Brexiteers should pay their EU bills

I have been thinking of the multibillion-pound lump-sum payment for Britain to leave the EU which formed part of the negotiations with Brussels when Theresa May was Prime Minister.

Boris Johnson evidently intends to refuse to pay the designated sum, or any smaller payment for that matter, if there is not an agreement which satisfies what he sees as right and necessary.

On reflection, payment by us of anything approaching £40bn was not at all talked about at the time of our referendum three years ago.

It occurs to me that if this consequence were widely known about by the general public, probably fewer people would have voted to leave.

Repudiating any such liability when leaving the EU is the probable strategy of the new ministerial team (which a Times political correspondent thought were all of low calibre, incidentally) but to default on a payment which would relate partly to pensions for EU staff could

seem shabby and unprincipled.

Like the Bullingdon Club smashing up a restaurant, perhaps.

If this situation were clearly known at the time of the referendum vote, many people might have been tempted to suggest that Boris Johnson gets on a bus and rides around the North Circular Road for a long time.

More pragmatically, since what this new Government proposes is a bit like walking out of a restaurant without paying the bill, a likely consequence would be near zero cooperation from the EU in future, which we are likely to need whether we belong to the club or not. Michael O’Neill Penarth