I hold no candle for anyone in the various second referendum campaigns, but I feel I must knock on the head the notion that a second confirmatory referendum would be overturning the will of the people or anti-democratic. Brief thread follows

I accepted the EU referendum result even though I thought it a pointless act of self harm over austerity, immigration and remote political elites. It was only the Trump campaign that took me into an investigation of Kremlin interference and then Cambridge Analytica

Exposing the dark arts of psychometric targeted ads aimed at arousing fear and paranoia using millions of hacked Facebook account wasn’t ‘trying to overturn democracy’ or ‘defying the will of the people

Nor was exposing Putin’s funding of far right populist anti EU parties across Europe after the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Nor the influence of US hedge fund owners and Putin connected oligarchs in the UK and US. This was to defend future elections

When Carole Cadwalladr exposed the multiple proven law breaking of both Leave campaigns when it came to data and electoral overspends — this was not ‘overturning the will of the people’ or defying democracy: this was defending it

After three years working on the story of Trump/Brexit and Russian interference, and the multiple senate, FBI and Congressional investigations, I felt that this issues of foreign interference, dirty money and dark data were a threat to all FUTURE elections.

On the specific example of Brexit, I join Rees Mogg, Cummings and Redwood on the principle that the final Leave deal - or options for Leave - should have been put the people again. But most the people were bored, and wanted Brexit done. Case closed.

Brexit is a disaster because the Leave position was never clarified, and always moves to the extreme in which anything but ‘no deal’ is a betrayal. Remainers aren’t responsible for this dynamic. If May and Johnson couldn’t placate the ultras, how could any Remainers?

To a certain extent I do feel responsible, for spending half a century ignoring our weak institutions, our corrupt, venal or cowardly media, and the post Imperial series of conventions that rely on politicians with a sense of shame — so readily abrogated by the shameless

Now I feel that Brexit is necessary because everything wrong about this country that led to it — private schooling, the reliance on dark money and oligarchs, the class system with its alternating snobbery and ‘prolier than thou’ inverse snobbery — was rotten well before 2016

But I won’t be told that people who believe in the rule based conventions of the EU, or the rule of law, or free and fair elections, are somehow responsible for this looking slow motion catastrophe

And if a Corbyn supporter tells me once again that campaigning for a second confirmatory vote was ‘undermine the will of the people’ I would remind them that - on that basis - Labour shouldn’t have had the same leader in both the 2017 and 2019 general elections

Story. End of. Sadly. Decades of irrelevance await the UK: relative poverty compared with the EU. I will ‘remain’ with those European values regardless. The people of our four nations do not deserve what follows. Maybe a better country - or series of countries — will result

I just hope I live long enough to see it