00:00Nobody here, nobody in this room thinks that we are going to have a referendum in the near future.
00:05Okay, I would like there to be one. I don't actually think we're going to have one for some time.
00:09And two reasons. One is I don't think the political debate wants it here.
00:12But secondly, while we've got the prospect of people like Jacob getting into bed with people like Nigel Farage,
00:19and Nigel Farage possibly coming to the government, the European Union is not going to think about having us back.
00:24Because this debate, this is the triumph that Jacob can take some comfort in, given his views of the world.
00:31Until the country is settled in the view that we should be in the European Union, the European Union is
00:38not going to have us back.
00:40Before you answer that, Jacob, I want to take you back and put the same question to you that Alistair
00:44answered a moment ago about Labour.
00:46So how, the impact on your party, which fractured to some extent over Brexit and has been in power repeatedly
00:55since then.
00:56It's been very divisive for the Conservative Party since the early 1990s, that there's been a pro-European, anti-European
01:03wing.
01:04And that has made room for reform to grow out of the Conservative Party and led to a lot of
01:09divisions in the last government.
01:11Well, you could say that your party failed to actually handle Brexit properly.
01:15Well, Alistair made the point that there was no plan for leaving.
01:17That was a deliberate policy decision of David Cameron, and it seems to me it was a deeply irresponsible one.
01:22That if you give the country a referendum and you're the Prime Minister, you ought to think that you could
01:26lose.
01:26Did you have a plan as someone who was arguing?
01:28I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn't in government. I was a backbench MP.
01:33And that was the difficulty. That's the difficulty with referendums, is that you don't have the party that wins the
01:39referendum then implementing the policy.
01:41You have the party that is in government doing it, who may disagree with the referendum.
01:46And that was the position we got into, David Cameron going and Theresa May, who was a Remainer taking over.
01:52And so, yes, there were lots of ideas of what we should do when leaving, but we weren't the government
01:59of the day.
02:00We were just arguing for those points.
02:01But that gave them an extraordinary advantage, that leave could mean whatever any of the leavers said that it meant.
02:07And that's why there was such a catalogue of lies, because Johnson said one thing, Farage said another one, Michael
02:12Goethe said another one.
02:12The lying expert's back. I mean, listening to him on lies is like listening to King Herod on childcare.
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