Daily catch-up: What is surprising is that Andrew Adonis's 'defection' has taken so long
Plus the 3D-chess calculations of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson over the EU referendum
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Your support makes all the difference.Defections are the hard currency of political exchange. Not that Andrew Adonis's resigning of the Labour whip in the House of Lords, to head an infrastructure commission for George Osborne, is an actual defection. He remains a member of the Labour Party, and has been more loyal to the party for the past five years than it has any right to expect. But what happens when a party moves off the centre ground is that serious, able people, people who desperately want a centrist Labour Party to succeed, start to look elsewhere for ways in which to contribute.
• The calculations of leading Conservatives about the EU referendum are as complex as 3D chess. I wrote in The Independent on Sunday about Boris Johnson's dilemma: if he put himself at the head of the Leave campaign, he would increase his chances of becoming prime minister by 2020, but might instead consign himself to the footnotes of history. Most people, including people who put money on it at the bookmakers, think that the British people will vote to stay in the EU, but I have an article in Politico looking at the reasons for thinking that they might not. It includes one of my favourite contemporary history vignettes: that of Mary Wilson, Harold's wife, telling him as they left the polling station for the 1975 referendum that she was sorry but she just couldn't vote for Britain to stay in the European Economic Community.
• The Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, is True Meanings of Medicines.
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this travel update:
"I like to smuggle a tiny piece of luggage onto the carousel at the airport sushi bar."
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