Well, there you are, then. Another epic political week has passed in off-brand Westeros, a septic isle from which there is no real escape, only a bloodstained booth where Chris Grayling is offering to sell you a ferry ticket.
Every few days I change my mind about what I’d pop in the time capsule to explain to future generations just how inspirational this era was. This week, though, the choice could only be Wednesday’s parliamentary exchange between House of Commons Speaker John Bercow and Tory MP Adam Holloway, which I have lightly edited for space reasons.
Holloway: “We’ve ALL noticed in recent months a sticker in your car making derogatory comments about Brexit. NO, THIS IS A SERIOUS POINT. HAVE YOU DRIVEN THAT CAR WITH THE STICKER THERE?”
Bercow: “THAT sticker, on the subject of Brexit, HAPPENS to be affixed TO – or in the windscreen OF – MY WIFE’S CAR! YES!”
Kill me now. And when you’ve done it, consider that exchange as our Statue of Liberty, and bury it in the sand for Charlton Heston to find at some unspecified point in the future. We are maniacs. We blew it.
To watch that photon-weight fight, and indeed all the auto-parodic scenes of parliamentary sovereignty this week, is not to wonder how this country ever managed its many past victories and immense cultural and scientific achievements. It is to wonder how, in a very real sense, it has managed to even get its own pants on and leave the house at all for at least a decade.
I’ve seen Holloway-Bercow five times now, and I believe it is possible to draw a clear and fairly short line between it and a mad-eyed UK finally deploying Trident to kill the third of British sheep that a Defra paper suggests will need to be slaughtered in the event of no deal, in order to maintain market integrity.
Until then, in her latest ironicidal gesture, Theresa May wants Bercow to explain himself. The feeling’s mutual. Indeed, Dominic Grieve’s amendment means that when the prime minister’s withdrawal deal is voted down next week, May will have to come to the house to explain her so-called plan B within three working days. I assumed that was about a year in parliamentary time, but it turns out it’s actually the following Monday. However, No 10 says the plan B debate will only be allocated 90 minutes, which feels quite a symbolic stretch of time.
It’s difficult to decide on the precise football match to which it will be analogous. But there was a lower league Nigerian game in 2013 in which Akurba FC lost 79-0 to Plateau United Feeders. Seventy-two of those goals were scored in the second half, in case that affects any plan to bring on Grayling at some point.
As for the specific details of May’s plan B, it is believed to be a variety of tinned goods and the contact details for Ray Mears. It’s her bad deal or no deal, kids – and no deal is no longer better than a bad deal, even if she told you for way more than a year that it was. Given how well that strategy went, it’s intriguing that May should have spent this week veering between suggesting that no deal was more likely, and suggesting that no Brexit was more likely. She’s good cop AND bad cop. Playing more than one character in a movie is fairly excruciating when Eddie Murphy does it; when a performer of the calibre of May attempts it, it is less watchable than gamma rays.
As for her conviction that now is the moment to reach out to Labour leavers, a cool 19 months after her Darwin award-winning election, it is once again only possible to rationalise if you realise that the prime minister has been experiencing reality on a massive tape delay. On these calculations, May will wait until February 2020 to wish the England squad good luck as they head to Russia to kick off their World Cup campaign. For now, she remains the comic character pointing the gun at their own head and warning: “one false move and I’ll shoot” – even as the timer she so foolishly set clicks down to zero.
Amid such desperately chaotic scenes, suggestions of a temporary “national unity administration” prompt an involuntary laugh. These feel like suggesting that Mordor might benefit from a couple of months of technocratic government. I suppose so. But things are quite … far gone down there, now? As for that self-styled Frodo, David Cameron, we are still unable to quantify how wrong his plan to destroy the ring has gone, other than to say the Shire is now primarily a vast Orc brothel.
In the end, you only needed to watch the news for 15 seconds this week to surmise that most of our political class is not up to the job, and hasn’t been for years. In fact, the very calling of the referendum was an admission of that. We live in a representative democracy. Though it may have been subconscious for Cameron, if he’d been a politician capable of finessing the internal Tory politics of the situation, he wouldn’t have thrown the entire question open to the floor.
But he did. He took what he thought would be an easy shortcut to an easy life, and we will all be living with the difficult, long-term implications of it for so many years to come. Cameron remains cocooned in his 25-grand shed, apparently still working on his memoir. What can you say? Other than: would you like me to come over and help you with the ending, dear? Failing that, I hear there’s a winter caretaker job going in a Colorado Rockies hotel – perhaps you’d consider applying and trying to finish it there.