Ross Clark

David Cameron has been widely blamed for the Conservatives’ current predicament, but in one sense he has saved the party – if inadvertently. It is thanks to his drive for younger candidates that Theresa May’s government has avoided succumbing to a no-confidence vote. May does not have a majority, and relied on DUP votes to help her survive a no-confidence vote last month. Yet even DUP votes would not be enough to save her were she losing her own MPs at the rate John Major did in the mid 1990s. In 1992, Major was elected with a seemingly healthy majority of 21. Yet over the course of the following five years he lost that majority entirely. Why?

I don’t know what it is like to work as a checkout assistant in Asda, still less in an Asda warehouse. But if I did work in a company’s shops and I learned that there were better-paid jobs available in its warehouses I am pretty sure I know what I would do: apply for a job in the latter. It wouldn’t occur to me to pick up the phone to a lawyer and claim I was a victim of discrimination. But then perhaps I am not suited to life in the age of grievance politics. Today, the Court of Appeal has ruled that Asda may be guilty of sexual discrimination in that it is paying shop staff less than warehouse staff.

Earthquakes in public opinion do not happen often, and when they do they can catch commentators unawares. But if you want to see one in motion you should go back and watch the last two editions of Question Time. Until recently, the BBC show could be relied upon to have a loud contingent of groaning audience members capable of drowning out the ‘gammon’ tendency. The programme even managed to find a broadly pro-Remain audience in Clacton, the one and only seat which Ukip ever managed to win at a general election. But no longer. The arrival of Fiona Bruce has coincided with a sharp change in audience tone.

Brexit has become the inverse of a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. It is the lens through which all negative economic news has come to be interpreted – and magnified. Yesterday, the IMF published its latest forecasts for global economic growth. One might well ask what use this material is, given the IMF’s past record at economic forecasting. But whether these forecasts are of any value or not, they have, predictably enough, been jumped on by the Remain-supporting media in order to scribble yet another chapter of anti-Brexit narrative. Indeed, according to this narrative, it is not just Britain which seems to be suffering now from the moronic, misinformed decision of the UK public to vote to leave the EU in 2016 – it is the entire world.

Have Leavers just blown their best chance of Brexit in a subconscious sort of way, because deep down, they never really wanted it? Matthew Parris makes this case in a typically eloquent Spectator column this week. He might be right, but they have not blown it quite so badly as Remainers have. Imagine how events would have turned out this week had the great mythical new political party of the centre actually existed – if it had an organisational structure ready to pounce on its big opportunity, along with a smattering of MPs of other parties ready to jump ship. Imagine if, in the 24 hours between the Brexit vote and the no-confidence vote, it had suddenly risen, serpent-like.

If, as seems inevitable, the Commons votes to reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal later today – thereby sparing Britain from the humiliation of being trapped in the backstop, forced to accept EU rules without having a say in them – the hero of the hour will be Dominic Grieve. Him and Anna Soubry, Nicky Morgan, Kenneth Clarke, Sarah Woolaston and a gaggle of other Remain MPs. Why? Because it was only thanks to them that the Commons is getting its meaningful vote on the Brexit deal. It was they who rebelled against the government in December 2017 to make sure that such a vote would be held.

Before Brexit: The Uncivil War is allowed to drift off into the ether, there is an important point which needs to be made, and yet which has not been addressed in all the reams of comment which have written about it. There is a gaping hole in its narrative. That narrative seems straightforward enough: Vote Leave won the referendum because its leader, Dominic Cummings, and his team of geeks realised that they could tap into a vast, lost constituency of Britons with whom politicians and traditional political campaigning methods had lost touch. This they did by analysing Facebook and other social media data and then hitting the lost voters – put at three million – incessantly with micro-targeted adverts.

On any other day of the week the Guardian is – with some justification – complaining about a housing crisis, with millions of young people priced-out of ever owning – or even renting – a decent home. Now, however, it seems to be treating with alarm news that prices are stagnating. 'UK house prices take pre-Brexit hit, says Nationwide' declared a headline this week – followed by news that house prices have, in fact, risen by 0.5 per cent over the past 12 months. That is a lot lower than we have become used to in recent decades, but isn’t it a good thing if rampant house price inflation has come to a halt? And is it really connected with Brexit? The housing market – outside London – never returned to the mania of pre-2008.

Britain is, of course, in a Brexit-driven recession of its own making, while other EU countries are powering on ahead without us. Or so we keep being told. The ideas is that we are distancing ourselves from European markets - and concerned manufacturers will move production to factories elsewhere in the EU. While this gloomy analysis appears to be confirmed every time the CBI, IMF and others publish their forecasts, it is becoming increasingly hard to square with the economic data. This morning, IHS/Markit published its monthly Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for manufacturing – a measure of business activity which leads official government statistics on the economy.

There is never more excitement on the Left than when a Tory MP recants and concludes that his heartless party and its callous social policies are wrong. So it was on Friday when Nigel Evans, MP for Ribble Valley, announced that he had had a ‘road to Damascus conversion’ and realised that David Cameron’s legal aid reforms – which reduced the eligibility for legal aid – had made life harder for those who found themselves on the wrong end of a court case. It wasn’t pure altruism which had led him to this conclusion – Evans himself was acquitted on nine charges of sexual assault in 2014. While the case against him fell apart so, too, did his financial security. He complained that it had swallowed up his entire £130,000 life savings.

When Boris Johnson was foreign secretary, he was admonished for accusing the EU of wanting to administer ‘punishment beatings’ to Britain for its temerity in wanting to leave the EU. In the months since it has become clear just how apt his description was. At every turn, the EU has acted with one aim in mind: to try to ensure that Britain suffers from exiting the EU, in order to deter other member states from contemplating leaving the bloc. Today’s memo from the EU, laying out the plans for what would happen in the event of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit is a case in point. It is hard, reading this document, to reconcile it with the EU’s claim to be an organisation which promotes free trade and free movement of people and goods.