Brexitmanship

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

BREXIT REMINDS me of the chikungunya virus: every time you think, “This couldn’t get any more painful,” it promptly does.

The lesson must be that one mustn’t tempt Providence, viruses or evil mop-headed clowns who sneak een to 10 Downing Street through the back door of Eton.

Three years ago – the same year the world was blighted with Fat Nixon (and through the same digital manipulation of emotions by Cambridge Analytic-I’ma-Take-the-Money-and-Run) – everyone was so sure Leave would lose the yes-or-no referendum on Brexit, no one bothered to address the extent of the proposed disconnection from Europe or the way it was to be achieved.

Accordingly, Britain has been more or less firetrucked since. But this week, the depth of the penetration has reached what my medical friends call “full leverage”; the Brexit campaign just can’t firetruck Leave supporters any deeper or more thoroughly.

Until tomorrow, at least.

Political chikungunya in dey roo-ker-ker-tung-a.

Leave voters – including the American writer Lionel Shriver, who lives in London, and wrote a fairly fatuous leading article on Brexit for the American magazine Harpers – begin with fairly solid, evidence-based, rational arguments for Brexit, logical premise leading on to logical premise that ought to progress to an irrefutable (or, at least, logical) conclusion – but instead, jump abruptly to the same final words: “For me, Brexit is a feeling.”

It’s a feeling very well understood by the current faces, which we have to take to be the final look, of Brexit: Prime Minister Bozo the Clown, Nigel Garbage and Jacob Rees-Mook, the Upper Class Twit of the Year for Life.

Brexit is a feeling and, if you can feel the feeling, it spares you thinking.

You don’t think, eg, when Bozo, who twice voted against Theresa May’s Brexit deal, expels Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson for not supporting a hard Brexit.

Or when Jacob Rees-Mook, in that ultra-posh accent that suggests his anal sphincter is being permanently pinched, accuses Dr David Nicholl of fearmongering and calls him a “Remoaner” because he asked Rees-Mook what level of mortality he was prepared to accept in a no-deal Brexit. (Nicholl is the neurologist who wrote portions of the suppressed Yellowhammer report warning of the risk of mortal harm to patients.)

The journalist James O’Brien, almost the lone voice of reason in an overly-emotional debate, who has picked apart the Leave lies assiduously for the last three years, points out that no deal is really “no detail” (check out O’Brien’s daily show on LBC Radio, whose app works seamlessly in the Caribbean.)

Leave voters had to watch Bozo the Clown – a man appointed PM by effectively 42K-odd British Tory party members – this week attempt the most serious attack on parliamentary democracy since Guy Fawkes tried to blow it up – and persuade themselves that it was a good thing to be able to remain onside with Brexit.

Amazingly, yesterday, Bozo’s own brother, Jo Johnson, resigned from the Cabinet, citing the conflict between family loyalty and the national interest – which means Jo is afraid Bozo will destroy the country with hard Brexit – and even that won’t be enough to make the 28 per cent of Leave voters who are still behind it look in the mirror and understand they’ve been duped.

There is no hurdle at which they will baulk.

Bozo, Garbage and Rees-Mook are pushing so hard for no deal because they know that it is no deal or no Brexit at all. A far more informed, far less emotional British population, given a new referendum, will not cut off its nose to spite its own face.

It’s precisely why Bozo will push for a third general election in four years rather than a second referendum – although the referendum, held in two parts (the first to eliminate no deal) is obviously the logical choice.

A hung Parliament, the likely result of any election, will be just as confused. A clear ruling out of no deal followed by a vote and a majority for either Remain or Theresa May’s Brexit deal will solve the whole thing nicely, as unhappy as it will make the great big girls' blouses who went to Eton.

The sun may have set on the British Empire.

But the sons of empire have not yet gone down without a fight.

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