I do love all the decorations going up now for the Christmas season. My favourite this year is the life-size Downing Street cuckoo clock, where – seemingly on the hour – the door pops open and the mechanical lady comes out.
She whirrs jerkily toward the lectern, says “taking back control” as many times as the hour demands, then rotates back inside the apparatus.
And so to another deeply cuckoo week in Brexit, in which we seem to have ticked a few minutes closer to the war with Spain that Michael Howard was trailing last year. Do you remember this? “Thirty-five years ago this week,” the former Tory leader intoned rationally, “another woman prime minister sent a taskforce halfway across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish‑speaking country, and I’m absolutely certain that our current prime minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar.”
With apologies to Jeremy Paxman, the only question I’d ask Howard 12 times these days is: “You’re a mad bastard, aren’t you?” Then again, so what? Yes! Come on: let’s have it. Fire up Sailing by Rod Stewart and let’s deploy our empty aircraft carrier to the Costa del Sol.
Or as the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez put it on Thursday: “My government will always defend the interests of Spain. If there are no changes, we will veto Brexit.”
Face it, war with Spain is the perfect way to unite our apparently hopelessly divided nation. Plus, war is the thing we could definitely beat Spain at. I don’t want to fall back on footballing cliche, but they are the great underachievers of recent world conflicts, having failed even to qualify for the second world war under a since‑discredited manager.
If we can’t have war with Spain, I am excited for an economic war with 27 countries, fought in all our names, by people who literally don’t understand money. One former minister told the Financial Times this week that the UK “should start preparing for economic war [with the EU], and we’ll win … the battle is asymmetric: we’ve got a floating currency and they haven’t.” A misconception to which the most dignified reply would be: lol OK. I want you to imagine a poster of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger and saying: “Idiots: your country needs you!” Sign up today and it’ll be over by Christmas. No idea which Christmas.
Meanwhile, Brexit continues to take back control of language. I very much enjoyed Dominic Raab talking about a “negotiated no-deal” on Friday, which does seem to be the moron’s oxymoron. Furthermore, the man who was Brexit secretary until 10 minutes ago now reckons the Brexit deal is worse than staying in the EU. Yes, mate. The great spectacle of the past two and a half years has been watching allegedly very clever people realise this incredibly slowly. It has had the flavour of an insanely painstaking stop-motion animation called Big‑Brain Gets the Point.
And yet, it is a measure of the depth of the Brexit rabbit hole that this is not even the most malarial development of a single morning. I am, right now, about to type the epithet “Ukip spad Tommy Robinson”. This is the business of attention‑starved Ukip leader Gerard Batten appointing the far-right street thug to advise him on grooming gangs and prison reform. Robinson’s lived advice on grooming gangs appears to be to risk collapsing the trials of them, while I imagine his ideas on prison reform extend all the way to making it law for him to get a telly should he ever find himself inside again for mortgage fraud. Either way, Nigel Farage has decided the Tories shouldn’t have all the motion‑of‑no‑confidence fun, and has launched an effort to oust Batten, presumably paving the way for his 37th non-consecutive stint as Ukip leader.
The only momentary bright spot seems to be the (temporary) humiliation of pretend aristocrat Jacob Rees-Mogg, a sort of Talentless Mr Ripley whose ERG coup against May has failed to ignite. When Michael Corleone is to attempt an assassination in The Godfather, his elder brother Sonny is all over the arrangements. “I want somebody good – and I mean good – to plant that gun,” he declares. “I don’t want my brother coming out of that toilet with just his dick in his hands.”
Well. I’m sorry for the image, but it does currently look as though Rees-Mogg has come out of the water closet with just his proverbial in his hands. That said, he could easily be back on top of the underworld in a fortnight. Such are our cuckoo times.
To survive them, I am trying to practise a new technique I am calling political mindfulness. This is when you say to yourself, “I will live in, and focus on, this moment alone. I cannot affect events before or after this point, so right now I will simply take time to hugely enjoy the fact that Rees‑Mogg looks to have shat the bed.”
For now, May still resembles Gromit on the runaway train, frantically laying the track just in front of him to avert disaster. So get ready for Brexit advent, where every day in the December calendar will offer the chance to open the door on some new, exquisitely rendered political hellscape. The best way to determine whether some eventuality or other is a credible potential timeline is to ask: is it terrible? Because if it is, it could definitely happen. If it feels like a net positive, then it probably has to be placed in the “nice idea but unrealistic” pile. Along with Jeremy Corbyn’s ludicrously, historically disingenuous “jobs‑first Brexit”.
Passing the test are options such as Boris Johnson campaigning for no deal, as well as Boris Johnson ripping off the Boris Johnson mask to reveal another Boris Johnson mask that has decided to come out for remain. Equally, forgive the return to a Hamlet analogy but it is absolutely not beyond the realms that after the next mad round of bloodletting and fallout, the unity candidate left standing could once more be ... Theresa May. Yup, May could emerge as Fortinbras for the second time, in Weekend at Elsinore II. Hey – you loved the first one.
The immediate upshot is that “global Britain” is now the basket case of the world. Karma, surely. All around our former dominions, people are shrieking with laughter as they say: “Isn’t it terrible what they’re doing to themselves?” I guess we were always very strong at cocking up a country. When the British were just beginning to get their claws into India around 1700, the Mughal empire accounted for a quarter of the world’s economy. By the time we were forced to leave them to undo all our good work, India was punching at just over 3%. The UK taking back control of the UK may well turn out to be a similar success story.
