Brexit is the fault of our romantic attachment to the British empire, says Vince Cable. Writing recently, the leader of the Liberal Democrats judged that the vote to leave the European Union was caused by the old “imposing a worldview coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation”. Sir Vince, like many Remainers who subscribe to this view, is both wrong and right: wrong that imperial nostalgia swung the vote, but right that empire had something to do with it.

It’s true that leading Brexiteers envisioned a resumption of pre-EU trading relations with the English-speaking world. But the reasons that campaigners give are one thing, the reasons people have for supporting them quite another. There’s no evidence that Leavers were moved by