Moaning Major, still in denial over Brexit

IF anyone should know about historic mistakes it’s Sir John Major. This is the man who led us into the disastrous Exchange Rate Mechanism and whose term as prime minister was so abject and incompetent that it paved the way for 13 years of unbroken Labour government.

Anyone with an iota of self-awareness would have accepted the magnitude of such failings and retired gracefully from the political stage.

But not Sir John. Yesterday he launched into a sanctimonious diatribe about the supposed evils of Brexit. On and on he droned about the referendum having been ‘an historic mistake’, how Brussels would exact terrible revenge, our influence on the world stage would evaporate and we’d be so poor we’d no longer be able to afford the welfare state.

It was as if we’d been transported back to those febrile days of Project Fear – of which Sir John was an ardent supporter. The speech was a tirade of negativity, containing not a single constructive suggestion about how Britain should move forward in this new era of freedom.

And this was not his first intervention since the referendum. He has previously warned about ‘ the tyranny of the majority’, as if the democratic decision of the people was somehow illegitimate. How strange that he should be trying to exert ‘the tyranny of the minority’.

The truth is that like his Remainer chums Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Michael Heseltine, Sir John simply can’t accept that on June 23 the voters rejected their puny arguments and chose independence. These men epitomise a deeply tarnished political class that has had its day but does not have the dignity to recognise the fact.

Ironically, when he was prime minister Sir John complained bitterly that his predecessor Mrs Thatcher constantly interfered after leaving Downing Street. Isn’t he now doing exactly the same?

And how wrong all the scaremongering has been so far. Markets have hit new highs since the referendum, growth is strong, non-EU countries are queuing up to negotiate trade deals, exports have been buoyed up by the weaker pound and there are more people in work than ever before. So much for the apocalypse. Theresa May has caught the mood of the nation and is hugely popular. There will be many hurdles ahead but she represents democracy, ambition and hope for the future.

Moaning old has-beens like Sir John serve only to remind us of the failings of the past.