Last month scientists produced a stunning set of photographs of a kind the world had never before seen of the rim of a black hole. An “event horizon”, the astrophysicists called it. In some ways it is a metaphor for the interminable Brexit phenomenon the crossing of whose brink is proving mighty difficult.
It was noticeable on returning to Westminster after Easter that the tents had been struck and the turrets dismantled on College Green from which the media had sung their cacophonous oratorio as the great European psychodrama unfolded inside parliament. They will be back.
A new threnody can now be heard in the chambers and corridors of Westminster. We might call it the “lessons to be learned” theme. Already the House of Lords International Relations Committee has produced a fascinating report, UK foreign policy in a shifting world order. And there is talk of how much wisdom can be gleaned from what one Whitehall friend calls the “sorry tale” through which we have been living.
A very old Westminster friend, Frank Field, Independent MP for Birkenhead, now so seasoned a parliamentary monument that he is almost ivy-clad, told me: “Everybody keeps saying this is the worst event since Suez. We need to see how parts of the British constitution did or did not work then.”
23 May 2019, The Tablet
A Brexit inquiry would plainly need to be a fully open process and a relatively swift one
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