We have come a long way since the heady days of the referendum campaign. Brexit was going to be our independence day and lead to a sudden upsurge in national wealth, prosperity and well being. We were to prosper like never before, according to BoJo. How far we are from those claims can be judged by this article in The Guardian (HERE) as a prelude to a speech Johnson is to give tomorrow. In it he is quoted as saying, "we must do the best we can".
He says the EU endgame is political unity as if he has only just read The Treaty of Rome. Bojo says that we must not be any part of it, speaking as he was from inside the political union that is the United Kingdom. Does anybody understand what goes on inside his mind?
His speech, the first in the Road to the future partnership series, is designed to appeal to our instincts - in other words, our emotions. I suppose even BoJo is getting a bit nervous when he looks at the figures. How every region of the UK is going to be adversely impacted by Brexit. Instead of looking at ways to alleviate the potential economic problems he is going to appeal to us to "do the best we can".
I suppose this is like taking up the offer of the holiday of a lifetime on a cruise ship, finding yourself shackled to an oar on a slave galley and being told by the great fat slob of a captain to "do the best you can" to enjoy yourself. Ignore the whippings, the pain, the exhaustion and the constant hunger and just focus on the sea breezes and sunshine.
He is to tell us that EU regulations are "not primarily there for business convenience, it is not primarily there to create opportunities for companies to trade freely across frontiers, it is primarily there to create a united EU.”
If there is a man or woman in these islands who know LESS about the reality of EU regulations than Johnson I would love to meet that person. He used to tell us we couldn't recycle teabags and that the EU was standardising coffins, among plenty of other falsehoods, including that retailers couldn't sell bananas in bunches of more than two or three. Any sentient human being who had ever set foot in a grocery shop or a supermarket would know what nonsense that was.
In fact, as I write this I'm amazed he is now foreign secretary, but there you are. This is what Brexit has brought us to.
We are also told BoJo's speech will urge us not to to "fear" leaving the EU (HERE) as if we are all cowering under the stairs at the thought. It isn't leaving the EU we are worried about, it's the prospect of being governed by imbeciles like him. David Davis will then give a speech about business. This will be reassuring to the industries who have zero faith in the old know-nothing bruiser.
Mrs May's contribution will apparently be on security matters and she has a shopping list of all the things we want to remain part of, Europol, the European Arrest Warrant and so. It's as is she's going on a cherry-picking trip and will almost certainly return fruitless or with a very large bill having had to pay over the odds for something we got automatically as members.
David Liddington - a non entity if ever there was one - will give a speech about the devolved administrations calculated to send everybody to sleep. Finally, Liam Fox will tell us about future trade. This latter one will be like listening to a freight forwarder explaining irritable bowel syndrome and about as enlightening. Fox by the way used to go under the name Barry from Bournemouth when he did karaoke with his friend Adam Werrity (HERE). But when our defence secretary used to be a fireplace salesman this is perhaps the least of our problems.
