Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on why Brexit will win, an unlikely encounter and bare bottoms at the seaside

Read today's column by Peter Rhodes.

Published
Callum Turner

ON June 30, 1643 a Cavalier army of 10,000 defeated 3,500 Parliamentarians at Adwalton Moor in Yorkshire. At the time it was regarded as a great Royalist victory. I bet some some of King Charles's men thought: "That's the end of the Roundheads." Six years later the Roundheads chopped off the king's head. Funny how things turn out.

BREXIT, like the English Civil War, is not a one-day fight, or even a three-year debate. It is a long-term aspiration deep in the heart of millions of Brits and it is not going to go away. It is the belief that the UK's natural place in this world is not as part of a 28-member federal superstate run from Brussels but as something bigger, better and more independent. It is an idea. And as Cromwell knew, if there is one thing more powerful than armies it is an idea that has reached its time.

SO after a bruising week, the Brexiteers will regroup, rethink and continue the struggle, as the Parliamentarians did after Adwalton Moor. Some sort of Brexit, based on compromise and a deal, is an historical inevitability. It may be frustrated this week, or next month and the final shape of Brexit may be too soft for your taste and too hard for mine, but come it will. The Brexit battle is already won. It is just a matter of time.

SPOT the mistake in The Capture (BBC1)? After winning his appeal against killing a Taliban fighter, soldier Shaun (Callum Turner) went for a celebratory drink with his barrister (Laura Haddock) at Shaun's local. In real life, no sane barrister would be seen in a working-class pub. A defence barrister is far more likely to go for a drink with the prosecution barrister, the cops and even the court officials. It is a sobering moment for defendants when they realise their legal team are best mates with the other side and that everyone in the courtroom is part of the elite - except them.

DOES anybody else wonder where Sanditon (ITV) is going? Based on Jane Austen's unfinished novel, most of this series has been written from scratch by the veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Davies is a genius at adapting other folk's stuff. Like William Shakespeare, he can tell a great tale, so long as someone else has told it first. Whether his original work will match his earlier adaptations remains to be seen but I find my attention drifting, and Sanditon's bare bottoms are no substitute for a plot that grips.

LATEST forecast is that HS2, the railway that nobody wants, will not be running until 2031, seven years later than planned. For me, and I dare say for many of my readers, it is becoming a moot point which luxurious and ridiculously expensive form of travel we will experience first, HS2 or a hearse.