This week Nigel Farage revealed that he had been left 'worried' about Boris Johnson's ability to campaign for Brexit after his 'slightly shambolic' North London press conference. While the Ukip leader insists he has since come round to Johnson's involvement, Mr S wonders what he will make of the Mayor of London's turn on The Andrew Marr show. Johnson appeared on the BBC show to put forward the case for leaving the EU. However, what followed was a tense exchange between Johnson and Marr as each tried to set the interview agenda. With Boris keen to speak about the single market and sovereignty, he clashed with Marr when the presenter attempted to change topic: AM: Let's move on to tipper trucks just for a second.

Pro-Brexit Tory Cabinet Minister would, I suspect, not be complaining about the government’s referendum campaign tactics if they didn’t fear that they were effective. Whatever you think about how he has done it, David Cameron has driven the risks of leaving the EU up the agenda this week. He has pushed the Out campaign onto the back foot. This is what makes Boris Johnson’s appearance on Marr tomorrow morning so important, I argue in my Sun column this week. Out need Boris to drive their agenda as successfully as Cameron is pushing IN’s. The interview is a big moment for Boris too.

Brexit campaigners make the argument that the European Union just isn't working when it comes to Britain's interests. While some are yet to be convinced, it's safe to say that some parts of  the EU parliament just don't work full stop. Last night Paul Brannen, the Labour MEP, found himself stuck in a lift in parliament, in Brussels. When door of the lift opened, a steel wall appeared. After waiting for 20 minutes, Brannen decided the only thing to do was to film himself in case he didn't made it out of the lift alive: 'I'm somewhere between the 13th floor of parliament and the 3rd floor of parliament, and I've been here for about 20 minutes and they're currently trying to get me out.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson & Isabel Hardman discuss the opening skirmishes of the EU referendum campaign" startat=540] Listen [/audioplayer] Stuart Rose will have to be added to the long list of British businessmen who have struggled to make the transition to politics. Rose, the Chairman of Britain in Europe, didn’t get off to the best of starts in this campaign when he told The Times that ‘“Nothing is going to happen if we come out of Europe in the first five years, probably. There will be absolutely no change’ a quote that was seized upon by the Out campaign who said it disproved all the dire warnings about the immediate consequences of leaving.