The question that I keep asking myself is, “All Johnson is doing at the moment, it’s all just theatrics? Right?”
No one in their right minds would accept a no-deal Brexit as anything other than a disaster. A disaster on so many different levels that it will take an age just to work out the detail of the disaster, as every day will bring new revelations of extra dimensions of “shotinthefootery” that we had not previously anticipated.
Seeing that ungainly scruff represent the safety of my future in Brussels was a true low point. How has it come to this, that an entitled chancer is ‘leading’ negotiations for an agreement in the dying days of our membership of the EU? Johnson puts himself forward as a spokesman for the people of Britain, a concept he neither understands nor believes in. He is a spokesman only for himself. He cares nothing for the ‘people of Britain’ because they are, clearly, not him. And he is his universe.
I would love to believe that the charade of negotiation that is going on at the moment is nothing more than window dressing for the final capitulation to economic reality as some sort of agreement (any bloody sort of agreement) is signed. He can then bask in the excitement of pushing the EU to the limit and managing to extract something that he will display as a triumph of his steely determination.
Johnson has already displayed his linguistic ‘imagination’ in redefining what “oven ready deal” meant; his explanation/clarification that he was referring to the withdrawal agreement and not to anything more is puerile in its mendacity and laughable in its believability. But if it works for him and allows him to redefine a few other realities to get an agreement signed, I will settle for the gibbering word soup that he uses for communication and be relieved.
But, if Johnson’s character is as nakedly, narcissistically, opportunistic as we have had ample proof of in his actions since he landed in Number 10, then we could be looking at someone who judges that a hard Brexit of no agreement could be something that he could get away with. Whatever that means in his insular world view.
I am more worried today than I have been since the awful result of the referendum. All my worst imaginings could be crawling (it has been four and a half years of negotiation, after all) to reality.
I am, by nature, an optimist, but my essential cheeriness is being stretched to the limit.
I usually try and find something of a lighter nature to end my piece of writing, but I do not feel that it would be appropriate. I remember watching an excellent TV drama during the time of a previous Conservative regime which showed a mother bringing a tray with tea making things on it, which she dropped, and then shouted, “Look what that bloody woman has made me do now!” We could still laugh at such an overreaction, even as Thatcher’s malign premiership poisoned so many aspects of British life – but what is threatened by a no-deal on Brexit will make what Thatcher did look like the “sunlit uplands” compared to the all-encompassing, unfolding misery of the reality of Brexit.
