This is pure revisionism, untrue and a dangerous, divisive reinvention of recent history that will stop our country from recovering. I was intimately involved in these events and will try to explain....

Let’s put aside for a moment the rights and wrongs of a ‘soft’ Brexit. (Wrong mainly because no one voted for it in the 2016 referendum; it literally wasn’t on the ballot paper.)

There was a fleeting opportunity for a soft Brexit in 2016 *if* the-then PM had chosen to make delivering Brexit a cross-party endeavour. This is what she should have done on an issue of such strategic national importance, and I told her so at the time.

There was a second missed opportunity after the 2017 General Election delivered a hung Parliament. That is as strong a signal as you get in our democracy that it’s time for a cross-party approach. Theresa May chose to buy a confidence-and-supply agreement with the DUP instead.

By mid-2018, the political reality was that Parliament’s choice was between a confirmatory referendum or a Hard (‘No Deal’) Brexit because enough of the Conservative party wanted a ‘clean’ Brexit and the rest either couldn’t agree on an alternative or didn’t care either way.