Not saying this is relevant to you, but the events that have transpired since the referendum have been a rather good rebuke of Lexit as a valid political idea.

One thing that bugs me about Theresa's headline in her speech, she says no deal is better than a bad deal. But under Article 50, both the UK and EU HAVE to conclude an agreement for both its withdrawal and future relationship. It's also really not in the interests of either party to end up needing to use paragraph 3. It will cause so much instability for both the UK and EU. Please can we just get a quick and amicable deal done. Yes the EU doesn't want to make it easy for us to leave, since it will create a precedent, but making it difficult for us will just strengthen the populist movement across Europe.

As someone who voted Leave, it's a very wrong move to reject the EEA. The strength of the Remain vote should also have been taken into account. Adding both the Leave voters who support the EEA but not the EU and Remain voters surely would give an easy majority for staying in the single market. If anything, I'd now like a second referendum on whether we stay in the EEA because I'm quite convinced Remain would win. They're over estimating the power of the leave vote / UKIP, imo.

The Leave brigade's optimism about trade deals makes no sense. The countries who are supposedly keen to do trade deals are generally counties who will be negotiating from a position of strength. It's not as if we can present the USA with a proposed deal and expect them to say "We won't bother reading it. Where do we sign?". Any deal proposed by Trump is bound to be a very one-sided one.

The EU and US have been trying to negotiate a deal for years. One reason it has taken so long (with no sign of an agreement any time soon) is that the EU can negotiate from a position strength. The UK will have no such luxury. Ultimately, the US can (if they so choose) get to the point where they say "This is our final offer. Take it or leave it".

This is what happens when Lynton Crosby runs a campaign with most of the press not on his side, in essence.

Lynton Crosby didn't do anything on the EU referendum.

topped off with regular doses of a US President thinking he's entitled to give instructions to us on how we should vote

I was under the impression that there was a lot of pressure from Cameron's group to run the campaign along his usual lines.

err poor obama, one sentence about trade talk realities, at the behest of cameron, and he gets slagged off by the press and everyone else.

Oh definitely, but Lynton stayed out and apparently the campaign was weakened a lot from being run as almost a parody of what a Crosby campaign is supposed to be. In the words of Mandelson, "as one of the so-called proponents of focused messaging, even I never ran it to the stage where it meant literally talking about one thing over and over and saying absolutely nothing else". And of course as you say, it's impossible to run an 'economy is safer this way' campaign without the media onside.

Whether it was "reality" or not, it was still horrible politics. The whole tone of what he said sounded arrogant and presumptuous, reminding people of the humiliation when Britain was seen as "America's poodle" in the Blair years (something which was never just confined to lefties). Hence why, from that day on, Leave being the "patriotic" choice became MUCH more widespread belief than it had previously, to prove to ourselves that we don't just do what we're told by other countries.

So even with a sweetener (undisclosed, the usual government/local gov Get Out OF Jail Free card "financial confidentiality" - with OUR tax payer money!) Nissan may leave anyway if Brexit goes tits up and they can't sell cars in Europe without hefty tax hikes.

Pound at it's lowest in decades, and we haven't yet left, or negotiated a thing, and the only reason the conomy hasnt plummeted too so far is due to the BoE support measures (the UK has been on BofE life support for nearly a decade now).

Yet things look warm and glowing to idiots believing Tory press headlines....

Shock on the way down the line...

I see Jezza has put a three line whip on the Article 50 vote - such a strange thing to do IMO!