Well. As the writer David Quantick put it on Twitter, that was the worst general election since the next one. How are you all feeling, nearly a week on: a) cyanide capsule, b) bunker, c) tingling numbness, d) molten fury, e) all of the above? Pick as many as you need.
Whatever your mental state, I doubt it will have been improved by watching The Brexit Storm Continues: Laura Kuenssberg’s Inside Story (BBC Two), a behind-the-scenes look at you-know-what from the BBC’s political editor who, through no fault of her own, has had a bird’s-eye view of the machinations of the past three years.
There was something about watching a show devoted to counting down from the 100 days to our supposed exit from the European Union on 31 October – spoiler alert: didn’t happen – then up to the election. Something about watching the months of lies, half-truths and self-serving guff from a parade of politicians whose venality seems unequalled in modern times. Something about seeing the abandonment of democratic ideals, the disapplication of checks and balances evolved over centuries for the greater good, the rejection of parliamentary standards and the end of adult, civilised behaviour among those we once saw as fit to govern us, compressed into an hour that corrodes your sense of optimism. Indeed, it challenges any notion you might have of human history as one of linear progress quite severely. Maybe it’s just me.
There is nothing truly revelatory in The Brexit Storm, unless you count the fact that it looked absolutely as bad and chaotic to those observing it close up as it did to the rest of us, while figures as monstrous as any conjured by the Doctor Who props department roamed our screens, institutions and constitution.
All the high points and low points (which were often one and the same point) were covered: Boris Johnson’s appointment; the prorogation; the rebel alliance, still nowhere near as fun as it sounds, and the “surrender bill”; the resignation of Johnson’s brother Jo as an MP, citing “unresolvable tension” between family loyalty and the national interest (which was as fun as it sounds) and so on and very much so forth.
If I understood no more about Brexit by the end than I did at the start, that is undoubtedly my fault (and that of my propensity to howl unstoppably in despair whenever I hear the word, which drowns out a lot of potential information.) Though I do also think that a layperson reaching full comprehension of exactly where we’re at is like handing a tissue sample to the man in the street and asking him to sequence the genome in his head. Then lie about it for so long to so many that he turns back into a monkey and starts flinging actual turds about.
Sorry, where was I?
Ah. Yes. The continuing storm. Kuenssberg was an admirably cool, clear-eyed guide for those who could bear to pay attention. Even with this extended focus on her, at no point did you get the sense, as you frequently do even in fleeting glimpses of others in similar positions as they interview politicians, that she enjoys the bloodsport aspect of these interesting times. She seems instead to have as little patience with everything as we do. There was little sense of the woman who many consider to be (and I can see where they are coming from) strangely unmeasured in her online behaviour, or who seemed nearly to breach pre-election broadcasting rules with comments about postal votes just before polling day.
On we went, through the supreme court judgment that the suspension of parliament was illegal, Steve Baker’s fury at the constitution being “bent, broken and abused – by remainers!”, Johnson’s lunch with Juncker, border’n’backstop back’n’forths, a deal of sorts, the Letwin amendment and on to the election results and the beginning of the postmortem and all the Christmas joy that it is continuing – God bless us, everyone – to yield.
An honorary mention, before we go, to a pair of stalwart optics-defiers; David Gauke MP, filmed on the phone at home while a man trimmed the huge hedge at the end of his huge garden (I suppose it pales into insignificance when you realise that Nicholas Soames’s is bounded entirely by stacked horses) and Matt Hancock, filmed being beaten at chess in what I suspect was a single move. He gets more Matt Hancock by the minute.
At one point Kuenssberg summarised the situation thus: “There is no reasonable debate any more. There hasn’t been for a long time. Now, with a more provocative prime minister, it’s even more the case.” An evergreen utterance, in the wake of results that have now handed him pretty much carte blanche for 2020 and far beyond. At least if we find the sixpence in our Christmas pudding this year we will have quite the array of wishes to make.
