Christopher Booker

In the only two speeches I have made in this referendum campaign, I quoted that startling passage from Margaret Thatcher’s last book in 2003 where she wrote: “That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain, with her traditional strengths and global destiny, should ever have become part of it, will appear a political error of the first magnitude”.

Back in 1975, we may recall, when Mrs Thatcher had just become Tory leader, she played a very prominent role in the campaign to keep us in the Common Market. But after 11 years as prime minister, at “the heart of Europe”, she had completely reversed her view. This was because she had come to realise that everything she had originally been told about the real nature and purpose of the “European project” was wrong.

She had come to understand that its only real agenda in all it did was to work towards “ever-closer union”, under a form of governance like nothing the world had seen before. The purpose was to weld all Europe together under a government that was “supranational”, never intended to be accountable or democratic and was based on gradually removing from the member states any important power to govern themselves.

So much further has this process now gone since Mrs Thatcher’s time, so enmeshed has our own government become in that vast supranational system, that to extricate ourselves from it would be extraordinarily complex and difficult.

Nevertheless, the silliest decision of our official Vote Leave campaign has been to turn its back on any practical exit plan that would allow us to continue trading with the single market just as freely as we do now. This would be perfectly possible if we joined countries like Norway, in the European Economic Area (EEA), where we would actually, as an independent nation, have more say in deciding that market’s rules than we have as just one country of 28. This alone could have knocked on the head virtually every one of the scare stories on which Project Fear has based its campaign to remain.

Vote Leave rejected this course of action because joining the EEA would mean accepting the EU’s freedom of movement rules. But however this week’s vote goes, it is not in itself going to solve the immigration issue. And what Vote Leave doesn’t seem to realise is that, on the precedent of little Lichtenstein, we could even, in the EEA, achieve a considerable degree of opt-out from that freedom of movement.

The way Vote Leave has chosen to fight this campaign has been just as embarrassingly ill-judged as the Remainers’ Project Fear. Of course, finding a practical way to extricate ourselves would be stupendously difficult. But given intelligence and real political will, it could be done.

If, having voted to Leave – for all the sensible reasons that Vote Leave is not grown-up enough to appreciate – we could manage to pull ourselves together again as a self-respecting nation, it could certainly be done. All I can say to those who, in fear of that “leap in the dark”, are thinking of making a reluctant vote to Remain, is that they may, this time, be joining the winning side. But if they change their minds back to voting Leave, this may enable them to say, in a few years’ time, when the next treaty makes a disintegrating European Union look even less attractive than it does today, “at least we chose right in 2016”.