MAJOR’S PLOY IS DESPERATE AND CONTEMPTIBLE

AFTER John Major led the Conservative Party to its most crushing election defeat in living memory, he declared: ‘It’s time to get off the stage. That’s what I propose to do.’

Unfortunately, he has not felt able to carry out that promise. Yesterday, he made the latest of a series of interventions in the Brexit debate, with a piece in the Sunday Times calling on the Government to revoke Article 50.

The former PM went on to argue there should then be a period of ‘national consultation’ followed by a ‘further referendum’ which would be ‘binding’ on whether we decided to leave the EU.

Major dismisses the objection that this would betray the 17.4 million people who voted Leave in 2016 by asserting that ‘63 per cent of those eligible to vote either voted to stay or did not vote at all’.

How desperate of Major to count in aid of his call for a second referendum those who chose not to take part in the first one — as if they were all would-be Remain voters.

How stupid he must think we are if we have forgotten that, in 2016, he declared if the result were for Leave, ‘it would not be politically possible to say we’ve reconsidered, let’s have another referendum. If we vote to go out, then we’re out and we have to get on with it’.

And how disingenuous he is to argue that revoking Article 50 would be a way of continuing the debate over the UK’s future relationship with the EU.

When the European Court of Justice (ECJ) last month ruled that the UK could unilaterally revoke its Article 50 notice to leave the EU, its judges insisted that revocation of the notification to withdraw must be ‘ unequivocal and unconditional’.

Or as the British QC who brought this case to the ECJ himself noted yesterday: ‘The revocation of your Article 50 notice must be an expression of your concluded decision to remain in the EU.’

That is what Major is trying to achieve. So it is contemptible of him to have begun his article with an attack on those in the Tory party whom he describes as ‘would-be assassins’ of Theresa May. His own intervention is another knife in Mrs May’s back.