The contradictions of the Brexit era confound comedy. Having publicly extolled the virtues of Northern Ireland’s access to the single market on Tuesday, Rishi Sunak was momentarily so engorged by exciting economics he forgot the ideological implications of what he was saying, while Tory advisers chewed off their feet backstage. The Tory Brexiter Sunak is now a more enthusiastic supporter of the EU than the Labour remainer Keir Starmer. An unrepentant remainer until I die, do I now vote Tory? Was this the secret Tory plan all along?
Brexit has reversed the polarities of Sunak’s and Starmer’s brains. It’s like Face/Off, where John Travolta becomes Nicolas Cage and Nicolas Cage becomes John Travolta, but with the exciting martial arts sequences replaced by Sunak, who went to prep school and has the personal GDP of a South American dictatorship, accusing grammar-school grafter Starmer, whose dad was a toolmaker, of being a north London metropolitan elitist. Again.
The Labour leader maintains a public opposition to the single market and the customs union to keep voters in the so-called red wall onside. This is pointless. Let’s face facts. The dispirited red wall voters gravitate towards any apparent beacon of hope. And who can blame them? Starmer may as well try to get a swarm of flies to do a coordinated, Red Arrows-style aeronautical display. Even if he holds the red wall’s attention for a moment, all it will take is another Farage fascist-lite to roll up with a frothing pint and a pair of Vera Lynn’s stained knickers on a stick, promising all the kingdoms of the Earth, and the red wall voters will be off. There! I’ve said it. Sod the sodding red wall sods and bugger every bugger who voted for Brexit.
And before you say I am a north london metropolitan elitist who never ventures farther south than the Islington branch of Watitrose, I have just spent 48 hours in Swansea making hardened Welsh people laugh, although admittedly I took a bag of Waitrose snacks with me.
And I’m not especially sorry that hard man of Brexit Steve Baker’s mental health suffered due to Brexit. Boohoo! Since the day after the 2016 referendum I’ve been on high blood pressure medication, which has made me deranged and impotent, while the lives and futures and careers of dozens of people I know have been ruined for ever. Where’s my TV sob story? They should put Baker in a bird cage wearing Tom Waits’s glasses, like Renfield in Dracula, and make him eat flies. Hopefully, he is well enough to continue denying the climate crisis with his Net Zero Watch group, as it is important we hear a balanced view of the inevitable extinction of all life on Earth from a depressed man who thinks God is talking to him in High Wycombe.
And I’m glad Sarah Vine has lost friends over Brexit, as she whined in her recent column in the Daily Mail, a paper that only exists to make nice people want to end their lives. I lost friends due to her Brexit too. We all have. The difference is, the friends I lost were Brexiters and thus either easily led or evil, so weren’t worth knowing, whereas Vine will have driven away the few decent people in her orbit. She makes Brexit about her social life as our economy is overtaken by those of European countries whose citizens used to want to come here for a better life and some nice trainers. You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off! Remember?
The contradictions continue. The foolish Brexiter Michael Gove attended a secret summit with clever remainers, aiming to solve Brexit in the national interest. Gove, a sentient but malign dong with a halibut’s lips and the eyes of a Philippine tarsier, got what he wanted – Brexit. But now he is seeking the assistance of clever people who said it wouldn’t work anyway in order to try and make it work anyway. Explain that to your children as they wonder what happened to all the salad. And their future prospects.
Last week, the tarsier-eyed dong enabled a new high in Conservative contradictions, saying parents whose children don’t attend school regularly should have child benefits stopped. Covid kids have just been through two years of hell in isolation, milestones missed, friendship groups fragmented. The first time I, an adult man, went out after lockdown – to a cautious afternoon party in a garden – I couldn’t separate one voice from another, a barking dog burned my brain and I wondered how we ever used to cope with crowds. I still do. Imagine being 11, thrust into the crush of school corridors after two years indoors. And imagine being a parent asking for help and finding, thanks to 13 years of Tory neglect, there’s a two-year wait for a child mental health consultation. Join the dots, Gove, or shut up. Redeem yourself!
Ironically, it was in 2017 that the Conservatives decided families with more than two children shouldn’t have extra child benefits. But children are expensive. Boris Johnson has at least seven and was finding it difficult to make ends meet on his prime minister’s salary of £164,951. The Tory donor and banker Richard Sharp facilitated an £800,000 loan to help him out. Sharp didn’t disclose this when interviewed for the £160,000-a-year BBC chair role. Sharp is a former director of the Tufton Street thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies that campaigns for the abolition of the licence fee and maintains that the BBC is biased. The average parent of more than two children, of course, can’t offer a man keen to dismantle the BBC the chairmanship of the BBC as leverage for sorting them out with a few quid. The whole lot of them have to go. Now. We’re done here.
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