Dear Mr Heaton-Harris

I have written to you before seeking help from you with regard to my forthcoming lecture on Brexit and Human Rights – but I have not received a reply. The thing is that the lecture is very soon – at LSE next week and I still haven’t got much clue about the benefits of Brexit! Now I know you are dead keen on scrutinising what we academics say about Brexit for bias and so on which is why I really need your help. I’ll do my best to find good things about Brexit – I have found one possible and one potentially.  But I need more.

You are doing a book I know and are a kind of scholar I am guessing.  Let me tell you about a well-known feature of free speech.  It is called the ‘chill factor’ – someone in a position of authority (like you, a member of the government say) writes to the bosses of a bunch of people (vice-chancellors for example) asking for details about what those people are doing (say giving lectures) when everyone knows (but no one says) what is really going on is deliberately raising a doubt in the minds of these junior people whether they should do or say or write the thing of which they know the powerful person disapproves (that Brexit is a stupid self-destructive act of national suicide for example) in case they get moved against by the bosses. McCarthyism started this way – people thought the junior senator from Wisconsin was a second rate nobody but he went on to wreck people’s lives. Check out Campus Watch in the US for another example.  I doubt you could possibly have intended this kind of thing, but it risks being an effect.  I genuinely want your input so that if anyone moves against me for bias I can say you were invited to engage – better still come to the lecture!  I’ll give you an immediate right of reply.

Professor Gearty

I am nearly finished watching Ken Burns’s epic documentary series  on Vietnam.  David Thomson, writing in the London Review of Books , is surely right to talk of it in terms of being (one of?) the finest documentaries ever made.

So what is the connection with Brexit?  Am I being an obsessive?

Well of course the casualties from Vietnam were direct and the horror immediate. The deaths and destroyed lives from Brexit will take longer and envelop people with no drama. But that’s not the point I want to make now.

A late episode in the series details the impact of the leaking of the Pentagon Papers. I’d forgotten quite what they signified. Commissioned by an at-this point departed Secretary of State (Robert McNamara), they were designed to get into writing the lessons of the disaster that was Vietnam. The Nixon administration tried hard to stop the New York Times running them, even fighting (and losing) a case all the way to the Supreme Court. They showed successive administrations knew that Vietnam was a disaster and consistently lied to the public while things went from bad to worse.

Remind you of anything? Exactly: those 58 studies of the impact of Brexit that David Davis refuses to publish.  These are Brexit’s Pentagon Papers. They must come out.