The latest futile Brexit negotiations are a throwback to a simpler time
“I don’t think we can go on like this forever,” said Michel Barnier, in some room or other in Brussels, as the latest round of Brexit talks proved as pointless as the last. He then listed all the areas in which no progress has been made.
Once upon a time, this sort of scene might have been a cause for concern, even rage. Now it’s almost reassuring.
Utterly futile Brexit negotiations followed by pointed statements from Michel Barnier are a throwback to simpler times. All that was missing from the full nostalgia hit was David Davis chuckling inanely away, talking luminous drivel about the German carmakers.
That slogan, “Take Back Control”, has been much derided over the years, but it’s really having its moment now. Massive economic damage, we now know, feels so much more liberating when you’ve done it to yourself for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
When you’re free to make a truly spectacular idiot of yourself on the world stage, and no one can come along and stop you, then you know you are truly the master of your soul.
What better way is there to prove your strength to others than needless self-harm? We’re Britain! We won the war, we can get through this! That’s what we used to shout out loud to the world, traditionally through the medium of an angry man in the BBC Question Time audience, before proving ourselves right by setting about our own head with a mallet.
The miseries of coronavirus are hellish by comparison. At this point, we were only meant to be dealing with the Brexit-related damage to our businesses, our schools, our hospitals, our jobs and our children’s life chances that we had chosen of our own free will.
Now there is a deadly virus on the loose throughout the world, and absolutely nowhere more so than here.
The weight of the irony is enough to send anyone over the edge. All of the Take Back Control guys are right there, in 10 Downing Street, and there is no other government, anywhere on Earth, that has shown itself so singularly incapable of taking control of anything.
So hopeless has it all been that it has made it on to the novelty birthday cards. As the kind of person whose nose is pressed far too close against the glass of politics, I have long considered the novelty birthday card market as the key barometer of political doom.
If you attend every speech, every press conference, every hustings, you are used to hearing politicians saying the same thing over and over again. So it’s only when you see, for example, Theresa May’s face in the window of your local Scribbler next to the words “Have a Strong and Stable Birthday” that you know something’s definitely up.
The Boris Johnson coronavirus novelty cards now appear to be doing a brisk trade. “Go out. No stay in. You can have a barbecue, no you can’t have a barbecue.” You can now use these words to wish someone a happy birthday. One suspects such a birthday item is not widely for sale in Germany, even though people there can mainly be confident they’ll be celebrating again next year.
A deadly virus, for which you are completely unprepared and your government is utterly incapable of doing even the bare minimum to deal with, is enough to unsettle anyone.
That we are, as things stand, on course for the most damaging form of Brexit available is a reality about which people have almost stopped caring. After the pain of coronavirus has passed through the economy, even the most damaging of all Brexits will be like the placenta after childbirth.
How the nation will feel about a no-deal Brexit, or at best, the most bare bones Brexit possible, come December, is impossible to know.
In so many ways, Brexit has shaped the nation’s opinion on coronavirus. That positions are still so deeply entrenched has almost certainly meant that large numbers of people are happy to overlook the truly and uniquely disastrous handling of what has happened in this country.
Of course, the same truth runs in both directions, but it must surely be to a lesser extent. I hope I can say with sincerity that I did not want the government to fail as badly as it has done, for as many lives to be needlessly lost.
I did not expect Cummings and co to be found so hopelessly wanting, and for the clear evidence of their hopelessness to be so overwhelming.
It reveals a tragic truth about Brexit, too.
They were always hopelessly out of their depth on that, and in a way they’re lucky. Now is the time they would have been clearly seen accidentally drowning themselves after getting into difficulty in the children’s play pool. Instead, a tsunami has appeared on the horizon.
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