Bernard Connolly

What is Jeremy Corbyn up to? The appeal in his letter to Remainers in the Commons to turf Boris Johnson out, and magically transform the Leader of the Opposition into an 'interim' Prime Minister – one who would block not just a no-deal Brexit but any Brexit at all, looks like something out of a Bulgakov novel. But there is a sensible – at least from Corbyn's point of view – purpose behind it. Few of the various ex-Labour and ex-Conservative independent MPs are likely to support the appeal. Many Corbyn-despising Labour MPs will not back it. A couple of Tories might decide to end their parliamentary careers endorsing it. But Corbyn's appeal will effectively dissuade most moderate Tory Remainers from voting against their own Government.

The no-deal Catch 22 for the Tories is well-established, bringing comfort to those who oppose no-deal (and Brexit) and worry to those who rightly see no-deal as the only way of actually leaving the EU. The idea is that the Tories cannot fight an election until Britain has genuinely left the EU, but that it will be impossible to leave without an election that would put Corbyn in power and stop Brexit altogether. The conclusion drawn by some Tories is that the new prime minister, whoever it is, will have to ask for another extension. But that's wrong. And while there is an existential issue for the Tories, there could be an even worse one for Labour – and even a dilemma for the Brexit Party: should they seek a pact with the Tories?

Could a no-deal Brexit destroy the Tory party's reputation for competence and lead to a crushing electoral defeat in the same way as Britain's withdrawal from the Exchange Rate Mechanism did in 1992? That is certainly the view of some seasoned commentators, such as Jeremy Warner in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, and the parallels to an acrimonious Brexit seem obvious. But in reality, the comparison is actually misleading, as it misrepresents the political history of the ERM exit and fails to understand how Britain has changed as a result of the Brexit referendum. First, it's worth remembering that what really hurt the Conservatives after 'Black Wednesday' was not that government policy had been defeated by economic logic.

In Parliament yesterday, Theresa May repeated Philip Hammond's fallacious argument that because the Brexit referendum result was 52:48, the form of Brexit should be a compromise between leaving the EU and remaining in it. This argument completely distorts the notion of democracy. Firstly, no such argument was ever deployed when it was a question of accepting the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties. Secondly, the referendum was not subject to any threshold level of support for one position or the other. And David Cameron and George Osborne stated very explicitly that a victory for "Leave" – even by a single vote – would mean leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union.

Four years ago, 45 per cent of Scottish voters favoured leaving the UK. Many of the warnings about the negative impact of independence on the Scottish economy were justified. But they did not extinguish a yearning for independence – and the same could be said of the EU referendum, with the caveat that this time a majority voted to leave, and many of the warnings were unjustified. An ineradicable desire to get our country back triumphed over the Project Fear campaign conducted by the Treasury and the whole of the nomenklatura that sought to preserve position, power and privilege for itself and to suppress any notion that ordinary people, in Britain or in any other European country, could have a say in how they are governed.