In 25 years of covering British politics – overstating outrages, decrying terrible ideas that have already happened, wishing someone else were in charge (someone more like me) – I have never been here before. I don’t mean: “I’ve never looked at the ranks of government with such distaste and despair,” because there was no way of knowing, 10 years ago, that things would get this much worse. No, I mean, I’ve never felt the public realm bleed so relentlessly into my personal life that I’m drenched in unknowables and can’t make any decisions at all.
All questions end: “Wait and see what happens in March, I guess.” “Do we move house?” is merely the headline uncertainty that probably only affects a few. Where do you go on holiday when you don’t know what’s going to happen to the pound? This stuff matters. I have a friend who went to France last year and spent £25 on a chicken in a market. She said: “You know if you got mugged by your own parent? That’s what it tasted like.”
It sounds all very first-world-problems saying it out loud, but what kind of political dishevelment have we brought ourselves to that we don’t know what our currency will mean in six months’ time? Is that supposed to be something only a spoilt person would object to? Is it tempting fate to renew a pet passport? Should your kid learn Spanish, or would he be better off with karate? Should you leave your diary blank from here on, block out some time for your own civil disobedience? It is like a Chinese curse: “May you live in times so interesting that you can’t even decide whether or not to go to the seaside for the May bank holiday.”
