<p>Ever since last week&#8217;s High Court judgment threw a spanner in the works of the Government&#8217;s plan to use the Royal Prerogative to trigger Article 50 there have been all sorts of rumours and suggestions as to how the Government is going to deliver Brexit.</p> 
<p>Theresa May has already said she will appeal to the Supreme Court. Brexit Secretary David Davis confirmed this in the Commons on Monday.</p> 
<p>Another suggestion is to bring forward a Bill that specifically rejects the High Court&#8217;s ruling and hands the Government the power to act alone. Or there&#8217;s the idea of a simple one-line Bill to trigger Article 50 itself.</p> 
<p>And those are just the more obvious ideas. There seem to be as many different theories and suggestions as there are EU members.</p> 
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<q> <p>The moment we trigger Article 50 the clock starts ticking and we know we will leave the EU 24 months later, deal or no deal. Brexit will mean Brexit</p> </q> 
<p>Things would be so much better if, as in the joke, we didn&#8217;t have to start from here. Or, to put it another way, if Mrs May had done what her predecessor had suggested should happen.</p> 
<p>Because for all his faults David Cameron got one thing bang on. Back in February, when he was setting out to MPs the details of the pathetic &#8220;deal&#8221; he had negotiated with the EU, Mr Cameron made clear what he thought would and should happen if we voted for Brexit: &#8220;If the British people vote to leave there is only one way to bring that about, namely to trigger Article 50 of the treaties and begin the process of exit and the British people would rightly expect that to start straightaway.&#8221;</p> 
<p>The referendum took place in June. Theresa May&#8217;s plan is to trigger Article 50 by the end of March next year. Even if she sticks to that timetable that will have been a nine-month wait.</p> 
<p>By no stretch of the imagination can that be described as triggering Article 50 &#8220;straightaway&#8221;.</p> Mr Davis confirmed that Mrs May has already said she will appeal to the Supreme Court 
<p>But Mr Cameron was clearly right that the British people would expect the process to have started straightaway.</p> 
<p>With hindsight it is surely now clear to everyone who isn&#8217;t plotting to stop Brexit &#8211; and was clear after the referendum to many of us &#8211; that Mrs May should have done what Mr Cameron said would happen and triggered Article 50 as soon as she entered Downing Street.</p> 
<p>Indeed he might even have done so himself. Imagine how different things would now be. Instead of politics being consumed with questions of procedure and timing &#8211; almost all of which are fig leaves pushed by Remainers who don&#8217;t want us to leave &#8211; and instead of the Remainers being handed ever more time to plot how they can frustrate the will of the British people, the path would have been set and the referendum result honoured. Straightaway.</p> 
<p>The moment we trigger Article 50 the clock starts ticking and we know we will leave the EU 24 months later, deal or no deal. Brexit will mean Brexit. Unless there is a unanimous decision by the rest of the EU to change that timetable nothing can alter that. So that&#8217;s what should have happened.</p> 
<p>But the fact that it didn&#8217;t doesn&#8217;t mean there aren&#8217;t important lessons for the future as to what should now happen and how we can avoid a further mess. Mrs May repeated after the High Court ruling that she still plans to trigger Article 50 by the end of March.</p> 
<p>The crucial word here is &#8220;by&#8221;. That doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean waiting until March. It means making sure it&#8217;s done by March, which could mean acting now. And there are compelling reasons why she should put a stop to the uncertainty and trigger Article 50 now.</p> 
<p>Most obviously it would destroy the Remainers&#8217; attempts to keep us in. They are playing for time. They have been doing that since the vote and will continue doing so for as long as they can. Their hope is that the longer they delay Article 50 being triggered, the more they can make a case that the referendum result is no longer valid.</p> 
<p>Make no mistake about this: they will do whatever they can to stop Article 50 coming into force. That&#8217;s just one reason why appealing to the Supreme Court carries a huge risk: that the Government might lose.</p> 
<p>The Remainers who brought the case are using the language of parliamentary scrutiny because it sounds appropriate and modest. But their goal isn&#8217;t scrutiny: it&#8217;s destruction. They want to destroy the referendum result. And handing them any victory, especially from the Supreme Court, is unnecessary and unwise.</p> 
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<p>On Monday the Brexit Secretary confirmed in the Commons that the Government could introduce a one-line Bill triggering Article 50 now, bypassing any Supreme Court decision.</p> 
<p>The Remainers would then be put on the spot and their plots exposed. Voting against triggering Article 50 would reveal their real agenda of ignoring the referendum result. They would doubtless seek to amend the Bill and use every parliamentary device at their disposal. But their motives would be obvious and the wiser among them would surely realise the huge risk they were running with democracy itself.</p> 
<p>They would in reality have no choice but to accept the result of the referendum and implement Article 50 &#8211; or risk sticking two fingers up to the very idea of a sovereign people.</p> 
<p>And even the Remainers, surely, are not that wilful.</p>
The Prime Minister should not wait to trigger Article 50, writes Stephen Pollard