The EU Referendum category gathered posts written before and after the June 2016 vote. This page summarises them in order, from the latest to the earliest, so that readers can trace how the debate developed in the author’s own commentary.
2018
- April 2018: a reaction to Emmanuel Macron’s address to the European Parliament. She found his call for democracy and sovereignty at EU level hard to reconcile, and recalled that a year earlier his campaign priority had been something rather different.
2016
- May 2016: a piece titled around getting off the EU’s “escalator to low growth”, drawing on conversations with colleagues from outside the Union, with whom she said she found common ground on the debate over the UK’s future.
- April 2016: a post on the security argument, written after the Brussels attacks, which followed Paris so closely. She expressed sympathy for the victims and referred to a television interview with Lord Reid on the topic.
- March 2016: a short diary entry noting that the closure of Brussels Airport had left the city in shock, with political talk dominated by events.
- January 2016: a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard III, used to open an observation about a sudden cold snap across Europe.
2015
- November 2015: a post titled “The Death of Schengen?”, arguing that the open-borders arrangement needed a fundamental rethink after the new terrorist threat and doubting that EU institutions were good at such rethinking. A second November post criticised David Cameron’s renegotiation, citing a Reuters report that EU leaders were unlikely to agree to his requests.
- September 2015: a call for Mr Cameron to stop the fudge and deliver, opening with President Kennedy’s well-known line about what you can do for your country, and a report on the launch of the Say No to the EU tour in Margate, with Nigel Farage and Ray Finch MEP, where she said the venue was full beyond standing room.
How to read them
These are blog posts, written quickly, and they carry the opinions of their author at the time. Later developments, including the referendum result itself, changed the context. For the full timeline of her writing, return to the Brexit Briefings.