A no-deal Brexit would ground all flights in and out of the UK, so perhaps the surest sign that it will not happen is the fact that Britain’s pretend Brexit secretary Dominic Raab is treating his job as a public audition for a new career as a flight attendant.
As he updated the House of Commons on the ongoing lack of progress in the Brexit negotiations, there was no mistaking that familiar juxtaposition of imminent death dressed up as unmitigated tedium.
“In the unlikely event of a no-deal scenario,” he began, “here are the steps the government has been taking.”
As Mr Raab again went through what arrangements were in place for the increasingly likely outcome of a no-deal Brexit, members stared in to the middle distance. Others fiddled on their phones. It was a cruel time to be casting their minds back to Tuscan villas abandoned just days if not hours ago.
“If no deal is reached, oxygen masks will fall from the panels above your head,” he may or may not have said. “You can inflate the hard border with Ireland by blowing on this whistle.”
“A no-deal scenario would bring some countervailing opportunities,” he continued, “including a swifter end to our financial contributions to the EU.”
This, arguably, is one the airline industry might consider actually taking up: “Hello, this is your captain speaking. We have suffered catastrophic failure in all four engines and are losing altitude at a rate of 10,000 feet a minute. None of us will ever have to make another mortgage payment ever again.”
Elsewhere, it was very much a case of different singer, same terrible tune. “Nothing weakens the UK’s negotiating position more than dangling the possibility of a second referendum, which would only invite the worst possible terms,” he told Labour’s Brexit secretary Keir Starmer.
If nothing else, it sets the abysmal logic of the true Brexit believer in the appropriate context. Mr Raab, like Mr Davis before him, really does believe that the possibility of a second referendum would incentivise the EU to offer Britain a bad deal. That a bad deal for Britain is also a bad deal for the EU, and Britain has already voted for self harm once, is a reality that is certainly not lost on the EU side. And it is, alas, only on this side of the Channel that shameless sociopaths take vast risks with other people’s life chances for the sake of personal ambition.
The EU, for the avoidance of doubt, is not risking its future on the British people making a wise choice.
Is Mr Raab coming out with this kind of palpable rubbish an improvement on Mr Davis doing so? It’s hard to tell. For understandable reasons, the record industry offers precious few examples of a slightly more accomplished artist covering a bad song by an inferior singer, so it is hard to place Mr Raab’s reworking of some of Davis’s very worst lines in their appropriate context.
In fact, after almost half an hour’s deliberation, one finally springs to mind, and that would be Johnny Cash’s significant improvement of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. Perhaps, next time, Mr Raab might just come to the despatch box and sing that.
I hurt myself today to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.
There could scarcely be a better anthem for Brexit. What have we become?
The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.
Sign our petition here
