Styled as a "car crash" interview - which was anything but - we have Nick Clegg discussing with Andrew Neil the lack of a Brexit exit plan. The thrust of the interview is Neil asserting that the leave campaign made its position clear during the run-up to the referendum, while Clegg insists that it didn't. It all goes back, said Clegg:
⦠to the origins of the debate prior to 23 June. What's coming back to haunt everybody, the whole nation, was the fact that the Brexiteers didn't deign to spell out to people what they actually meant. Now you will now no doubt quote this quote and quote that quote but actually there was no manifesto from Farage, Gove and Johnson, united, coherent, putting before the British people â I'm not talking here about television clips in a television studio ⦠on crucial things like whether we stay in the Single Market.
Neil responded that there was a "framework document" from the official leave campaign, widely covered by the media, in which it said that we want the supremacy of EU and EU jurisdiction to end, budget contributions to end and the EU's control over the UK's borders to end.
Demonstrating his lack of grasp of the subject (which he does all too often), he also said it wanted to leave what they call the common commercial policy â which, he said, "is another way of describing the Single Market".
This, quite rightly, had Clegg protesting that these were not the same things, only to have Neil, without apologies, running a number of clips showing Gove, Johnson and others stating that we should leave the Single Market.
None of these people, of course, had any authority or mandate to speak for anyone other than themselves. The official leave campaign was appointed by the Electoral Commission for its ability to run the campaign, not because it had any claim to represent the views of leave voters.
But, as Clegg observed, any such claim would have required a manifesto. "Where was the single document from all of the key Brexiteers saying British people, this is what will happen if you leave the European Union? " he asked.
Warming to his theme, he answered his own question: "It was not there", he said, adding: "I'll tell you why it was not there. It's not as if they were not warned. Dominic Cummings, apparently the intellectual architect of the Brexit campaign, said months before the campaign, he said it's very important we don't say what we mean".
As a result, Clegg concluded, they did not state what Brexit means. "They didn't have a mandate on how to do it as they didn't deign to spell out what they meant".
And, not for the first time, Clegg does have a point. It's exactly the same point we made in Flexcit, for exactly the reason that we are all addressing this precise point. Without having spelt out in detail what Brexit would mean before the referendum, the campaign has no authority whatsoever to state the terms on which we leave.
What is particularly apposite here, though, are Clegg's comments about the sayings of Cummings. These were articulated in his blog on 23 June 2015, coincidentally exactly a year before the referendum, to the very day.
Asking, rhetorically, whether the leave campaign (then the "no" campaign) needed to have a unified plan for exit, he stated: the campaign "is neither a political party nor a government. It has no locus to negotiate a new deal".
Creating an exit plan that makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around, Cummings argued, seems an almost insuperable task. Eurosceptic groups, he said, have been divided for years about many of the basic policy and political questions.
At this point, Cummings wrote of an "interesting attempt" at such a plan, referring to Flexcit, the merits of which he promised to discuss when he had studied it more. That was never to happen.
But even if a plan succeeded, Cummings averred, the sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered in such a plan even were it to be 20,000 pages long, and the longer it is the more errors are likely.
On top of the extremely complex policy issues is a feedback loop, he said. Constructing such a plan depends partly on inherently uncertain assumptions about what is politically sellable in a referendum, making it even harder to rally support behind a plan.
Thus, Cummings concluded, "there is much to be gained by swerving the whole issue", adding:
Different people have different ideas about the best way to leave. For example, some people suggest we should leave the EU but simply remain in the Single Market while we negotiate a new deal. Others have different ideas. Global rules set by the World Trade Organisation provide some guarantees against European countries discriminating against British trade. But none of this is the real point. We are not a Government. We can't negotiate anything.
In a lengthy dissertation, he then told us that a "no" vote "really means that a new government team must negotiate a new deal with the EU and they will have to give us a vote on it, but after a thoroughly confused argument, he then decided that: "What a NO vote really means would depend upon what the political parties say they will do and this remains unclear as these issues have not been explored yet".
From all that, one of the key point Cummings makes is that Eurosceptic groups "have been divided for years about many of the basic policy and political questions". And they still are.
The likes of Gove, Nuttall, Banks and all the others squealing about leaving the Single Market have no more right to have their views taken into account than anyone else. How we leave is a matter for government, as it is only government that will have to stand by its record in an election.
All the rest are just unaccountable noise â and especially the likes of Andrew Neil, the man who doesn't even know the difference between the EU's common commercial policy and the Single Market.
