Brexit, of course...

...well, I'm getting my blue passport back, so all that remains now is to sort out my free unicorn, and job's a good 'un......

Not sure you can; I think the limit on early renewal is nine months. Unless you declare the old one lost or damaged, but that's a whole new ball ache.

Other EU countries - Croatia, for one - don't have red passports, so this move changes nothing in terms of aborting the exit process.

Two incidental points:
1. my one pre-1988 passport was black, not blue.
2. the blue passport is supposedly 'iconic'. In my business, an icon is a small design intended to be pointed at. This idea goes one further, in that the rest of the world will now point and laugh.

I have mine from 1976, issued at Liverpool. Quite how I could still be identified form that photograph almost ten years later defies belief. 

It'll never happen. More's the pity.

Over the last two years I have more despondent about the Brexit process. In fact the only thing I can think of that really annoys me about being a member of the EU is the inability to send convicted criminals back to their home countries, with no ability to return ever. My wife is a JP and today remanded in custody an east-european man who is accused of multiple counts of under-age sex, fleeing the country (but he returned and was found), breaching the terms of a bail order etc etc. We have enough of these nasty people of our own without wanting more. Second to that is the claiming of benefits in a 'wealthy' country and repatriating it to their own 'poor' country. That is not fair, but I suspect this is exaggerated anyway.

On the other side, when I think of the benefits to the consumer of EU legislation, from mobile phone tariffs including European roaming, the compensation for air travel delays, uniform safety requirements for products, I sometimes think we are better off even more integrated. Certainly if the two extremes are considered equally bad, then I would certainly prefer greater integration.

And then we have the inevitable economic meltdown, exacerbated by online shopping habits, and our huge employment force is going to crash, without the safety net of a large, easily accessible 300+ million population market 22 miles away.

I always said that for me, remaining was a case of holding my nose and voting to stay in, and in many aspects my views haven't changed. What has changed is the total balls up the government and the opposition are making of it.

Pretty fair sumnary, Esp, although I’d disagree with you about the shape of the curve: it’s far more poisson than normal. The criminals and benefit repatriators are in a very tiny tail - vastly exaggerated by some with a vested interest in fomenting outrage, while the benefits of common standards and frictionless trade are clear to anyone who’s bothered to look at the queues on the German-Swiss or Swedish-Norwegian border.

Besides, after centuries of generally having a major war evety 25 years, a project that has kept Europe at peace for 70 years can only be a good thing. So no nasal restraint required for me to support it.

Al, turns out you've got it all wrong and have misunderstood that nice Mr. Farage....

“After Brexit whether for good or ill, we will be self-governing. That’s the point. I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave and everyone would be better off, just that we would be self-governing."

- Nigel Farage, Friday 1st June 2018"

I wish they would put it on a bus, the lemmings should be forced to acknowledge what they were following.