Thrice Mayor of London?

I bet he wants it. He just needs to square it with the Editor of the Evening Standard. "Buller! Buller! Buller!" Now, is the full office of Foreign Secretary going to be reconstituted? It is no longer necessary to give the important parts to grown-ups instead of letting Boris Johnson anywhere near them.

Liam Fox would need to be moved out out of the way, but, like Johnson and like David Davis, it is not as if he has done anything, anyway. Fox is away with the fairies of the "Anglosphere", a kind of nineteenth-century British Empire without the darkies, but with a United States shorn of the anti-British protectionism that is its historical norm.

None of this has anything to do with the twenty-first century, in which American protectionism is resurgent but largely irrelevant, while the real action lies in deals with the BRICS countries, and in integration into the Belt and Road Initiative. 

Equally unconnected to present global reality is the Government's Brexit opening gambit, which is now set alongside a Foreign Secretary, seen by the Prime Minister as a potential successor, who is in favour of a second referendum. 

We have always known that there was going to be a second referendum, and we now know that it will be between whatever the EU negotiates even the Chequers proposal down to (it was always going to be something like that), and simply staying in the EU, with no Third Way. 

Between those options, one of which would be bound to win, even the latter would be preferable to the former, since it is better to be a rule-maker than a rule-taker, and it is better to pay and have a say than to pay and have no say.

For months, and it might have been years, I have been using the words "colony" and "satrapy" for the status to which the Government was committed to reducing the United Kingdom in relation to the European Union. And now, here we are.

But there is going to be another hung Parliament. We need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I need £10,000 in order to stand for Parliament with any chance of winning. My crowdfunding page has been taken down without my knowledge or consent. But you can still email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com instead, and that address accepts PayPal.