These are not good times for those of us suffering from anxiety. Every day merely confirms what we have already suspected: there is no one in government who has a clue about what is going on, and Brexit policy is being made up on an hour-by-hour basis.
On Wednesday evening, Theresa May made yet another trip to Brussels in which she insisted that progress was being made. She and Jean-Claude Juncker were now on first-name terms, and she had narrowed down her backstop demands to three possibilities that the EU would be unable to meet.
Her post-summit briefing was positively upbeat. Juncker appeared to have attended an entirely different meeting. His assessment was that a catastrophic no-deal was becoming increasingly likely. And for the record, he had never called the prime minister Theresa.
It has now become a physical impossibility for Philip Hammond to smile. His facial muscles have long since atrophied and his only expression is a rictus Munch-like scream of despair. But on Radio 4’s Today programme he was even gloomier than usual, his monotone barely rising above a whisper.
Everything was really, really bad, he mumbled. He did not want a no-deal but he had to admit that was now a real possibility, as the government did not have a clear plan of how to break the deadlock. If anyone else had any bright ideas, he was all ears.
John Humphrys reminded him several times that he was the chancellor and the country was looking to him to provide solutions, but Hammond just deadbatted everything. The prime minister was a void – an avatar at best – and he had all but given up. Something might turn up, but if it didn’t then something else would happen. Something worse. The man who only a year ago was describing himself as “positively Tiggerish” now sounded as if he was starring in his own hostage video.
The fatalism only got worse. There were 36 days until Brexit. Tomorrow there would be 35 days until Brexit. And the day after, 34. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. He couldn’t even say what he would do if there were to be a no-deal Brexit or even if he would choose to remain in post. He was beyond rational thought. Beyond decision-making. It was as much as he could do just to get out of bed in the mornings. Imagine what it was like going to cabinet and having to deal with halfwits like Gavin Williamson in the flesh. The rest was silence.
Michael Gove was on rather more bullish form at environment, food and rural affairs questions in the Commons. Which was just as terrifying in its own way, because Gove’s confidence is invariably misplaced. The more he insists he has everything under control, the more you know it is time to panic. His answer to Brexit was the no-nonsense approach of talking up the value of rationing by promoting his planned wartime cookbook, complete with recipes for rotting vegetables and unconventional cuts of meat. The working title for the book was Tripe.
This caused some consternation for the Tory Giles Watling, who is under the impression there is a huge black market in dog and moggy meat. Watling has explored the nation’s underbelly and concluded that everyone is secretly hacking their pets to death and eating them. He even spotted someone in the big cat enclosure at Whipsnade Zoo, taking a quick bite out of a sleeping lion’s thigh.
The environment secretary offered only token reassurance. At times of national crisis, every pet should be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Far better to die a free cockapoo than live a second longer as a slave of the EU.
He was rather more equivocal about what would happen to other foodstuffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Basically there were two possibilities. Either he would impose tariffs on all food coming into the country, which would be great for British famers but would send hundreds of thousands of others scuttling off to food banks as prices soared. Which would be great for food-bank workers. Or there would be no tariffs, in which case British agriculture was screwed. But then we could always build some houses on the empty fields. So it was all fine.
Gove looked up triumphantly. He is one of the few ministers still capable of presenting a lose-lose situation as a win-win. His denial of reality is near total. It’s just the rest of us who are suffering.