Good to see my old student Keith Simpson MP, saying this on TV yesterday: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-50467008. Keith was one of my favourite early students, despite our political differences, and the fact that in my courses on British history I didn’t cover the military side as much as he would have liked. He later went on to become a notable military historian, as well as an MP. He told me he married a General, in order to be saluted when he visited Army camps with her. (I’m sure that was in jest.) He’s 70 now, and not standing in this election, which is a shame. He’s one of those old-fashioned Tories I’ve always got on well with, by contrast with all those ideological right-wing public school-educated journalists and financiers who seem to have taken the party over recently. I trust Keith now to carry on sniping at our mutual enemy from behind the lines.
He’s on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Simpson_(politician). And there’s a clip of him here on an old TV discussion programme with an incredibly drunken and quite incomprehensible Oliver Reed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_hBnSkQZCQ. Keith is the other one with a moustache. Reed offers to take him on ‘tash to tash’.
Porter’s Pensées 
Tory moderates have seen the party entirely transformed from a ‘one nation’ Euro-friendly party to a very right wing, nationalistic, and bigoted one. It was Macmillan who made the early applications to join and Heath who led UK’s entry, and even in the 1980’s the Tories were more euro friendly than Labour who were generally sceptical or outright antagonistic, especially on the left. The European Movement was largely Tory dominated and in the 75 referendum financed the BIE.
When the Johnson government has got their country ‘back,’ and it will take years of negotiation, what then? Perhaps a Little England’ ruled by and in the interests of the wealthy, and for the rest the less than tender mercies of unregulated free market capitalism.
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Right-on!
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