I am beginning to think we have reached a significant moment in history. In Russia, an armed rebellion seemed to be underway last night with the head of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) and 25,000 troops loyal to him taking on Putin and the entire Russian leadership. Tanks and armoured vehicles were out in force on the streets of Moscow and this morning Putin is about to speak to the nation. What ordinary Russians make of it all I really can't imagine. At the very minimum, it's an acute political embarrassment for Putin - and it could be much worse.
In the US, Trump is slowly sinking under the weight of numerous legal actions with the two worst being the illegal removal of classified documents from the White House and the investigation into the 6 January 2021 insurrection which is getting ever closer to him.
Over here, Johnson has quit parliament in order to write a weekly column for The Daily Mail, something which insiders believe is already prompting unrest inside Associated Newspapers among columnists who produce far more interesting opinion pieces at a fraction of the former PM's reputed near million-pound salary.
Text from one of my Mail spies “big shots already regretting. Paying too much. Pissing off everyone on less money. Columns pisspoor. Readers not liking.” Hey ho. Just remember non-lord Dacre - everything Johnson touches turns to shit. And you were half way there already https://t.co/FKRpFF6Kwp
— ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (@campbellclaret) June 23, 2023
His first two efforts have been widely ridiculed. He wrote last week about a quack slimming cure that didn't work (for him anyway) and this week he praises the founder of Ocean Gate, a man who ignored the safety advice of experts and died this week when his submersible imploded while diving down to the wreck of the Titanic, taking four other innocent lives with him. Johnson hits out at 'lefties' who questioned the design of the 'Titan' although why they should be on the political left is a mystery.
I honestly think he's losing his mind.
However, perhaps the best news came in an article by Peter Kellner in The New European: Anti-Brexit Britain has reached the point of return.
Kellner is a former president of the YouGov pollster so his opinion matters and he concludes we have now past the tipping point and essentially the settled will of the British people is to rejoin the EU.
Brexit is effectively dead. He writes:
"In the past seven years, more than four million people have died. They were mostly older voters who backed Leave by two-to-one. Over the same period, almost five million people have reached voting age, and they overwhelmingly want Britain to be in the European Union.
"The combined effect of these two trends has been big enough to wipe out the 1.3 million Leave majority in 2016, and replace it with a 1.6 million majority for Remain. (This estimate takes full account of the fact that older voters turn out in much larger numbers than the under-25s.) If the referendum were being held today, Remain would defeat Leave by 17 million to 15.4 million – again, assuming nobody has switched sides."
I wrote about this demographic issue in March 2017 when I first started this blog and made the same calculation as Kellner with the obvious point that by 2020 the leave/remain sides would be equal and thereafter remain (rejoin) would increasingly become the dominant opinion.
This would not even mean a single leave voter expressing regret and being ready to admit they were wrong but as we know, not least from last week's Question Time when an audience of 100% leave voters revealed that many had changed their mind. This can only add to the rejoining argument.
The broadcaster David Aaronovitch tweeted about it, linking to a video he made in March 2018:
Someone just retweeted this from 5 1/2 years ago. The angry comments seem almost poignant in retrospect https://t.co/fuOkLUFKhB
— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) June 23, 2023
It's well worth listening to.
Brexiteers had assumed young remainers would grow into a Brexity mindset and would support their cause, something I always doubted would happen and the figures now seem to confirm that is not happening.
Brexit is certainly dead, regardless of how many try to keep breathing life into it but the bigger worry is for the Tory hierarchy. If the population decisively rejects their flagship policy what are they to do?
There are only two choices. First, to retain the policy and continue to argue for it, hoping voters switch back to an anti-EU stance, or to abandon Brexit altogether. Neither is very palatable.
Sticking with an unpopular policy, one that has been a proven failure is not the way to win elections but neither is admitting that you enthusiastically pursued it for years when all the evidence was that it was damaging the economy and the British people.
The demographic changes spell the end of Brexit but they may also spell the end of the Conservative party itself.
