Tory shadow minister's car-crash interview

Think Brexit has been an economic disaster? Then you just need to “come up north” to see the huge benefits it has brought, according to one Tory.

Shadow Home Office minister Matt Vickers, a man who somehow makes his boss, Chris Philp, seem like one of the great thinkers of the age, yesterday appeared on LBC to talk up the decision to leave the EU with the 10th anniversary of the vote looming – and inevitably walked into a head-on car crash.

Vickers, an ardent Brexiteer, entirely dismissed a new study led by researchers at King’s Business School, Stanford University, the Bank of England and the University of Nottingham which found that his pet project had left the UK economy significantly smaller than it would otherwise have been – by between six and eight per cent.

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Rats in a Sack

“I’m sure that those people probably would have told you that was what was gonna happen. I mean, we heard the sky was gonna fall,” Vickers sniffed, saying he had “never heard of” the report. Asked if he had ever heard of the Bank of England, he declined to answer.

“I think it’s created opportunities,” he said of Brexit. “We’ve gone out there, we’ve set up trade agreements… let me take you out of Westminster. You can come up north.”

Quite why Vickers thinks that would be the argument winner is unclear. While the south-east of England has fared the worst relatively on earnings, the next two regions hardest hit have been the north-east – where Vickers’s Stockton West constituency is – and Yorkshire and the Humber.

Perhaps Vickers meant the north as in Northern Ireland, which, sitting as it does effectively within the EU’s economic orbit, is doing very nicely indeed.