I felt giddy, vertiginous, thrilled, but slightly scared. I went to bed and woke up about 3.30am, switched on the laptop and could not believe my eyes.
#Crimson court viscount map plus
Plus midsummer in the North is unmissable. I did not want to be in London because I thought we were going to lose. I told them to shoot you in the arm, not the leg.”īC: Where were you on referendum night? How did it feel?Īt home in Northumberland. Kerr walked past and said with a grin: “Darn. Once when I had sciatica, I was limping through Westminster tube station. In the Lords, I came to like John Kerr, the author of Article 50, despite fervently disagreeing over Brexit. Aye, he replied, I thought it might wind you up and I had to get it off my desk somehow. I once said: Ronnie, why do you keep forwarding that new newspaper called The New European to me through the parliamentary mail? It’s a Remainer propaganda sheet. We’d meet on the train from Newcastle to London and compare notes about our parties. Ronnie Campbell, then the left-wing Labour MP for Blyth Valley, became a good friend during that period. So much for the idea that people did not know what they were voting for.īC: Who was the most unlikely ally you campaigned with or shared a platform with during the referendum? Did you strike up any unexpected new friendships across traditional political divides? May I ask why? There followed a word-perfect, textbook analysis of the democratic deficit in Brussels, which could have been taken from a think-tank pamphlet. He was in his garden in a string vest with tattoos and piercings, plus a Rottweiler straining to get off its chain and kill me. If so, that shows how far from us their thinking was.īC: What was your most memorable moment during the referendum campaign?Ĭanvassing a voter in Gateshead on the day itself. I was surprised later to find that Cameron did not think of it as a failure because offering a six-month delay on benefit payments to migrants was such a big deal for the EU.
![crimson court viscount map crimson court viscount map](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1agZnMVgi30/maxresdefault.jpg)
When his renegotiation came back with the square root of minus zilch in early 2016, I decided we should leave: that humiliation was a key moment for me. I was then for Change, or Go, especially after David Cameron’s Bloomberg speech, which seemed to me an excellent manifesto for comprehensive reform. I said I thought that was too calculating. I remember later, around 2015, discussing Brexit with a fellow Tory peer who said: “The trouble is if people like you and me come out for Brexit in the coming referendum, we’ll lose, and that will kill Euroscepticism forever and consign us to irrelevance we will never be able to slow down European integration”. However eurosceptic you were, leaving was utterly unthinkable: I found that odd, but was not yet a Leaver.
I recall a moment in the very early 2000s when a bunch of people were grumbling over dinner about the EU and I said: I wonder if one day we should be better off leaving? Whereupon one of those who had been grumbling, a very wealthy owner of a premiership football club, turned on me in a fury for even voicing such a thought. Here are the answers to our questions from Conservative peer Viscount Ridley, better known as the author, journalist and businessman Matt Ridley.īC: When did you first come to the view that the UK would be better off out of the EU? Did you ever think that the EU could be reformed from within to make membership tolerable for the UK? Tell us how your views developed over time on the issue.
#Crimson court viscount map series
Here is the latest in our series reflecting on the Brexit process with regular BrexitCentral authors and others who have played an important role in our journey out of the European Union.