Sitting on the sun-dappled terrace of the House of Lords, watching the Thames flow, Lord Nigel Lawson explains that the June 23 referendum, which he hopes will withdraw Britain from the European Union, was never supposed to happen. It is, he says, the fulfillment of a promise Prime Minister David Cameron expected to be prevented from keeping.
Going into the 2014 general election, Cameron, heading a coalition government with Liberal Democrats, placated anti-EU Conservatives by promising a referendum on the EU membership. He expected that another close election would leave him again heading a coalition, and that he would be able to say, truthfully, that his pro-EU Liberal Democrat partners would block a referendum. But his Conservative Party won a large parliamentary majority, inconveniently liberating Cameron from the constraints of a coalition and leaving him with an awkward promise to keep.
Full of years, 84 of them, and fight, Lawson has spent 42 years as a member of both houses. He is impatient with the proposition that it is progress to transfer to supra-national institutions decision-making that belongs in Britain's Parliament.