Brexit: How did we get here and how could it have played out differently?

Three people with a good claim to have predicted it first are Charles Grant, Denis MacShane and Patrick O’Flynn. Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform, wrote in March 2005 about what would happen if Britain voted No in the referendum Tony Blair had promised. Charles Grant was one of very few people who could see that clearly, if only because he thought through what would happen if Britain had held a referendum on the constitution and been the only country to reject it. He assumed that Labour would win the 2005 election, but if it then lost the referendum, “the triumphant Eurosceptics would be demanding more”. He went on: “Having defeated the treaty, many of them would see ‘renegotiation’ as the obvious next step.” Their demands would be “incompatible with EU membership”, he wrote, and “the public would, therefore, turn against the EU itself”. Ten years later, it came to pass.