Most of the time we don’t mind simply saying that some cases are ambiguous. But science loves categories. For instance, species are defined as groups of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile organisms. House mice, Mus musculus, can breed with other house mice and their offspring are fertile. They are a species. They cannot interbreed with the black rat, Rattus rattus, but rats can breed with each other. The black rat is a separate species.

But there are intermediate cases. There are species of finch on the Galapagos which were thought separate, but a hybrid intermediary has been discovered which can breed with both. Does that mean that, instead of two species, the existence of the intermediate means there is now one? Lions and tigers can interbreed, but only the female offspring are fertile. Are lions and tigers therefore the same species? How about dzo, the cross between cows and yaks? Again, the female is fertile, the male not. Do species therefore not exist? 

Or, consider the famous case of Pluto. There are asteroids, and there are planets. Planets are defined by the International Astronomical Union as celestial bodies which are in orbit around the sun, are big enough to have formed a near-spherical shape under their own mass, and which have “cleared the neighbourhood” — that is, swept its orbit clear of other objects. All those criteria are comfortably met by eight of the planets.

But Pluto, although spherical and in orbit around the sun, has not cleared its neighbourhood. Nor have the other bodies Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. In 2006, a major astronomical conference declared by fiat that Pluto, therefore, was not a planet; they made up a new category, “dwarf planet”, and shovelled it in there with the other not-quite-big-enough spheres.

There is nothing set in stone about that definition of the word “planet”, or “species”. We could define them any other way. We could say that any sun-orbiting body large enough to have formed a sphere is a planet; then there would be 13, not eight, recognised planets. We could have defined “species” by morphology, by appearance, rather than by breeding compatibility. Definitions are human things, not Platonic forms. Still, almost all humans would agree that Jupiter is a planet, and the asteroid Eros is not; that black rats and house mice are separate species; and that the existence of some edge cases doesn’t change that. 

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Having said all that, I’m going to talk about Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Swinson, on Radio 4’s Today programme, was asked by Justin Webb whether she believes that “biological sex exists”. She replied: “Not on a binary, from what I’ve read. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the subject but I don’t think that things are as binary as are often presented.”

I should say that she was quite tentative, admitted to not being an expert, and said that it was not a scientific debate she was interested in but one about people facing prejudice and discrimination. She also said that most people do fall into the categories “man” or “woman”. I don’t want to accuse her of flying in both-footed, but I do want to look quite closely at what she’s saying.

With sex, just as with the concepts of “planet” or “species”, there do exist ambiguous cases. The intermediate cases in human sex are usually known as “intersex” people. There are various ways in which one can be intersex: the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)’s FAQ site mentions genital ambiguity, such as girls with very large clitorises or boys with very small penises, or scrotums that have divided to form labia-like structures; external genitals that appear female, but with male-typical anatomy inside; chromosomal abnormalities, such as mosaicism, when some cells are XX and others XY, or having three sex chromosomes such as XXY; or having standard male XY chromosomes but a body that is insensitive to the androgenic hormones such as testosterone, which tell the embryo to start becoming male.

How common intersex is depends on which of those conditions you consider intersex; if it’s all of them, then perhaps one in 100 children. But it’s not that if you’re intersex you’re neither male nor female. One common intersex condition is hypospadias, a condition in which the male urethral opening is not at the tip of the glans but further back along the underside of the penis, which happens once in every few hundred births.

I think it’s fair to say that most people born with hypospadias would consider themselves unambiguously male. Most people born with complete androgen insensitivity will, to all intents and purposes, be female, and may never know that they have XY chromosomes, unless they get genetically tested (although they will be unable to get pregnant). 

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Still, it’s certainly true that some people with intersex conditions would not feel themselves to be the same gender that they were assigned, upon inspection of their genitals, at birth. And it’s also true that, until recently, many intersex babies underwent unnecessary and dangerous surgery because surgeons were too conservative in mind to accept that some people didn’t fit neatly into either sex category. Alice Dreger’s wonderful, horrifying book Galileo’s Middle Finger tells the story of her own activism — along with Bo Laurent, the founder of ISNA — towards ending that practice, and allowing intersex babies to grow up and decide which category they wanted to be in.

Still: that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t exist “on a binary”. If you did a graph, plotting human beings by height, you will see two clear peaks on that graph — average male height and average female height. If you plot weight, it would be even clearer. Foot size, hip-to-waist ratio. There would be significant overlap between men and women, but there would be very clear differences.

And those are not really sexual characteristics. If you were to plot, say, volume of mammary tissue, or number of ovaries, or number of sperm cells produced, you would see a far, far clearer picture of two enormous spikes with almost no overlap at all. Sex is about as binary as any biological or natural classification gets. It’s certainly a lot more binary than planetary status, and we’re happy to teach kids that Mercury is a planet but Pluto isn’t. There is a twilight, but it’s tiny compared to the size of day and night.

Weirdly, though, “sex is not a binary” seems to be a common claim these days. You get articles about it written in the New York Times, for instance. And you get leaders of relatively major UK political parties saying it in interviews on Radio 4. But while it is possible to define the words “sex” and “binary” in such a way as to make it true, most native English speakers would find those definitions very weird and counterintuitive. 

What’s even weirder is that it’s so unnecessary. For one thing, being trans and being intersex are entirely different things. By the nature of intersex condtions, a larger minority than usual of intersex children end up saying that the sex they were assigned at birth is not the one they are comfortable living as – if your genitals are ambiguous, it’s easier for the paediatrician to make the wrong guess. And some intersex conditions don’t appear until puberty; things like congenital adrenal hyperplasia, in which female-born children develop male sexual characteristics.

But most trans people are not intersex. They are physically male or female, but they have an internal feeling which does not match their external characteristics. I’m going to quote ISNA’s FAQs again, on the difference:

“People who have intersex conditions have anatomy that is not considered typically male or female. Most people with intersex conditions come to medical attention because doctors or parents notice something unusual about their bodies. In contrast, people who are transgendered have an internal experience of gender identity that is different from most people.”

The existence of the “twilight” between the categories of day and night does not matter in the case of most transgender people. The argument is not over whether transgender people’s bodies are ambiguous, but whether someone’s description of their internal sense of gender identity should override their physical appearance and history in terms of how society defines them. In fact, I think quite a lot of intersex campaigners actively want to be distinguished from transgender people, because they think it muddies the issues; ISNA at least doesn’t want to abolish the gender binary.

For the record: I am a coward. I have consistently avoided writing about transgender issues; partly, that is, because I don’t think I have any great insight into them, and partly because I think a disproportionate amount of coverage is given to them already, but mainly it’s because I don’t want the online grief. It is a topic which will definitely get me shouted at, so I have avoided it. On this occasion, though, I wanted to get involved, because the Lib Dem leader talking about sex not being a binary struck me as a big deal. 

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Jo Swinson wants — as she said — to help people who are facing extreme prejudice and discrimination, which transgender people clearly do face. You can do that, without making these at best strange and at worst flat wrong statements about biological sex. You can make the arguments about the Gender Recognition Act, about self-ID for trans people, without tying them to biological claims.

That is also the sensible thing to do, because if you tie a moral argument to a factual claim, then if that factual claim turns out to be wrong, your moral argument disappears. The important arguments are about whether self-ID should be sufficient for legal assignment of gender, or about whether safe spaces for women or women’s prisons should be limited to female-bodied people. Those arguments do not hinge on whether or not a small subset of people have sexually ambiguous bodies.

As I mentioned, I’m a coward, so I don’t want to get into those arguments here myself, although I will note that when Swinson said that women commit domestic violence as well as men and so keeping men out of rape shelters isn’t the whole answer, it’s saying something technically true but kind of asinine. Male suspects in domestic homicides outnumbered female ones by more than seven to one in England and Wales from 2016 to 2018. Men — male-bodied people — are simply much more violent than women, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

But those arguments are worth having, and important. We should have them openly, not tie them to a strange and frankly unnecessary sideshow about whether the existence of intersex people means that men and women aren’t real. Twilight is absolutely real, but so are day and night.

Which means that at any other time, the fact that she has built an election platform on the twin planks of making it impossible to measure sex inequality and eliminating women-only spaces, would get her rightfully trashed as a hypocrite.

But we don’t live in any other time. We live in 2019, when the actual “sex” part of sexism makes the most fastidious of progressive speakers squeamish, and talking about women’s rights is seen as dreadfully passé. We’re not supposed to think that oppression occurs on the basis of bodies any more. Instead, it’s framed as question of feelings: everyone has a gender identity, we’re told, and injustice occurs when people aren’t treated in accordance with the identity they claim to have.

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It’s a supremely liberal logic, because it’s wholly individualistic. The problem is no longer to free women from male violence and exploitation, it’s a matter of personal liberty. As Swinson said during her interview with Andrew Marr, she supports gender self-identity so that “everybody can be themselves and be free to live their lives”. Under this reasoning, it would be a deep cruelty to turn a transwoman away from a women’s refuge because it would be a denial of the transwoman’s deeply held sense of self.

But what about the women who need the refuge? There are services for male victims that a transwoman could access. Female victims, who need female-only refuges as a sanctuary from male violence, don’t have that option. They aren’t trying to access women’s services to validate their identities: they’re trying to access women’s services because they’ve been terrified and traumatised by men.

This obvious truth — that women and transwomen both need refuges from male violence, and that there must be separate institutions for everyone to have the security they deserve — is an unspeakable act of transphobia in the eyes of anyone who has accepted the rule of gender identity. Women who have already suffered violence from males who identified as trans to access supposedly female spaces (such as the victims of the rapist Karen White, who sexually assaulted fellow inmates after being moved to a women’s prison) are merely regrettable collateral.

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Single-sex refuges, changing rooms, sports, prisons and toilets were established for women’s protection. When women are forced to share them with males — however those males identify — women are not “free to live their lives”, because they can’t be free from male violence. And there is no test we can apply to reliably identify men who will abuse a system of gender self-identity. Despite the Lib Dem MP Layla Moran’s claim that “I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body”, soul reading is not yet an objective test.

One of the Lib Dems’ other commitments is to “improve diversity in public appointments by setting ambitious targets”. Ambitious targets sound great, but they’re meaningless without any mechanism for achieving them, all the more so if there’s no way to measure them. Replacing sex with self-identified gender (rather than recording both sex and trans status) immediately renders any sex-disaggregated data farcical. It only takes a handful of male executives ticking the “woman” box in wage-gap reporting for the underpayment of hundreds of junior women to be obliterated.

Actually, Swinson has personal experience of the strange distortions of gender identity applied to sex inequality. Writing in Equal Power about her time working at Viking FM in the 2000s and how male-dominated radio is, she says: “In fact the gender balance was slightly better than we knew at the time, as our anchor breakfast presenter was Stephanie Hirst, at the time known as Simon.” She does not appear to be joking.

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Hirst was, by all external warrants, a man; was hired as a man; was treated by colleagues as a man. Subsequently coming out as a transwoman is personally brave, but it doesn’t retroactively alter the maleness of Viking FM in the previous decade, any more than Swinson would stop being the Lib Dem’s first female leader if she were to declare herself non-binary.

The party’s festishisation of “freedom to” means that it’s offering freedom in name only, which is no kind of freedom for women who need protections for their sex rather than permission for their self-expression. Judged by her feminist credentials, Jo Swinson is a disaster.

According to Ipsos Mori, Corbyn sets records for public disdain: 62% disapprove of his record and his net score is miserable -39. But Johnson is hardly the people’s darling: 44% give him an unfavourable rating and his net rating is also underwater, at -8.

Could it happen? Could they both lose — personally? By that I mean: could they both lose their Commons seats, sacked by their own former constituents? It is, of course, wildly unlikely, but this is 2019, and you know what that means about political probabilities.

***

It was shortly after 2am on 13 December that British politics opened the door to a new circle of hellish turmoil. After inspecting the piles of votes on the tables in Islington Town Hall, and accepting that the grinning Lib Dems weren’t bluffing, Jeremy Corbyn’s agent quietly confirmed to his candidate what they’d suspected for a few hours: “You’ve lost.”

To describe that loss — confirmed by the returning officer at 2.30am — as seismic was not hyperbole. When the Lib Dems announced they were pulling their campaigners out of Islington South to allow Emily Thornberry (“our fellow Remainer”) a clear run and focusing their fire on the Labour leader (“Since he won’t get off the fence on Brexit we’re going to knock him off,” said Jo Swinson), no one took them seriously. Yes, they’d won Islington in the (worthless) European elections, but Corbyn had held Islington North for 36 years, claiming almost 75% of the vote with a majority of more than 30,000.

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At best, the Lib Dem push against Corbyn was supposed to help Swinson rebut Tory claims that “a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Jeremy Corbyn in No 10”, allowing the Lib Dem press office to counter: “If we’re so cosy with Corbyn, why are we trying to decapitate him?” (The use of the word “decapitate” was of course deliberate bad taste to get the strategy more publicity. Successfully, as it turned out.)

And somehow, it worked. On a night when Kensington also turned yellow and Twitter blazed with the hashtag #RemainersRevenge, the Lib Dems leapt from barely 5% of the total to beat Corbyn by 195 votes.

At Conservative Campaign Headquarters, there was disbelief at the Corbyn result, but not outright jubilation. For one thing, the Lib Dem surge was much bigger than the campaign planners had expected, which was sending all the models haywire. CCHQ had, of course, been quietly resigned to a few Lib Dem seat gains (sorry, Zac) but the central forecast had suggested that a solid night for Swinson was actually a net positive for the Tories.

By drawing a good chunk of the Labour Remain vote away — but not enough to get near winning — the Lib Dems would help some Conservatives retain their seats in Remain-leaning southern parts. But the sort of earthquake that might topple Corbyn could change things in ways the Tory scenarios barely anticipated.

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Anyway, even as Tory officials tried to work out what the earthquake meant for them, an asteroid struck. The Prime Minister was in his car on his way to the seat for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip count when the call from the Tory agent came. It was short and bleak: “It’s going to happen.”

By the time Boris Johnson arrived at his own count, his team had told him to prepare for the worst. Despite all the CCHQ bombardment of the seat with online ads, despite all the pavement pounding by London Tories dragged in from across the capital, his majority of not much more than 5,000 had gone.

For that, Johnson could thank Donald Trump and that moment at the Nato summit when he put his arm around Johnson’s shoulders and declared: “Hey London, this is my guy, such a great guy. When he wins again, and he’s gonna win, win so big, we’re gonna do great things, maybe the best it’s ever been. He’s my guy and he’s gonna make Britain great again, just like we’ve done. Vote Boris, London, vote Boris.”

Those presidential words turbocharged the Uxbridge campaign of Labour’s Ali Milani. An army of students, youth campaigners, minor celebrities and one elegantly-dressed lady in dark glasses who said she was from “just outside Reading” all flocked to Uxbridge to urge residents to “stop Boris selling us out to Trump”.

On her regular visits, the lady from Reading proved especially good at persuading traditional Tories to switch sides, seeming to know just what made them tick. No one could quite put their finger on it, but she seemed quite familiar too, although as she wasn’t much for small talk or personal chitchat, no one ever found out her name.

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By James Kirkup

And so it was that as the sun, eventually, rose on Friday the 13th, Britain found itself in a new and — for once the word was justified — extraordinary new form of political chaos. With almost all the results in, the BBC exit poll said that the Tories would still be the biggest party, with 316 seats. (Just one less than Theresa May got in 2017, though no one could find her for comment.)

Despite that outlier in Uxbridge, Labour slumped and were projected to end up with just 230 seats, while the Lib Dems — who came close to beating Labour’s overall vote share — were forecast to have 39, behind the SNP on 44.

Though pundits, civil servants, voters and most MPs went into a turmoil of confusion and sometimes panic, the Labour team were relatively calm in those first hours — almost as if they’d been preparing for something like this. Just in time for the 7am bulletins, Labour’s John McDonnell spoke to TV reporters to set out what would happen next:

“Jeremy remains our leader. He was elected by our members and they want him to remain as our leader. He may have been cheated out of his seat by the Conservative media working hand-in-glove with the bankers in the City and MI5, but he remains the spiritual leader of the Labour movement, our moral guide. He has told me that he feels liberated from the confines of Parliament and will be spending his time among the people of Islington and this country, so that he can lead them from the places where they live and work.

“No, he won’t be speaking directly to the media today, or for the foreseeable future. What he’s doing now is much more important than that.

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“The party in parliament will be led by deputy leader, Rebecca Long-Bailey, who has asked me to serve as her chief of staff and representative in the talks that must start immediately about forming a progressive alliance government to lead a country that has decisively rejected Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s Tories and which must now have a chance to have its say about the Tory Brexit plan too. When we form that government, Rebecca will be the Prime Minister, but she will govern in Jeremy Corbyn’s name and true to his ideals.”

On the Conservative side, there was no comparable statement or clarity. By 7.45am, no fewer than five people had suggested that they would now lead the Conservative government that would ask the Queen for a chance to demonstrate that it had the confidence of the Commons. Dominic Raab was first out of the blocks, quickly followed by Sajid Javid; neither even mentioned Johnson in their statements. Priti Patel did so, but mostly she talked about Margaret Thatcher.

David Davis surprised many people by convening a press conference where he talked about the SAS and being good in a crisis, concluding: “I am ready to serve again.” His moment was rather spoiled when TV gallery directors cut away from him, however, because at that exact moment Nigel Farage spoke to the cameras outside the Red Lion and revealed that he’d thought long and hard about it and was in fact willing to accept a peerage and the premiership for long enough to see Britain out of the EU without a deal at the end of January.

Financial markets were having none of it, however, and after initial panicked falls, the pound was rising sharply again as traders decided the turmoil meant no Brexit in January and quite possibly ever. They were encouraged in this by tweets from Guy Verhofstadt in Brussels suggesting that the EU27 should unilaterally suspend the Article 50 process.

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Of Johnson himself, there was no sign. He was still, technically at least, Prime Minister, and so remained shut up in Downing Street. The No 10 press office issued a brief statement saying that the PM was consulting officials and no further comment would be made. Off the record, Tory officials briefed journalists that the only conversation going on in No 10 was about how a minority Conservative government would reconvene Parliament and bring about an immediate dissolution with a new general election in January; Johnson would be a candidate, though they declined to say where. There was no question of changing the Brexit timetable, they insisted.

Yet equally, off-record, “sources” at Buckingham Palace insisted that the Queen was constitutionally bound to consider all the possibilities; officials were seeking an urgent conversation with Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee to ask just who, if anyone, was actually Conservative Party leader at that moment.

In the Palace view, the possibilities to consider included Long-Bailey, Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon somehow assembling a government that could govern at least long enough to reset the Brexit process, most likely by way of a referendum but possibly by simply asking the EU to stop the clock. The only sad certainty was that the Monarch would not be making her annual New Year trip to Sandringham.

That was the state of play just after 8am when another snap dropped on the Press Association election wire, bringing one of the results that had been delayed due to ballot boxes being delayed when a van crashed on a slushy Scottish road. A split second later the news flashed up on phone screens across Westminster: “East Dunbartonshire: SNP GAIN…”

She should be stepping over the threshold and into the job she never believed she’d hold. But instead, she turned back to the cameras for a few more, unscripted words. Her team would go nuts, but what the hell? She would not have the job for very long, so why not enjoy it?

“One other thing,” she added with a grin. “I wanted to say thank you. Thank you to the men who made this possible, the men who gave this great country its third female prime minister. Thank you, Boris Johnson and thank you, Jeremy Corbyn.”

And with a cheery wave, Prime Minister Jo Swinson turned and strolled into No 10 to greet her new staff.

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Future historians of the Swinson premiership would spend much more time debating its beginning than its middle and its end; her time in office was, as she knew it would be, almost as short as that of her predecessor, Johnson.

Most of those historians agreed that it was Johnson who made the first move in the chain of events that put a Liberal Democrat in Downing Street and began the realignment of the British political system.

The first few months of the Johnson premiership went pretty much according to plan. The concessions on Brexit he sought from the EU27 were largely refused. That allowed him to confront Parliament: will you affirm or resist my choice to leave the EU on October 31 without a deal? Faced with resistance from most Labour MPs, a number of his own Tories and the prospect of outright obstruction in the Lords, he activated his plan for a general election.

This is where things started to go wrong for him and for Corbyn, and surprisingly right for Swinson, elected Lib Dem leader almost unnoticed in the same week Johnson became PM.

The Tory campaign immediately faced two huge and linked questions: what manifesto commitment would the party make on Brexit, and how would it deal with Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party? Johnson, convinced by his advisers that his first priority was to re-unite Right-wing Leave-voters under the Tory umbrella, opted to buy off Farage. All Tory candidates were required to sign a public pledge that they would vote to end British membership of the EU on Halloween, regardless of the circumstances.

It was enough for Farage to stand down his candidates; there was even a rumour, never convincingly denied, that he would take a peerage and a seat in Cabinet after the expected Tory rout of Corbyn’s divided, demoralised Labour Party.

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But that rout never materialised. For the second time in little more than two years, a Tory campaign directed by Lynton Crosby and focused on Brexit failed to secure outright victory. The campaign started with Tory defections, not to another party but to a new Independent Conservative Party whose members – including several recent ministers – were defending affluent Remain-voting seats across the south of England. The short timetable for the election left CCHQ unable to field “official” Conservative candidates against some of the new ICP candidates.

In some cases, that was enough for ICP members to scrape home. In others, places dominated by affluent graduates – places like Richmond upon Thames, St Albans, Oxford, Cambridgeshire, Mole Valley, Wandsworth, Cheltenham, Woking, Guildford, Waverley, Winchester and Bath – the Lib Dems captured (or recaptured) seats where Remain-minded voters rejected what Swinson repeatedly described as the “Johnson-Farage Brexit Party”, her leaflets and social media feeds heavy with photoshopped images of Johnson and Farage guffawing together.

The Lib Dems also strenuously denied involvement in the first DeepFake political ad in British history, an instantly-viral video of Johnson making a string of racist and sexist remarks while spilling red wine on a sofa. Elsewhere, in places like London, the Lib Dems directed their fire squarely at Corbyn. They were forced once again to deny involvement in another DeepFake video, this one depicting Corbyn addressing a small town hall meeting and speaking of his determination to free Britain of a European Union “that is run for the benefit of big business and Zionist bankers”.

“Honestly, I have no idea where these things come from,” said Swinson. “The Liberal Democrats are committed to the same old-fashioned, honest local campaigning that we’ve always done.”

Repeated demands from Labour and Tory alike that Facebook expunge the fake content were regretfully declined by Nick Clegg, the company’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, who insisted that it would not interfere in the British democratic debate.

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Labour avoided the sort of formal schism that the Tories experienced, but only because Corbyn did not even attempt to impose a single Brexit policy on his party, allowing Labour candidates to adopt positions ranging from No Brexit in Bristol to No Deal in Stoke-on-Trent.

The results of the election were described by one leading constitutional expert in an emotional late-night TV appearance as “a massive clusterfuck.” Labour technically “won” with 240 seats, marginally ahead of the rump Conservatives on 235. A total of 25 Independent Conservatives returned to the Commons, and the SNP hoovered up 50 Scottish seats.

Swinson marginally avoided losing her own seat, but hung on to cheer as 76 other Lib Dems were elected, taking seats from both Labour and the Tories.

The events that followed led to October 2019 being widely remembered as the most momentous month in British peacetime history. It started with Buckingham Palace signalling that the Queen would not immediately summon Corbyn and ask him to form a Government. As Corbyn’s few remaining media allies fulminated about a constitutional coup, it became clear why the Monarch had hesitated: Tom Watson, still Labour’s deputy leader, announced that he was resigning the Labour whip and would sit as a Social Democrat; he was quickly joined by more than 100 of his former Labour colleagues.

While Johnson, still technically Prime Minister, remained in No 10 facing Tory calls to quit in favour of Farage, Swinson made her move.

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Inspired, as she later confirmed, by an old episode of The West Wing, she summoned TV cameras to film her walking slowly from the House of Commons up Whitehall then along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. Accompanied initially just by her Lib Dem colleagues, she was joined on the way first by Independent Conservative leader Rory Stewart, then by Watson, Emily Thornberry and Sir Keir Starmer.

By the time she reached the gates of the palace, she was able to deliver an impromptu speech declaring she and she alone could command a majority in the House of Commons and that she would wait outside until the Monarch asked her in.

For 57 minutes – later recalled as the longest hour in British history – Swinson waited, insisting that the light London rain was “nothing compared to Dumbarton”. Then the gates swung open.

In the hours that followed, the Queen faced immediate criticism for asking Swinson to form a government, because she did not obviously have the numbers to win a confidence vote: even with the SNP’s 50 votes, bought for the price of another Scottish independence referendum, the Swinson Coalition of Lib Dems, Independent Conservatives and Social Democrats would still be well short.

Then it emerged that the putative government would have a single purpose: the passage of a single piece of legislation.

The Democracy Day Bill, introduced on Trafalgar Day 2019, would have a number of consequences: Britain’s Article 50 notice to leave the European Union was withdrawn; the 2016 referendum to Leave or Remain would be run again in the spring of 2020. Prime Minister Swinson committed to campaign to remain, but also to resign the day after that referendum whatever the result. Britain would then hold a general election, its fourth in five years, to choose a government that would be elected having set out in its manifesto how it would honour the result of that referendum.

It took a couple of days of rather undignified taunting (“What are you afraid of, boys?”) but Swinson cajoled enough Conservative Leavers to signal support for her plan, declaring: “Let’s settle this once and for all.”

Barely noticed amid the tumult of debate around the new, temporary government and its single purpose were the clauses in the Democracy Day Bill. It made the holding of that second EU referendum conditional on the ending of the First Past the Post electoral system and the introduction of the d’Hondt method of voting for all future elections.