Glen Newey

Springtime for Europe. Magnolia buds jut from the bough, and the Netherlands is gripped by Euro-referendum fever. Or, if 'fever' is too strong, the vibe in Amsterdam's smokeasies is at least lightly tousled. For we're talking not of the UK's in/out poll on 23 June, but the one that really matters, here on 6 April, on ratifying the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine.

In The View From Nowhere, Thomas Nagel describes his encounter with a large spider in a Princeton University urinal, from whose gutter it can't escape. Through the summer, the spider survives, even thrives, despite being urinated on 'more than a hundred times a day'. Finally Nagel takes pity and helps it climb out of the trough with a paper towel. Next day he finds the spider, exactly where he had left it, dead. The golden shower turns out to have been its lifeblood.

A couple of weeks in, the EU referendum campaign has already spawned material to rival the US presidentials’ fabliaux spun round General Pershing, and Donald Trump’s mythic dong. A top pick in the EU campaign so far is the Guardian’s profile of the illustrator Axel Scheffler, warning that The Gruffalo, by the British author Julia Donaldson and the German Scheffler, might not have existed had Britain Brexited. It's a clear ploy to shunt the votes of three-year-olds, if not their parents, towards Remain. ‘The Gruffalo is a British-German creative collaboration,’ Scheffler said, gesturing darkly towards the non-gruffalic nightmare that the EU has spared us.

So it's 23 June for the EU referendum. This afternoon Cameron bigged up his foreseeably footling deal with Merkel and the Eurocrats, insisting that he'd secured the UK's special-snowflake status on ever-closer union, the Euro, in-work migrant benefits, the handbrake on EU laws. Dave had done his best to 'battle for Britain' – but the view from his own party seems to be that his best is still crap. In Britain's previous in/out poll, in 1975, the leavers fielded Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Peter Shore and Michael Foot, with Enoch Powell for political balance. This time the leavers' A-team is Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Iain Duncan-Smith and Nigel Lawson, balanced by George Galloway.

The US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is dead, and not before time. The co-author of some of the dodgiest court opinions since Judge Taney's in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Scalia was duly hymned on Saturday night's debate in South Carolina by the self-avowed psychopaths – Ted Cruz has vowed to make the Middle East 'glow' with US bombs; Donald Trump’s problem with waterboarding is that the torture doesn't go far enough – slugging it out for the Republican presidential nomination. Scalia's judicial opinions reveal a mind whose fixation with the jurisprudential genetic fallacy known as 'originalism' betrayed his embrace of legal ancestor worship in a peculiarly pure form. It seems fittingly bizarre that he died on a quail hunting trip (his Supreme Court crony Clarence Thomas noted that Scalia 'loves killing unarmed animals').