The death of old people can harm Brexit

‘A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future OF THE COUNTRY’, SAYS IAN MCEWAN.

Donald Trump is curdling my brain. Now he’s saying we shouldn’t necessarily expect everything his spokespeople tell us to be true, whether at the podium in the West Wing or in the darkness among bushes outside the White House. That, you recall, is where Sean Spicer met with reporters after the sacking of James Comey last week, begging TV crews to kill their lights. You’re probably scratching your head too. But that is what he said, in the course of his latest early-morning social media rant: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he wrote on Twitter. Well, OK. Why bother have them come out at all then? Which was precisely his next thought. “Maybe,” he added a few moments later, “the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” I suppose this was to be expected. It’s a trick that autocrats share: intimidate and muzzle the press. You’ve seen it in Turkey, where police just detained Oguz Guven, the online editor of Cumhuriyet, which has led criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump is not arresting editors, of course. But his attacks on them never cease. Here is another tweet just from Friday morning: “The Fake Media is working overtime today!”Fake news. The enemy of the people. The notion of terminating the press briefings wasn’t just Trump musing, it was a clear threat. Keep this up, and I will shut you out. As for releasing those tax returns, forgeddaboutit! Oh, and this is good. Did you catch how livid the US news agencies were when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Trump in the Oval Office last week? They weren’t allowed in to take pictures. Only a guy from Tass was, the Russian state agency. Here’s what’s so confusing, though (just to add to the list). This may, in fact, be the most transparent White House ever – and the most transparent President. The death of elderly Brexit voters could lead to a second referendum delivering a result in favour of Britain staying in the EU, novelist Ian McEwan has claimed.

In a string of highly-charged comments, the Atonement author said: “A gang of angry old men, irritable even in victory, are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth.

“By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5 million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly ‘Remainers’; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.”

The author’s comments, reported by The Guardian, came during a conference in Westminster on Friday.

Accompanied by speakers including anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller, Mr McEwan said leaving the EU would harm Britain.

“This country, like a depressed teenage self-harmer, takes out a razor to scour a forearm and now contemplates its own throat,” the author said. “Truly, Brexit has stirred something not heroic or celebratory or generous in the nation, but instead has coaxed into the light from some dark, damp places the lowest human impulses, from the small-minded to the mean-spirited to the murderous.”