Strong and Stable?

One year ago today, what little credibility the official British commentariat had retained after the Iraq War was shredded completely. I had predicted a hung Parliament from the start, a prediction that I confidently repeat in relation to the next General Election. But, as with the Iraq War, no official commentator has been removed as result of having been so spectacularly wrong as to have predicted a Conservative landslide last year.

And why had that General Election been called in the first place? Impertinent Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP MPs had been voting against the Government, as had members of the House of Lords. The nerve of them!

During the campaign, Theresa May indicated what she thought of such insolence by giving no interview in the ordinary sense of the word, something that she has still never done, and by giving an astonishing performance on The One Show, where she appeared with her husband and talked about putting the bins out. Certain members of the Royal Family have had to play tougher gigs than that, and still do.

12 months on, and the news is that once again David Davis has not resigned, that Boris Johnson has knowingly allowed himself to be recorded saying that the entire Brexit game was up, that Alan Duncan has pretty much announced a second referendum as Government policy, and that the hardline Remainer Geordie Greig has been appointed as the new Editor of the Daily Mail. Crush The Saboteurs, indeed.

The was never going to be Brexit under any Conservative Government, nor under a Labour Government while the Parliamentary Labour Party retained anything like its present composition. Brexit will never formally be cancelled. Instead, unless there really were to be a second referendum in order to nullify the first one, it will be left unattended in the background, to be mentioned only when there was some ulterior motive for doing so, and never, ever to be given any kind of practical effect.

Such is the consequence of having allowed the voices of Leave to be those picked by the other side. The matter has been left to people who thought that the EU had only gone to the bad sometime in the very late 1980s, around the time of a speech in the dotage of Margaret Thatcher's Premiership, which we now know to have been the beginning of her own dotage.

She never opposed the EU while she was in full possession of her faculties, and to this day her flame-keepers cannot tell you what, in particular, is wrong with it. Yet we have been expected to trust them to get us out of it. Lo and behold, we are not getting out of it.