During the referendum campaign, the Government controversially spent £9.3 million on distributing a brochure to every British household making its case for remaining in the EU. That official publication contained a clear statement: “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide”.

Remainers defended the leaflet on grounds that it was not simply a campaigning tool, but a formal statement of Government policy.

Not a single Stronger In campaigner, as far as I’m aware, took issue with the sentence I have just quoted. Confident that they would win, they were happy to treat the referendum as final and binding.

Which is what makes all this pomposity about constitutional propriety so preposterous. Pro-EU campaigners, having won the first round of their legal battle to prevent the Government disengaging without another parliamentary vote, are now claiming that all they want is due process. It’s not their hypocrisy that shocks; it’s their sheer brazenness.

Does anyone imagine that the corporations which funded the court case were interested purely in the constitutional niceties? Does anyone believe that the remnants of Stronger In who have been cheering the challenge would be taking the same line had there been a 52-48 vote to stay?

After all, the people now huffing and puffing about the sovereignty of parliament have, in many cases, spent the past 43 years undermining it.

Now, in the most sudden somersault since Western Communists backed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they have gone from deriding parliamentary supremacy as a Victorian hang-up to posing as its defenders.

The case wasn’t really about parliamentary sovereignty. Everyone agrees that Parliament has the ultimate power to leave the EU.

But this particular Parliament voted – by six to one in the Commons – to put the question of EU membership to the voters. It didn’t tack on a reservation saying that it might think again if the voters surprised it. 

David Fuller's view

One should not blame everything on the EU but I will say that it has not helped attitudes towards democracy within the UK over the last 40 years, across all political parties.  I believe Theresa May understands this and is trying to address it.  However, if the UK Supreme Court does not reverse last week’s High Court’s ruling that the Government does not have the power to trigger Article 50 without parliamentary approval requiring a vote from MPs, the Prime Minister may have to call a snap General Election in 2017.  

Presently, Mrs May does not have enough cross-party support within Parliament where some MPs regard the EU political gravy train as a cushy personal option, should they be defeated in a UK general election.  Inevitably, there is an element of uncertainty in any election but if the Prime Minister was asking the country to give her the support to regain full UK sovereignty via Brexit, I think she would win with a landslide.  

Here is a PDF of Daniel Hannan's article.