Be silent, Sir John

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 an unprecedented 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 another sanctimonious diatribe about the supposed evils of Brexit. On and on he droned about the referendum result having been ‘an historic mistake’, how Brussels will exact terrible revenge, our influence on the world stage will evaporate and we’ll be so poor we’ll no longer be able to afford the welfare state.

This was a tirade of negativity, containing not a single original or constructive suggestion about how Britain should move forward in our new era of freedom.

The truth is that like his Remainer chums, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Michael Heseltine, Sir John simply can’t accept the people rejected their arguments and voted to leave. These men epitomise a deeply tarnished political class that has had its day but does not recognise the fact.

And how wrong their scaremongering has been so far. Markets have hit new highs since the referendum; 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.

Moaning old has-beens such as Sir John only remind us of the failings of the past.