Readers will remember that during the election campaign, a key moment in the Tory squeeze on the Brexit Party came when four prominent MEPs resigned from Nigel Farage’s group to urge Brexireers to vote Conservative.
At the time, the four – Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Lance Forman, Lucy Harris and John Longworth – opted to become independents.
Pleasingly, it has emerged today that all four have now chosen to join the Conservative Party. They have been accepted, and I understand the intention is that they will end their terms – having helped to abolish their own jobs – as Tory MEPs.
This is an important part of the process of moving on as Brexit is delivered: reuniting the right, healing the divisions the process has inflicted, and focusing on what comes next. The same goes, of course, for those on the centre right who held the opposite view on EU membership, but for obvious reasons a rapprochement there might be more difficult and take longer.
It’s early days, of course, but this is a positive start. Welcome to the four.