Daily catch-up: Boris spins out his will-he-won't-he cliffhanger on Europe
As a new survey suggests David Cameron's deal is going down badly with Tory members, the EU Leavers look to the most popular politician in the country
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Your support makes all the difference.I wrote about the EU referendum in The Independent on Sunday yesterday, looking at three possible challenges to my view that the British people will vote to stay in. I wasn't convinced by any of them, and concluded that a Remain vote is still likely.
But then Conservative Home published its poll of Tory party members. It found 71 per cent said the publication of the draft made them more likely to vote Leave, and only 13 per cent were more likely to vote Remain, with 14 per cent saying it made no difference. "More or less likely to vote x?" is not the best question wording, but, given that Tory members were pretty hostile in the first place, two thirds of them inclined to vote Leave, it looks bad for Cameron. It gives Boris Johnson more of an incentive to get off the fence on the Leave side, because Tory members are the people who will choose the next prime minister.
Johnson's article in today's Daily Telegraph is therefore even more interesting than usual. It is a well written fence-sitter, expressing the Remain arguments with more verve than the Leave ones, I thought.
The other new intelligence was the Sunday Times survey of Conservative MPs (pay wall), which identified 66 definite Outers. This is higher than I thought. It is beginning to look as if Cameron is going to face a serious split in his party after all, even if the Outers have no leader of better box-office drawing power than Iain Duncan Smith or Priti Patel (who isn't even a cabinet minister, despite the Mail on Sunday's headline).
• The Leave campaign desperately needs Boris to lead it, and it also needs more people like Tom Harris, the Labour former transport minister who lost his seat last year, who wrote in the Independent on Sunday that he is 53-55 per cent for voting to leave, but that this is not something he can mention in polite middle-class company.
• The Queen is opposed to electoral reform. I've always said the monarchy is a fine institution. She was "not supportive" of proportional representation in 1997, Joyce Gould, the Labour peer, reveals in her book, The Witchfinder General.
• Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, is Songs That Begin With "And". I forgot one other rule for this list: no Simon and Garfunkel.
• Poem by Brian Bilston last week:
IN PRAISE OF THE COMMA
How, great,
to, be, a, comma,
and, separate,
one, word, fromma,
nother.
Bilston is publishing a book. He has enough pledges to fund it, but you can still support it here.
• And finally, thanks to Rayner Lucas for this relationship advice:
"Never say, 'I told you so.' Say, 'It is as the prophecy foretold.'"
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