Is Brexit Worth Scotland’s Independence?
EDINBURGH—One afternoon in the early 1990s, the vice president of the European Parliament sat down to a congenial lunch at a Brussels restaurant with a young reporter for The Daily Telegraph.
The parliamentarian was David Martin, a Scot and a member of the Labour Party who held his seat for 35 years, a run that finally ended in elections this past May. A Europhile, Martin neither questioned Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom, a formation that had held for hundreds of years, nor the U.K.’s place within the European Union, a newer alliance but seemingly an iron-cast certainty. Across the table sat Boris Johnson, who was assigned to cover the European Union for The Daily Telegraph, acquiring on the way a reputation for concocting stories of overzealous Brussels administrators bringing in nonsensical regulations on matters such as the maximum size for condoms or the allowable curvature of a banana.
Martin remembers finding Johnson a mildly amusing character. “I used to laugh at the kinds of stories Boris wrote,” he told me. “I assumed people would simply see the bent
