We are entering the fourth hiatus in the long Brexit saga, or rather in the first stage of it. By Christmas we will have had two Tory leadership contests and two general elections, and this is not counting the periods when Theresa May and latterly Boris Johnson were trying to get their deals through parliament or when parliament itself was prorogued. I suppose it's a reflection on where we are at the moment as a nation: fractured, rudderless, leaderless and lacking in a plan, a direction or even now, a clear destination. We are simply looking up, taking a breather and regrouping for the next chaotic steps. The whole affair is completely mad.
No wonder we are the laughing stock of the world.
Have we ever had such an appalling choice at the ballot box? If so, I can't recall it. Another product of The Bullingdon Club, a shambolically disorganised sociopath and moral bankrupt with an Old Etonian's sense of entitlement or an elderly Marxist sympathiser, trade union activist, professional protester, dilettante and drifter with 2 A-Levels at grade E.
This is the sorry state we have come to as a nation. And yet the newspaper columns pump out the commentary and we go through the motions of picking one or the other to lead us through what will be the most tumultuous period since 1945. You wouldn't trust either of them to run a sweet shop in Cheltenham. God help us all.
The only other man with a supposedly big influence is Farage who is hogging the limelight while he keeps us guessing about his intentions. He is not going to stand for parliament for the eighth time. This we learned yesterday. I suppose there is only so much failure a man can take - even him. But at the moment he is still committed to putting up candidates in 600+ seats. They are expected to take most votes from Tory candidates which is why the Spartan's mouthpiece and shop steward Steve Baker is warning Farage that he risks "throwing away Brexit".
Farage has given Johnson an ultimatum. He has two weeks to abandon his deal or face a challenge from the Brexit Party in every seat in England, Wales and Scotland.
Steve Baker told The Telegraph: "Whilst there are some compromises people like me have to swallow, Boris’s deal is a path to a great future. But we will not succeed if Nigel Farage creates a hung parliament by dogmatically pursuing purity."
Coming out of Baker's mouth this is really something - chutzpah I think.
Farage does not think Johnson's deal is Brexit at all. And isn't this the nub of the entire fiasco? The leaders of the two organisations which spearheaded the successful referendum vote, Leave.eu and Vote Leave, cannot agree what Brexit actually means. This brings into sharper focus Dominic Cummings widely reported remark from his blog in June 2015 that "creating an exit plan that makes sense and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task. Eurosceptic groups have been divided for years about many of the basic policy and political questions."
If the leave campaigns had only been able to reach a compromise that allowed Eurosceptics to support and rally around a common position we might not now be in the mess we are. That Farage is unable to compromise even at the eleventh hour when everything he has worked for is in danger of being lost shows how wise Cummings was to avoid trying to do it in 2015.
However, don't bank on this being the final word.
My guess is that The Brexit Party will not put up 600 or more candidates, partly on the grounds that there aren't that many fruitcakes in the country, and partly because he will come under an awful lot of pressure.
If Johnson and Farage can reach an understanding (as Trump is urging) which creates a leave alliance, so the pressure would then fall on Swinson and Corbyn to do the same for the remain alliance.
We would then have that second referendum by proxy on December 12th.
The result would almost certainly be another hung parliament and calls for a final confirmatory vote would surely become irresistible. Fingers crossed.
