Brexitopendoor?

Dan O’donoghue’s report (Friday, 5 January) on today’s meeting between Nigel Farage and Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier raises some interesting issues about the state of European and British representative democracy.

Last October Michel Barnier readily granted an audience to the pro-eu self-styled “rebels” – the former MP Nick Clegg, the unelected Labour peer Lord Adonis and Ken Clarke, MP, who boasts a modest majority of 8,010 in the Rushcliffe constituency.

Yet despite declaring his “door always open”, it has taken Barnier almost three months to “receive” Nigel Farage, a four times elected MEP for South East England, representing 751,439 voters since the 2014 elections, and until recently the leader of the largest group of British MEPS in the European Parliament.

Is it surprising then that Mr Farage fears that the voice of the 17.4 million Brexit voters is being suppressed? Is it not time for the leading “Remoaners”, Tony Blair and Nicola Sturgeon included, to accept that on Brexit the game’s a bogey?

We have not, as they would have us believe, arrived at the present impasse as a result of extreme Tory eurosceptic machinations, but rather because over the last 40 years or so the great British electorate, with an average European election turnout of 35 per cent slipping in 1999 to 24 per cent, has shown little enthusiasm for the EU and all its works.

A dignified Brexit support- ed by all parties in 2018 is surely the only honest course of action.

JOHN WOOD Woodside, The Croft, St Boswells