Are the feared Tory ‘Spartans’ a busted flush?

In his book Spartan Victory: the Inside Story of the Battle for Brexit, Mark Francois makes constant reference to the last war, and Winston Churchill’s leadership in our finest hour.

Intended perhaps as a modern-day counterpart to Churchill’s monumental History of the Second World War, Francois’ account sees his band of Eurosceptics as the “last line of defence” in the effort to leave the European Union (ironically enough a project Churchill had some sympathy with). His volume of memoirs, by the way, is predictably Partridgean – a fairly self-important, self-congratulatory read, along the lines of “needless to say, I had the last laugh”.

Francois and the other self-styled Spartans in the European Research Group saw themselves very much as a commando unit in a struggle for national survival, not so much against the Nazis and the Luftwaffe, but more Theresa May, her EU withdrawal agreement, and her plan for a Northern Ireland backstop.