Hard choices for true believers - Rules on Irish exemption eased

This weekend’s 40th anniversary of the death, in a storm in Bantry Bay, of double Booker prize winner JG Farrell, offers an opportunity to speculate how that great chronicler of empire and the collapse of empire might regard Brexit.

However he might have viewed it, and it is hard to imagine he would admire Boris Johnson, he would have been alert to the nostalgia politics at the heart of that unfortunate enterprise.