"At the moment I tend to be worried when I wake up at 3am about whether this no-deal Brexit episode suggests there are people in government who either don’t understand what they are doing or don’t care"
3/ He decided to set out on a journey across Britain to find out what the country really thought.
He spent time in Northern Ireland, the north of England, and the East End of London, where he arrived shortly after yet another knife attack.
4/ In Northern Ireland he found a fragile peace still holding, but signs of potential conflict.
"It was an extraordinary eye-opener from the time I spent in Derry & Enniskillen because to see the 14ft brick walls....
...you got the sense that peace there is very fragile"
5/ In Enniskillen, the entire farming economy was dependent on trade with the Republic.
85% of the sheep went to abattoirs across the border.
It's a reminder that nationalism is about borders.
The line on the map that says:
"This is us, this is you"
6/
Everyone has deeply neglected about 10% of our population, whom I saw very directly when I was prisons minister, 50% of whom had reading ages under 11, and 40% of whom had been in care.
7/
I realised that nobody was really speaking for them, not just the Conservatives, not Labour either, because by definition most of these people don’t vote.
In fact almost none of them vote.
8/ Rory Stewart is returning to with a project....
Stopping a no-deal Brexit and explaining what will happen when it's stopped.
1. Extension to 31st October.
The only way to heal is through compromise.
9/ One way or another it seems that Rory Stewart has overcome his moment of self-doubt and is back in the political mainstream, trying to work out solutions for a country which he sees as broken but which he still believes can be fixed.
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The US withdraw would have been known by the British government for months and the UK Secretary of State for Defence, @BWallaceMP would have been briefed daily.
He knew it was a looming mess.
If the UK and EU can't agree a trade agreement with the EU due to other things like the #COVID19 pandemic then it will need to agree an extension of 1 or 2 years by 30 June.
2/ A agrement to extend the 'transition' period needs to be made by 30 June and it isn't as 'easy' as extending #Article50 was because each of the EU27 needs to be asked, which isn't a last last-minute thing.
3/ Civil and diplomatic service grandees, including Ivan Rogers, Philip Rycroft and Gus O'Donnell have called for an extension to the transition period to deal with #COVID19
"It is simple common sense"
Philip Rycroft, former head of the Brexit department