As I come to the end of my six years as President of the Party in South East England I have been reflecting on lessons to be learnt from a time that has been particularly significant both for our Country and our Party. When I began we were in Government and as I leave the final arrangements for departing the EU are being confirmed. We have had four leaders during this period.
It has been a tumultuous time dominated by our relationship with the EU. As a committed European I now realise that people like me have to take a lot of responsibility for how the referendum turned out as I adopted the approach like many others of keeping my head down, not offering the strong reasons for remaining and hoping that the issue would go away. It is though worth noting that as the Supreme Court ruled the referendum result was non-binding and twenty nine million people either voted to remain or did not express an opinion. It would nevertheless, because of the way the referendum was presented, have been very difficult immediately after the vote for parliamentarians to reject the outcome.
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