UK

What happens over the coming weeks and months will determine our political and economic fate for decades to come. Governments can follow Attlee or Erhard. The hopeful victory against coronavirus will be a Pyrrhic one if we allow it to destroy our liberal, free-trading economic order.

The real work of sorting out Britain’s trade relations with the EU and the world has only just started.

As important as Brexit will be to Britain, its real impact will be felt across the Channel for years to come.

As Karl Marx taught us, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. With Brexit we are long past these two separate stages.

He famously claimed his chances of becoming Prime Minister were “about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive”. It probably means Boris Johnson will be a pizza topping in his next life.

Monty Python prepared me for the absurdities of British life. Without Monty Python, I would be even more hard-pressed to make sense of Brexit.

Nothing in my work in Germany, Britain, Australia and now New Zealand has given me reason to doubt my basic beliefs: incentives matter; councils can work effectively when given the right incentives; and decision-making removed from the people it concerns creates problems.

May’s abject failure to deliver Brexit would always pulverise her party and the political system with it. Somewhat naively, I thought she and her party would not let it come to that. How wrong I was.