Stephen Pollard

membership. For months all we’ve heard from them, and from Labour, is that the Government doesn’t have a plan – that Mrs May has got no idea what to do or what Brexit really means. It might have taken six months but yesterday Mrs May made clear that, as she has put it all along, Brexit really will mean Brexit.

Far from being a meaningless slogan, that phrase spells out with clarity what Brexit actually means.

It means, in essence, leaving all the institutions that comprise membership of the EU. So now we can finally put to bed all the nonsense about remaining in the single market or still taking orders from the European Court of Justice. As Mrs May put it, Brexit means “not partial membership… not associate membership… or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out”. And it means, specifically, regaining full control of our borders. She could hardly have been clearer.

One is tempted to say to the Remoaners: put that in your pipe and smoke it! None of this will, of course, change the mindset of those who refuse to accept the referendum result.

But whatever one thinks of Brexit or of yesterday’s speech, even the most hard-core Remoaner ought now to acknowledge that Mrs May is a serious, heavyweight politician. Her speech was devoid of the

BUT we haven’t even triggered Article 50 yet, let alone started full negotiations. There isn’t much more Mrs May could realistically have told us beyond what she will seek to agree with the EU.

And crucially, she repeated Philip Hammond’s message at the weekend that if the EU tries to stiff us over a deal, we won’t simply roll over and take it. Not just repeated it but strengthened it.

As Mrs May put it: if Brussels tries to damage the UK during negotiations it would be an “act of calamitous self-harm” for the EU. Quite rightly, she said that “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”.

Talking of bad for Britain: yesterday’s speech was, as I said, one of the most important for decades. How striking that almost no one cares what the leader of the Opposition thinks of it. What a damning indictment of Labour’s irrelevance under Jeremy Corbyn.

But let’s end on a positive note. Each of us has our own political priorities. Many don’t even care about politics. But whatever we think, Brexit really will change the country.

And after yesterday’s speech, we know that the Government has the right approach and the right priorities.

Now comes the difficult bit.

‘Mrs May is a serious heavyweight politician’