BRITAIN needs decisive leadership and it needs some new ideas to break the logjam of Brexit.

But Boris Johnson’s wheeze of proroguing Parliament for nearly five weeks, thus preventing our democratically elected representatives from debating Britain’s biggest change for 70 years, sends out all the wrong signals.

Yes, we understand that when everything is taken into account, Parliament is really only losing a handful of debating days, and we note that in the last three years our MPs haven’t collectively found any way out of the quagmire, but effectively suspending democracy for even a short space of time does not look good.

We also understand that most of the outrage is coming from people, and parties, of a remain persuasion, but if it were a Third World tin-pot dictator who twisted convention to boot out his opponents when they were making life difficult, we would mock that country and that leader. That is how the world, a part from Donald Trump, now views Great Britain.

A big test will be how moderate Conservatives, like the popular Scottish leader Ruth Davison or the former leadership contender Rory Stewart, take Mr Johnson’s move.

Democracy and debate should never be viewed as being inconvenient, and in a country that is so bitterly divided as it takes this mammoth step into the unknown, a true leader should really be trying to bring people round to his way of thinking by compromise and discussion – not by lobbing in a firework and blowing the divisions even wider.