I just got through watching the last hour or so of the BBC debate on the upcoming European Union Referendum concerning Britain’s continued membership in that organization (this is more commonly known as the “Brexit” vote). I had a few takeaways.

  1. Sadiq Khan has ambitions beyond being the London mayor. He clearly wants to be prime minister someday. His attacks seemed rehearsed and over-the-top to me, but I imagine that they will serve him well with the Labour base.
  2. The Remain side did better than I expected them to, but a lot of this was helped along by the moderators, who seemed to be in the tank for Remain. Again, that’s just my preliminary reading.
  3. Boris Johnson’s finale speech was excellent. It gave the Leave side a powerful last word of the night and it was also one of the best cases for leaving the EU that I can remember hearing. Not only that, it’s less than 2 minutes long, so it can be shown to even those with shorter attention spans. This is the type of statement that can have real electoral power.

In case you missed that last segment, here it is…

We’ll see how the vote turns out on Thursday, but either way, that segment was an epic performance by Boris.

By the way, I’m going to have a live Brexit results stream on Thursday evening. It should kick-off around 6:30PM EST (New York, NY timezone). More details will follow tonight on the site.

 

UPDATE: YouGov post debate poll shows the Leave side winning the debate…