Brexit, Ken Clarke said early last year, will be like the Iraq War. Fifteen years ago, he told the Times, “70 per cent of the British public were in favour of the invasion and most of the Conservative party was in a patriotic fury. Within 12 months you couldn’t meet a member of the public who had ever known anybody who was in favour of it.”
In the fundamentals, if not the details, Clarke is right. In 2003, YouGov polling found that 54 per cent of Britons were in favour of the war, compared to just 38 per cent against. Asked a dozen years later how they had felt at the time of the invasion, 43 per cent remembered opposing it, and just 37 per cent supporting it. It wasn’t just that people had changed their minds – they had forgotten they ever held a different view.
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