Pro-Brexit voters knew what they were voting for...

...well, sort of.

Like many Remainers, I don't think that many pro-leave voters really knew what the consequences of a Leave vote in the 2016 European Union Referendum would be. But I do think that there's a sense in which they did know what they were voting for.

Leave's strategy of microtargeting many different types of voters with diverse, and often contradictory, concerns, meant that a lot of people did know what they were voting for. People who were targeted with messages abut the (bogus) extra £350 million for the NHS, probably voted for that. Those who thought that migration was the cause of their lives getting worse probably voted based on messages alleging that the UK had open borders, which it could "take back control" of if we left, or that Turkey would imminently be joining the EU, with millions of migrants about to arrive at Dover unless the UK voted out.

I'm not sure how they managed to filter down to the level of people who believed press myths about the EU unilaterally imposing lots of absurd and onerous rules on the UK, although I guess that their data gurus had ways of finding out who was sharing content from the Mail, Express or Telegraph web sites. Hell, they even had messages targeted at environmentalists and animal lovers, pretending that leaving the EU would, in some way, help to save polar bears.

So I'm sure that lots of people, on an individual level, knew what they were voting for. What they didn't know is that other people were voting for different, often incompatible things, all of projected on to the deliberately vague concept of Leave

The other thing they didn't know was that the people who were inducing them to vote for everything from more nurses to more polar bears had zero intention of delivering these things. The real reasons behind the campaign to leave were never shared with voters, from retaining secrecy around money hidden in offshore tax havens, to stripping voters of their workplace rights, freedom of movement, protection from dangerous products and access to free health care. All for the benefit of the super rich and the profits of unaccountable, predatory corporations.

It's a point that Remain campaigners should bear in mind - the "you didn't know what you were voting for" message might be counter-productive for people who responded directly to a simple targeted message. Reduced to this short, simple form, it sounds very much like "you were just stupid", which is never going to win hearts and minds.

In short, don't focus on what Leave voters didn't know, but focus on the promises that Leave politicians and cheerleaders broke, and keep on breaking.

"Oh, won't somebody PLEASE think of the polar bears?"

On the road to Damascus

Throwback... pic.twitter.com/4fx9jAnuKu

— Matt Turner (@MattTurner4L) April 16, 2018

And Theresa went his way, and entered into the house; and putting her hands on him said, Brother Boris, The Donald, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales...

The respect he deserves

Here's the United Kindom's excuse for a foreign secretary, showing how to suck up to a racist, authoritarian anti-Semitic bully:

Congratulations to Fidesz and Viktor Orban on winning the elections in Hungary. We look forward to working with our Hungarian friends to further develop our close partnership. #UKandHungary

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) 9 April 2018

And here's Jean-Claude Juncker demostrating the correct diplomatic protocol:


Well played, Jean-Claude. If you need a list of other people overdue for a bit of disrespect and a good slap, I've got a few names here. The list, of course, starts with Boris:

The foreign secretary joins Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Matteo Salvini, Beatrix von Storch, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini in sending his congratulations to Viktor Orban. https://t.co/vw0Jgxh6FQ

— Peter Foster (@pmdfoster) 9 April 2018

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Misleading £1 bus claim lacks ambition

Don't even think about making a dodgy claim about a £1 bus ticket. People will be outraged and you'll be forced to retract:

MEGABUS ads offering fares from £1 have been banned after the company admitted as little as one seat per coach was available for the price...

...Two people complained, saying they could not find fares at that price.

Megabus said the number of fares available at £1 varied due to factors such as the number of intermediate stops and whether tickets were booked for partial or full routes.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: ‘We noted in particular that only one of the £1 fares on the London to Bath route was for the full length.’ It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.

Plaster a dodgy claim about £350 million windfall on a bus and nobody can stop you driving the bugger around the country for months.

Herr Goebbels must be chortling in his grave:

"The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Where can you go from there, Boris?

Boris Johnson has likened the way President Putin is promoting the World Cup in Russia to Hitler's notorious use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The foreign secretary said Labour MP Ian Austin was "completely right" to say Russia's president wanted to "gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime".

A man with an expensive classical education like Boris should really have a wider range of historical precedents to draw on. But no, if your opponent is thuggish, repressive, undemocratic, there's apparently only ever one valid comparison. Hitler, Hitler, always bloody Hitler. But the thing is, once you've turned your rhetoric all the way up to Hitler, where do you go from there? Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel could have told him:

Nigel Tufnel: ...You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly.*

And "Nowhere" is exactly these comparisons usually lead.

Anthony Eden wasn't afraid to talk the talk about Nasser being the new Hitler, but when it came to walking the walk ... well, let's just say that Suez wasn't exactly a replay of our finest hour. Then there was the drum beat to the Iraq War, when you were either with us or some kind of craven Munich-style appeaser. Surprise, surprise, it took more than overheated rhetoric and a dodgy dossier to liberate Iraq and victory, when it came, brought a settlement that was more Mad Max than Marshall Plan. And who can forget Boris's fellow ex-London mayor, Ken Livingstone, doubling down on his stupid comments about Hitler being a Zionist? That didn't exactly bring peace to the Middle East, or achieve anything, apart from indelibly staining Ken's reputation.

If you have to use the "H" word, save it for actual Nazis, like the sort of far-right Holocaust-denying cranks Putin's Russia has  been funding and supporting in its transparent, and relatively successful, efforts to destabilise Europe. That's about as close to a justified Putin-Hitler connection as you're going to get. Otherwise, Putin is just another one of the world's thuggish autocrats, in the same mould as Erdoğan, or the UK's best buddy, Prince Salman. They're all objectively horrible, but not in the same league as a mass murderer who gloried in killing tens of millions by war and genocide.

The more Hitler comparisons I hear, the more sympathy I have for the crudest version of Godwin's Law ("If you're the first one to mention Hitler, you lose").





*Of course, in Spinal Tap, they solved the problem of having nowhere higher than ten to go by painting the number "eleven" on the amp dial. I'm not quite sure how Boris could take it all the way up to eleven - maybe he could compare Putin to Darth Vader, who had a whole planet and its population blown up just for the evulz, which would sort of make him even worse than Hitler, if only he'd actually existed...

Boris Johnson to blame for the Skripal poisonings?

Oh, hi Boris Johnson's lawyers, how are you doing? No, I most certainly wasn't accusing your client of doing anything untoward - "just asking questions", as they say.

What do you mean Betteridge's Law is no defence in a case of libel?

OK, I would like to state, for the record, that I do not believe your client, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, capable of poisoning the Skripals. Assuming that the Skripals were the intended targets of the unknown poisoner (which I do), I believe that this attack was planned and carried out by professionals. If somebody had tasked a brilliant amateur like Boris Johnson with carrying out the hit, I believe that the targets would have escaped unscathed, although Boris would most likely have ended up accidentally poisoning half of the Salisbury Cathedral choir. He is Boris, after all, and getting into "hilarious" scrapes it what he does.

So what am I saying? I'm just floating the hypothesis that, if I belonged to the intelligence service of a hostile power and I was thinking about doing something shockingly illegal in the United Kingdom, I might look at the person appointed to the post of UK Foreign Secretary and think "These people cannot be serious - I'm totally not frightened of messing with them."

Whatever talents Boris Johnson may have - writing moderately amusing (if factually-challenged and occasionally racist) opinion pieces, quoting Cicero and saying "cripes" a lot when in character as an entertaining upper-class eccentric - it's obvious to even the dimmest observer that diplomacy, discretion and mastering his brief are not among them. His addiction to blurting out memorable sound bites at every possible opportunity, with no thought for the accuracy of what he says, or for who might be offended is as close to an anti-qualification for the post of Foreign Secretary as I can think of.

After all this time, it still beggars belief that Boris is the public face the UK presents to the world. Making him so implies contempt for the people the UK is dealing with. It's the equivalent of turning up late to your best friend's wedding half-cut and unshaven, wearing trackky bottoms and a mucky T-shirt. It implies a total lack of respect both for the occasion and for yourself. OK, a few people might have a laugh at the wacky funster throwing convention to the winds, but most of the people invested in the process will be rightly mortified.

And it makes the UK look weak. It implies a barely-keeping-it-together administration, too absorbed in the psychodrama of its own self-inflicted crisis to care about impressing the outside world. An administration that looks at a man who could, maybe, be allowed to make an ass of himself at, say, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport without doing too much damage and thinks "Let him play at being a world statesman for a bit - he's obviously going to shoot his mouth off at every opportunity and infuriate every nation on the planet, but right now we've got more important things to worry about than what the rest of the world thinks, like not having an actual punch-up round the Cabinet table."

Why wouldn't your hostile foreign power take one look at what we, as a country, are doing and assume that we're a bunch of powerless, clueless diplomatic pygmies who can be ignored and flouted with impunity? What would a careless bluffer like Boris do to protect a couple of foreigners, when he can't even look after the interest of UK nationals (your foot in mouth helped to double Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's sentence, Boris, but we're still waiting for you to get her out of that Iranian jail)?

Boris is the symptom of a national self-absorption that puts winning petty squabbles within the Westminster/UK press bubble ahead of presenting any semblance of credibility or competence to the outside world. It would be no wonder if some hostile power* thought "Is that the best you've got?" and proceeded to do as it damn well pleased. If so, some of the blame belongs to Theresa May for offering, and to Boris Johnson for accepting, an important job which, deep down, even he must have realised he would be terrible at.





*Probably Russia. Richard North overstates the doubts when he goes off on one about other people being idiots for jumping to that conclusion (to be fair, he usually blogs about Brexit, a target-rich environment for idiot hunters, so he's probably a bit trigger-happy). He makes great game of people for saying "Russia", when the nerve agent was originally developed in the Soviet Union (specifically, Uzbekistan).

Which is all very well, but Russia is the suspect with the obvious motive and probable means to attack the Skripals. OK, the nerve agent was developed in another former Soviet state, but let's do a fun WMD quiz. When the Soviet Union broke up, which of its constituent countries got all the nukes? Clue: it wasn't Uzbekistan. And which bit of the former Soviet Union do you think was most likely to get first dibs on any other nasty stuff that was hanging around? Clue: probably the same place that got all the nukes.

Of course it might be somebody else - the Uzbeks (why?), or surprisingly well-resourced non-state actors, or a false flag operation by MI5, in the hope of drumming up more counter-terrorism resources, or part of a US deep state anti-Trump plot , or Mossad, or Hilary Clinton while she was taking time off from running a paedophile ring out of a pizza joint ... if you want to jump down the rabbit hole into any of the above conspiracy wonderlands, be my guest, but it's still probably Russia.

__________________________

Update - if you thought I was exaggerating about those conspiracy theories, feast your eyes on this little beauty:

"MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom may be perceived as a plot to derail Brexit negotiations and use Russia’s alleged threat as a pretext to keep the country with the European Union, Richard Wood, a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), told Sputnik on Wednesday."

Wood told Sputnik that he thought the Skripal poisonings were "staged." I fought Poe's Law and the law won...

Bonus fact - "Sputnik" is Russian for "one on the same path (with someone)", or more succinctly, "fellow traveller."

Bonus bonus fact - Ukip's Richard Wood was - purely coincidentally - one of the delegates on a Moscow-sponsored jolly to Crimea last March. In a statement to Sputnik, Wood gushed:

"I wanted to see the situation in Crimea and I was absolutely delighted. I saw the people wanting to be a part of the Russian Federation. That is what came over to me strongly. I never heard of anybody saying that they have been put down, they were repressed or had difficulties with the Russian authorities. For a very long time now the West has had a very shortsighted policy towards Russia. When I was in Crimea, I have never seen a policeman on streets, I have never seen a soldier, no civil disorder, nothing of that sort," 

Make of that what you will...

Ukip - probably worth less than nothing + VAT

Back in September, Ukip's latest ex-leader, Henry Whatsisname, boasted that the party had avoided becoming the "UK Nazi Party" by astutely electing him, instead of the candidate who'd run promising a Final Solution™ to the Muslim Question.

Poor Henry

Sadly, we didn't have long to get to know Henry. If he had any interesting policy positions, beyond being anti-Nazi and pro-badger strangling, we didn't have time to find out before his tenure ended prematurely, not with a whimper, but with a bang, when he was caught banging a glamour model who was into experimenting with policy positions at some uncomfortable distance from anti-Nazism.

“I was working as a racist in a cocktail bar, when I met you” pic.twitter.com/1iRlBaLh4b

— Scott Ballantyne (@Moosedog23) January 18, 2018

A new leader has yet to be elected, but given the new acting leader's keen interest in the Muslim Question and fondness for "I'm not anti-Semitic, just anti-Soros" dog-whistles, it sounds as if Henry's warning about the "UK Nazi party" wasn't too far from the truth. According to some of the lovely people at Kipper Central, a Gerard Batten-led Ukip could quickly become a Nazi tribute act, even attracting its own cadre of ex-Friekorps types, in the shape of entryists from something called Veterans Against Terrorism (VAT):

Veterans Against Terrorism held a march in Newcastle yesterday and below is a report on that march. Significantly for UKIP they also praise our new interim leader, Gerard Batten as a “working class man of the people” who will “transform the Party”.

They pledge to join the Party en masse and take part in that transformation as committed activists as per our previous report that they will join in their thousands and set UKIP on track to consign the Labour Party to the “dustbin of history”. 

Angry veterans on the streets. That usually goes well...

Are these the new Stormtroopers who'll take to the streets to intimidate the traitors, the enemies of the people, the Jews and the Reds who'll be accused of stabbing the Fatherland in the back, once Brexit inevitably delivers hardship and humiliation, instead of the promised victory?

Actually, I'm not yet that worried. The most significant problem is that Ukip seems to be bust - they couldn't even afford to pay their last leader a salary, they're on the hook for £200k as a result of the Jane Collins libel case and the consensus is that they probably don't have enough left in the kitty to fund the forthcoming leadership election.

And they don't have that many members - about 34,000 as of December 2016, a number which has almost certainly reduced, given their poor showing in the last election and comically inept post-Farage leadership. Even if VAT march to the Kippers' rescue, they have a maximum of 8,500 members (that figure came from the Express, so should be treated as being as unreliably exaggerated as the paper's hyperventilating weather warnings). In which case Ukip + VAT = fewer members than the Green Party. And our first past the post system is rarely kind to third parties, let alone sixth* parties without any money or a single sitting MP.

Without funding, I think that any Fascists hoping for the resurgence of an even more alt-right-ist Ukip will be disappointed. As will some leftists and Remainers - let's face it, standing up to Nazis sounds badass cool.

Unfortunately, our most powerful enemies are a lot less impressively evil -  the hapless, broken automaton otherwise known as the Prime Minister, those badly-drawn P G Wodehouse caricatures, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, David Davis, who looks like an elderly uncle who's the only one in the family not to realise he's losing the plot, Liam Fox, who never had the plot in the first place, and the various faceless policy wonks and empty suits inhabiting the spiders' web of obscurely-funded right-wing think tanks and lobby groups without which terrible ideas like Brexit would never happen.






*In sixth place, by membership, behind Labour, the Conservatives (I assume, although they don't publish membership data in their annual accounts), the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

Fishing with a golden hook

I can't speak for anybody else, but having had a few days to digest Boris Johnson's recent attempt to reach out to Remainers and set out a positive case for Brexit, I'm not convinced.

The Brexiteers' loud and aggressive campaign against freedom of movement for other Europeans won't, Johnson assures us, cause the Continentals to inconvenience UK nationals trying to exercise their freedom to move between jobs, cheap stag nights, or cultural attractions in any part of Europe that takes their fancy. And if you believe that one, Boris has a bridge he'd like to sell you...

I'm more convinced by the rhetoric of another lofty patrician, which our classically-educated Foreign Secretary would have done well to heed before he got himself, and the rest of the country, into this fix:

It was a principle of his that no campaign or battle should ever be fought unless more could clearly be gained by victory than lost by defeat; and he would compare those who took great risks in the hope of gaining some small advantage to a man who fishes with a golden hook, though aware that nothing he can catch will be valuable enough to justify its loss.

Sound, if platitudinous, advice from Augustus Caesar, (according to Suetonius). When every Brexit scenario modelled in the government's own assessments looks worse than the status quo, it seems to me that the Brexiteers are fishing with a golden hook.

"We're going to win so much, WE'RE going to be sick and tired of winning"

Trump didn't want to win the election:

"Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary."

Johnson didn't want to win the EU Referendum:

"Once he lost, Johnson would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Project Fear."

In Trump's case, we have to rely on the word of Michael Wolff and his sources, when they say that team Trump reacted to victory with shock and disbelief. In Johnson's case, we've actually seen the terrified "What have I done?" expression on his face, as he reacted to his victory like a man who's suddenly and unexpectedly been asked to deliver a funeral oration.

Having come first in a competition he never wanted to win, it now looks obvious that he views the prospect of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with relief, not disappointment:

The foreign secretary has reportedly told friends that he would rather stay in the EU than accept a soft Brexit.

According to The Sun, Boris Johnson told allies that any Brexit result which left Britain outside of the EU, but still closely aligned to it, would be a "total waste of time," adding that "I’d rather us stay in than leave like that."

A separate report by Politico on Monday confirms this, stating that Johnson told allies that calls for Britain to remain closely aligned to EU rules and regulations after Brexit were "mad," adding that: "You’d be better off staying in."

He reportedly told friends that he believes Theresa May would be "worn down" by civil servants and persuaded to accept a bad Brexit deal that would leave Britain in a similar relationship to the EU as Norway.

Friends of Johnson have previously told Business Insider that the foreign secretary never had any intention of leaving the EU, but joined the Leave campaign purely out of his ambition to win the Conservative leadership. 

If you believe the Eurosceptic UK press, the chief enemies of Brexit are the treacherous "Remoaners" who voted and campaigned against leaving the EU. I'm not so sure.

With a few honourable exceptions (like the dogged and courageous Gina Miller), I think the Remain side have been pretty ineffective (such is the prevailing Brexit orthodoxy that even the most pro-Remain MPs routinely preface their criticisms with a feeble "Of course, nobody's trying to block Brexit", before coming up with some half-baked waffle about "a Brexit that works for everybody", whatever such a fantastic beast might look like).

But maybe, just maybe, the true enemies of Brexit come from inside the Brexit camp, from self-identified Brexiteers like Johnson and 'ol frog-face, who publicly claim to be with the program, but are secretly hoping it will go away, so they can forget about the complexity, hard work and harder choices that delivering Brexit would actually entail, and get back to their comfort zone of cheerfully fact-free scapegoating, while playing the victim from a position of cosseted privilege.

Henry and Wallis

Henry Whatsisname's leadership of Ukip continues to go from strength to strength. After a strong start, when Henry built his reputation as a very stable genius on that impressive boast that he could strangle a badger with his bare hands, Henry went on to demonstrate his family-friendly credentials by cheating on his wife and kids with a foxy Ukip groupie 25 years his junior.

As any fule kno, there's nothing the public love more than a celebrity romance (just look at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle), so I'm sure that by showing his human side, Henry has astutely burnished the glamour of his führerschaft to an even more impressive sheen. I confidently expect bunting and street parties to follow the announcement that Henry and Jo Marney are now an item.

The happy couple

Already Henry's new companion and soulmate is helping the great leader in his stated mission of leading the party towards definitely-not-racist respectability:

UKIP has suspended the girlfriend of party leader Henry Bolton after she apparently made racist remarks about Prince Harry's fiancee Meghan Markle.

The Mail on Sunday has published a series of messages sent by Jo Marney.

In them, the 25-year-old model said Ms Markle would "taint" the Royal Family, that she had a "tiny brain" and that black people were ugly.

Ms Marney apologised and said her messages had been taken out of context.

Henry didn't want to comment. What will Henry do, if forced to choose between his duty and the woman he loves? It's all very Edward and Mrs Simpson.

"fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists", as somebody once said...

Although, to be fair to Henry's Wallis, she may be a contemptible racist, but she isn't any more racist than the current President of the United States, or the UK's Foreign Secretary. Interesting times.





*Update and afterthought - Ms Marney contends that her remarks have been taken "out of context." Other than as a satirical parody of the sort of things you might hear a racist muppet say - which I assume wasn't her intention - can anybody explain what sort of context might excuse such remarks? Help me out, I'm struggling here.

The special relationship

Racist pillock who called Africans "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" supports racist pillock who called African countries "shitholes."

The USA and the UK. Two countries divided by a common outrage.

Corbyn: "I'm king of the world!" (spoiler: iceberg ahead)

Imagine that it's close to midnight on 14 April 1912 and we're on the bridge of the RMS Titanic. Watchers in the crows' nest have just spotted an iceberg ahead. What should we do?

There are two schools of thought.* Mister Barlow thinks that our top priority is to do everything possible to change course and speed, during our short remaining window of time, so that the ship can either avoid the berg, or try to hit slowly, at a speed and angle which gives us some chance of not sinking.

Mister Jones objects that while everybody's obsessing about the iceberg, conditions aboard the Titanic are unacceptable; the working poor are crammed into cramped, airless quarters in steerage, while the rich and powerful lounge about in their sumptuous staterooms, being waited on hand and foot, when not stuffing their faces with turtle soup and lobster at the Captain's table. Mister Jones is a fan of First Mate Corbyn's vision of something better, a Titanic that works for everyone.

Now I don't think Mister Jones is wrong. The massive levels of unfairness and inequality are wrong, bad and need fixing. But - forgive me if I'm being be a single-issue iceberg bore here - the iceberg is dead ahead, the time left for avoiding action is short, and if we hit and sink, who do you think will be first in the queue for the limited number of lifeboats (hint; it's probably not going to be the poor devils in steerage)? For the moment, I think that the pressing problem of iceberg avoidance deserves to occupy the top left quadrant of the Eisenhower decision grid.

That was my take on the "What - if anything - should progressives do about Brexit" debate, as argued by Owen Jones and Nick Barlow.

Credit to Boris Johnson for first suggesting the Titanic analogy.

*Of course, there are other courses of action, although the one being urged on Captain May by her senior officers ("Shut your eyes, full steam ahead and just keep on saying that we're definitely going to win the Blue Riband"), doesn't really involve enough neurological activity to qualify as a school of thought.

Conservative home and away

Daniel Hannan raised a few eyebrows this week when he used a Consevative Home article to vent about his fellow Brexiteer, Arron Banks. According to Hannan, it was the official campaign, Vote Leave, wot won it. In contrast, Hannan called the Arron Banks-funded Leave.EU campaign a "hapless and hopeless" "wrecking operation" which did nothing to help the Leavers win, but only functioned "as a vehicle to promote himself [Arron Banks] and Nigel Farage."

There's a perfectly rational reason for Hannan's attack. The media are delving into where Banks got the money that propped up Ukip and, along with the Electoral Commission, are looking at allegations  that officially separate pro-Brexit campaign groups illicitly colluded to share money and resources in order to breach campaign funding limits. The main reason for the article is to distance Hannan and his fellow Vote Leave Tory Brexiteers from the dodgy-looking geezers of Ukip and Leave.EU.

"There have been technical investigations into both Leave and Remain on compliance issues. But it’s Banks who is attracting the most fevered speculation about where his money came from. No proof of wrongdoing has been found, but the lurid nature of the accusation is being used to suggest that Leave won improperly.

To repeat, Banks’s outfit was not Vote Leave, or even an ally of Vote Leave...

...As far as the Electoral Commission’s investigation goes, Banks is as entitled as anyone else to the presumption of innocence. Being a boastful, belligerent man-child doesn’t make you a Russian agent."

In other words:

"You can't prove he did anything (we hope), but even if you find out that he did do something, he's got nothing to do with us. Move along, nothing to see here." 

So far, so Mandy Rice-Davis.

But the string of insults about the "hapless and hopeless" campaigning of the "boastful, belligerent man-child" reminds us that this is deeply personal, too. It's also the latest round in a long and bitter feud of easily-bruised egos taking place in the exclusive bubble inhabited by millionaire political donors and the politicians who court them. It's been going on at least since Banks stopped giving money to the Conservatives and started funding Ukip, but really came to a head when William Hague said that he'd "never heard" of the former Tory donor, causing Banks to increase his donation to Ukip from £100,00 to £1 million out of spite, or wounded self-importance.  For the careerists in the Conservative family, the political is personal.

It's a bit like watching members of a highly dysfunctional family plotting and squabbling over which one of them is going to inherit the family house. Only they're all so intent on making sure that no other sibling gets the house that none have noticed that the house itself is on fire. From the perspective of an observer on the other side of the pond, the flames engulfing the family mansion are only too obvious:

"The world recently commemorated the centennial of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the flagrant incompetence of that country’s ruling class in confronting a moment of overwhelming national crisis. The barricades are not yet out in the streets of modern-day London, but a certain sense of déjà vu is appropriate. At the least, we are likely witnessing the slow-motion suicide of the Conservative Party, and, conceivably, of British conservatism more broadly defined.

In the British case, the crisis involves the nation’s referendum vote in June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. Opinions may differ about the virtues of Brexit as an idea—I opposed it—but once it was decided, most everyone agreed that the process of extraction had to be implemented with great care and single-minded dedication. The actual response of the Conservative government has been deplorable to the point of unforgivable—inept, slipshod, insouciant, and ignorant of even the basic realities of law and process."

Philip Jenkins, writing for The American Conservative, was just getting into his stride there. Just wait until he gets down to the nitty-gritty of the "victory" Vote Leave and Leave.EU are both claiming credit for:

"After the referendum, Theresa May emerged as prime minister with a firm commitment to the principle “Brexit means Brexit.” Accordingly, she chose leading Brexit campaigners for key positions, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary and David Davis as head of the new department in charge of exiting the European Union (DExEU) and chief negotiator of withdrawal. Liam Fox carries responsibility for international trade, which includes negotiating new agreements outside the old EU framework.

Painfully early, it became apparent that none of this Gang of Four had a clue of what they talking about in relation to Europe, nor did they understand the basic principles by which the EU worked. It is not so much that they approached the key issues wrongly—they did not even perceive them as issues. Throughout the referendum campaign, Brexiteers had trivialized the question of future relationships with the EU, suggesting that these would easily be decided in high-level summits within weeks rather than years. There was therefore not the slightest need to prepare detailed negotiating principles. As Johnson explicitly stated, the new British relationship with Europe would be exactly what it was at present, although omitting some of the features he found unpalatable, such as unrestricted EU immigration.

When Britain invoked Article 50, no government figure grasped the implications. Until quite recently, Johnson and Davis mocked the notion that Britain might have to pay a penny for the divorce bill. (The British government is now admitting a liability of some tens of billions, a sum that will definitely increase.) When the reborn Irish Question finally surfaced in their minds, Davis presented a vision of an invisible border made possible by as-yet undeveloped high technology, a prospect that has been commonly derided as magical thinking. Oh, and remember those vast new trading empires outside Europe, with all those lucrative deals being signed almost immediately? There’s no sign of any movement in that direction."

Come to think of it, my analogy of a dysfunctional family squabbling over the inheritance was altogether too kind. Vote Leave and Leave.EU arguing about who won the referendum are more like a pair of arsonists both wanting all the credit for burning down the house. "It would never have happened without me!", boasts box of matches guy. "But he was hapless and hopeless!" counters can of paraffin guy, "I was the one who did all the heavy lifting!" While all around, law-abiding folk shake their heads and wonder how anybody can be so thoughtlessly delinquent as to claim credit for replacing a perfectly good house with a useless pile of blackened, smouldering timbers.

Post-truth for dummies

A fish rots from the head down, so they say. First, our most high-profile, charismatic politicians find that they can get away with gaslighting their critics, by flat out denying the reality of whatever they've been criticised for. Now the big fish have got away with it, the minnows are trying the same trick.

This is what happened. A bunch of MPs voted against transferring the EU protocol on animal sentience into UK law. Some people didn't like it. Instead of addressing the issues, certain MPs have decided that if our most famous post-truthians can get away with gaslighting, they'll have a go. There are two forms of gaslighting being tried out here, respectively named after their most famous proponents:

1. The Johnson
"I have been misconstrued" ("How could you be stupid enough to believe that I said the thing I clearly just said, or did the thing I obviously just did. It's probably not your fault though - not everybody can be as clever as me.") . Here's Zac Goldsmith, doing a Johnson:

No, MPs did not vote that animals aren't sentient @Benfogle @domdyer70 @DeborahMeaden @sueperkins pic.twitter.com/eQLz6plfa9

— Zac Goldsmith (@ZacGoldsmith) 21 November 2017

2.The Trump
"FAKE NEWS" ("Somebody just disagreed with me? That's not even a real thing, it's FAKE NEWS, believe me.") Here's Rachel Maclean's Trump tribute tweet:

So disappointing to have to combat fake news. Neither I nor any other Conservative MP voted against animals as sentient beings. This government cares deeply about animal welfare and has done more to protect with more measures on the way. This is mischief making pure and simple pic.twitter.com/0nCkdaddwf

— Rachel Maclean MP (@redditchrachel) 21 November 2017

Zac, Rachel, if you're listening, you might think that pretending that you've been misconstrued, or fallen victim to fake news, makes you look big, or clever. It doesn't. What does it make you look like, I wonder?

Shameful bastards, denying what is obvious - animal sentience.
Let's not take this one lying down. #resist https://t.co/EqHeg8HKWz

— Sue Perkins (@sueperkins) 20 November 2017

Thank you Sue, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Top tip: "Shameful bastard" shouldn't be an aspirational role model.

The untouchables

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."

Donald Trump, January 2016.

"I could stand in the middle of Westminster and shoot somebody and Theresa wouldn't sack me."

Boris Johnson, now.

In fact, I just made that second quote up. But I'll bet that's what he's thinking, as he watches the rogue minister who isn't a white male old Etonian being summoned back to the headmistress's office to be given a stern dressing down, before probably being expelled.

When I said "enemy" I meant "friends", obvs

For Christ's sake,  Philip, it's Boris who's in charge of the diplomacy! Just remember that and everything will be fine...

Boris and Theresa in Tory love triangle

Boris Johnson’s “roaring lion” speech at this years’ Conservative Party conference was a bit like an early Christmas present. Not like a Christmas present you’d actually want to get, but more like a gift from somebody inspired by one of the madder verses of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Not that the whole song's bonkers - you could imagine somebody being happy to receive, say, five gold rings, or even three French hens (either dead, if the recipient was a non-vegetarian, or alive, if gifted to somebody with enough land to keep them on, who enjoyed fresh eggs and the sound of contented chickens scratching about in the dirt). But Johnson's offering was more like “You’ll never guess what he went and got me. Ten bloody lords a-leaping. What was he thinking?”

In this spirit, Johnson gave us all one lion a-roaring. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it’s not exactly the most practical gift. After a couple of days’ roaring, the neighbours will be wanting to kill me and, anyway, exactly where am I supposed to keep a ruddy great lion? And even if I can afford to keep it in bloody hunks of red meat, how, exactly, am I supposed to feed it and clear up all the lion poo without getting my head bitten off?

OK, I know it’s not a real lion, just a figure of speech, but a metaphorical lion’s still not much of a gift to me, or to anybody else.

The intention was presumably to make the audience feel good, but the metaphor’s getting pretty tired. When it comes to the personification of the nation, I reckon we hit peak lion in the high noon of Empire, somewhere between the mid Nineteenth Century and the outbreak of the First World War. When I was a lad of seventeen or so, our history text books frequently illustrated the history of Empire and great power rivalry with unfunny Punch cartoons from that period, depicting the mighty British lion, usually lording it over the inferior symbolic beasts of lesser nations (the Gallic cockerel, the Russian bear, or – after 1871 - the German eagle). In the cartoons, colonised, or non-European people generally didn’t warrant a heraldic national symbol of their own, in which case the British lion was shown menacing a racist caricature of a villainous Fu Manchu-style Chinaman, or a wide-eyed, cringing African.

You can see how this sort of stuff might appeal to a man at the centre of the British establishment who still thinks it’s fine to dismiss black people as "piccaninnies" with an "ancestral dislike of the British Empire" and fancies himself in the role of tousle-maned British lion in a “l'état, c'est moi” sort of way. But you’d have to be a century or so behind the zeitgeist* for this sort of dusty rhetoric to really set your pulse racing and your spirit soaring.

Which brings me to the intended audience – presumably elderly, reactionary nationalists, more interested in the vague symbolism of roaring lions and taking back poorly-defined forms of control than in the boring nitty-gritty of actual policy. Compare and contrast with the sort of stuff coming from the hapless Team May since the election. At least there was a belated decision to promise to do something about stuff like house building, council housing and student debt, because it’s just occurred to them that young people loaded down with debt, but without a hope in hell of buying, or even affordably renting a place of their own won’t be the next generation of Tory voters. It might not have been well delivered, colourful, or convincing, but in terms of content, May's conference speech was still streets ahead of Johnson's empty bluster.

What we’re looking at here is triangulation – nicking some of your political opponents’ most popular policies for tactical advantage, or, in crusty old Tory huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ language, “Shooting the other chap’s fox.” It’s a tactic which has worked in the past, but now it’s running into trouble. This is the problem. Since the glory days when Cameron and Osborne controlled the political narrative, the Tories have triangulated not once, but twice. First, they tried to outflank Ukip by stealing their nationalist clothes, as Boris the Lion King is still trying to do. Then, after Labour turned from unelectable no-hopers into a clear and present electoral danger, they decided to triangulate against Labour with a new offer for the youth.

The trouble is, when you triangulate not with one, but with two, opposing groups, with mutually incompatible outlooks and interests, what you end up with isn’t triangulation, but a love triangle. Just like that old serial love rat, Boris, the Tory party is wooing two partners at once. One is Eurosceptic and old, often with a property-owning stake in the baby boomer settlement and a lingering suspicion of diversity and free movement. The other is young, cosmopolitan and socially liberal, but insecure, debt-ridden and with no experience of the housing ladder, except when they’re being ripped off by private landlords. Neither partner is going to take kindly to the Tories running off with the other, but there’s no way the Tories can keep them both happy at once.  These people are playing a zero sum game that can only end in tears.

Of course, this isn’t just a Conservative problem. The Labour party, too, is trying to hold together a coalition of youthful Europhiles and older Europhobes, but for now, they seem to be making a better job of it, the two other sides of the love triangle each apparently loving Jeremy to bits and believing, against all reason, that he’ll exclusively love only their side back in return. It must be making Boris, that floppy-haired old Don Juan, green with envy to see how a man who looks like a mild-mannered geography teacher can apparently keep the other two parties in his own love triangle in adoring thrall, rather than being involved in the bitter psychodrama the Tories are going through as they try to sweet-talk both Ukippers and da yoof. Of course, it can’t last – eventually, even dream-boat Jeremy will have to do something disappoint one or other of his two sets of admirers. But he’s not in power yet, so he doesn’t actually have to do anything which would really upset either one of his two constituencies at the moment.

The Tories, who are (sort of) in power, don’t have any such luxury. They actually have to do stuff, whilst trying to placate each suspicious group by telling it what it thinks it wants to hear. Unfortunately both messages, reactionary nationalism and a re-discovery of the pre-Thatcherite social democratic consensus, are quite different from the globalist free-marketing There Is No Alternative swagger the Tories were rocking just a couple of years back, so both messages sound desperate and  insincere, as well as inconsistent, to their intended audiences.

I don’t know how this will all end, although “badly” seems to cover most of the possibilities.









*Even if the Labour Party really were stuck in the 1970s, as the Tories love to claim, that would still put them a comfortable hundred years or so ahead of Empire Boy, the Conservatives' current Great White Hope.

Ask another silly question

They're coming thick and fast now. After "Is it time to place our future in Boris's hands and prepare for new leadership?" (no, obviously), here's another question with an even more obvious answer.

Who should you trust to give an accurate assessment of how much the United Kingdom pays the European Union - the head of the UK Statistics Authority, or Michael Gove, a man who believes that it's possible for all schools to be above average?

Please tell me that there's nobody left who still needs help working out the correct answer.

Ask a silly question...

"Is it time to place our future in Boris's hands and prepare for new leadership?"

If you still believe in a thoroughly debunked claim that was too dodgy even for The Wide Boy of Brexit himself, that might be a "yes."

For everybody else, see Betteridge's Law.