YoYo returns for kamikaze mission into the Brexit firestorm

Martin McQuillan dusts down his sketchpad to greet the new universities minister.

John Yossarian, the lead protagonist of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, is known by his fellow flyers as Yo-Yo. Catch-22 is a satire on the absurdity of wars of attrition.

Higher education now has its own YoYo with the return of Jo Johnson to the brief of minister for universities and science. Johnson resigned from the government in November, calling for a second referendum on European Union membership and describing Brexit as “a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis”.