THE POLITICS OF POLITICS - MARCH 28 - 10.02AM - 2019

Oxford Literary Festival Brexit bonanza

And so with a somewhat breathless sense of genuine anticipation, it was announced yesterday that former Tory deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine will be discussing, well, take a wild guess... Brexit, on the final Saturday (April 6) of the festival at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. Considering that tomorrow should have been our final departure date for leaving Europe (now of course extended), this should prove a sell-out event. So, for anyone with even a brief, passing interest in our country’s future, Saturday week, 6.30pm, might be worth a large red scrawl in your diary. And perhaps as an amuse-bouche to what will certainly be a rich and heavy mains, you might like to consider attending Ali Ansari’s talk ‘These Islands: A Letter to Britain’ at 2.00pm on the same day. Ansari, a professor of modern history at St Andrews University, considers the idea of Britain as a political entity constructed to integrate conflicting nationalisms but which now has succumbed to resurgent nationalisms. And on the Friday before (April 5) at 4.00pm, also in the Sheldonian Theatre, former foreign secretary Lord David Owen (who in the 70s voted to take Britain into the Common Market) discusses - and this should be very prevalent - the mental and physical condition of political leaders past and present. Now that does sound intriguing...