Skip to main content

Have yourself a merry little Brexmess

"You'll see me right, won't you guys? Guys? Hello?"

Tough week? 

Maybe the kids were playing up, your chosen team spectacularly failed to achieve what you’d hoped, or you had problems at work.

Theresa May’s Brexit-themed week from hell featured all of these. Those pesky children, Boris Johnson and David Davis, left home in a right old huff. Her team are in a constant state of flux and no nearer figuring out a Brexit deal with the EU, and describing her last seven days as “problematic” is like saying Gareth Southgate is OK-ish.
v DaDa and BoJo aren’t the only CabiTubbies to have quit this week, with Maria Caulfield and Ben Bradley both leaving their vice-chair roles in the Conservative party.

Mrs May, forced into a hasty reshuffle to fill the vacant cabinet seats, announced after her latest incarnation had met that she was “looking ahead to a busy week”. She might as well have added “and looking over my shoulder to see who’s going to stab me in the back next”.

With just over eight months until the UK leaves the European Union, there’s no deal agreed on how trade will work after the 29th of March 2019 deadline.

An agreement made by the beleaguered PM, last week, has been the catalyst for the big name departures. Davis said that the UK was “giving too much away, too easily” before jumping overboard, whilst Boris’s resignation letter stated that the Brexit “dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt”.

Describing Brexit as a dream seems pretty extreme, but this was Boris – it’s possible his letter was written in crayon anyway.

So, is May maybe going to go too? With so much dissent and turmoil in the Party ranks, she does look increasingly vulnerable. But there is one simple question that’s tough to answer for any would-be leader thinking of mounting a challenge: Do I want to be the one burdened with getting Brexit sorted out with a deal that everybody is happy with?

It does feel like a Mission Impossible – the ultimate poisoned chalice. Become leader, have a go at sorting the mess out in time, and then immediately after, when everyone realises it’s still a dogs dinner and feels like they’ve been cheated in some way, get ousted by an ungrateful party/voters.

At which point, Boris will saunter back in with a promise of making everything lovely again. Even if he writes it on a big red bus, it’ll probably still work.

Merry Brexmess!

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday 13th July 2018. It received a minor title edit in the print edition (dropping the 'little'), but made it through unscathed in the version on their website.

I usually avoid political columns where I can - largely out of pure laziness. It does require a bit of research to get some of the detail right, and there's always the risk that the story will change during the 2-day gap between submitting copy and it appearing in the paper.

Got away with it this time, and I was pretty happy with this one... especially the "CabiTubbies" bit.

(CS A-Z: "Now Xmas". Stop judging me.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...