Finally, some clarity. After months of pretence, almost everyone in Westminster has abandoned any pretence to having a plan. Now it’s more or less a total mind-fuck. An out of control rollercoaster of parallel universes in which any number of incompatible things can be both true and not true simultaneously.
Labour both want an election and don’t want an election. They also want to get Brexit done but have no idea what Brexit they want to get done. The Tories also want an election but don’t know how or when to get one. They also would quite like Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal to pass, while secretly wishing they had voted for Theresa May’s rather better – low bar, admittedly – deal when they had the chance. What’s even weirder is that this is the new normal. No one finds any of this to be in the slightest bit odd.
There are one or two outliers who still cling to the notion that they have some influence over events. Dominic Cummings can often be found hiding in corners of parliament, torn shirt, ripped jeans, laces untied imagining himself to be a teenage Thomas Cromwell – let’s hope no one tells him how that story ended – while everyone else thinks he’s a bit of a dick.
“Plan A was for Plan B to fail,” he mutters. “We then blindside the opposition by ignoring Plans C and D and racing through to Plan E, which was to resort to Plan A that had already failed. I’m a genius. I have the country exactly where I want it.” He finishes with the manic laugh of a Bond villain about to be eaten by his own crocodiles and then vanishes into the shadows. Control, alt, delete. Classic Dom.
Boris Johnson is also finding it tough going. He’s used to a world that can be bent to his will. Where his actions have no consequences. But now the cracks in the World King are beginning to show. Not even his narcissism is enough to protect him any more.
His body language hints at betrayal and his eyes display the silent terror of a man who fears he’s in the process of being found out. Kidding himself that he actually believes in the thing that he knows to be untrue. Brexit is corroding what’s left of his integrity from the inside. He is the hollow man, bellowing against the dying of his sense of self. No longer capable of looking himself in the eye.
Even his own backbenchers have begun to doubt him. Where once they had saluted him as the Saviour who could deliver them a promised Brexit, now they saw a false prophet. A man who had flogged them a get-rich-quick Ponzi Brexit scheme but had lost far more votes than he had ever won. The public might still be taken in by his crumbling facade, but they weren’t and for Johnson’s second prime minister’s questions in nearly 100 days in office, Tory MPs could barely muster a cheer. So fickle.
Johnson appeared rattled from the start. It hadn’t helped that Tory Patrick McLoughlin had pointed out that the Incredible Sulk had achieved something no one thought possible. He had not only lost yet another Brexit vote but his temper with it. Epic fail. But when Jeremy Corbyn had played it safe by asking six relatively undemanding questions, Boris had visibly imploded. His speech patterns, already staccato, morphed into morse code and his arms alternatively punched the air randomly and flailed helplessly.
Labour DOT have voted DOT to delay DASH Brexit, he boomed. That is why DOT we will still DASH be leaving on DASH October 31st. The logic was impeccable. For a three-year-old. He was also equally confused about just how many hospitals he was single-handedly building. First it was DOT 20. Then it was DASH 40. Then it was back to DASH 20. The real answer was none.
“They said we’d never get our deal through the Commons,” Johnson insisted. Not even his own front bench could bring themselves to break it to him that he hadn’t actually managed that. The Sulk is so confused he can no longer even remember that he had suspended his own legislation the night before.
Johnson ended by reiterating that the spaceport at Newquay that is never going to be built was already under construction. The queue to be on the first flight is already 16 million strong. All hoping they never return. Boris picked up one of his arms that had come loose and shuffled off to dream up another cunning plan.
DOT DOT DOT DASH DASH DASH DOT DOT DOT.
