O brave new world, that has such people in’t! Day Three in the Big Brexit house, and Mr Johnson bigly regrets that, despite there being two rows of empty seats in the media section, there is absolutely no room in the Painted Hall of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich for the Guardian’s sketch-writer. It’s nothing personal. Absolutely not. It’s a total coincidence that the sketch-writer for the Times has been allowed in.
Try to think of it this way, Boris explained. Basically he was doing me a favor. Because what would be the point of making me sit through another half hour speech that would be full of half-truths, evasions and outright lies, when I could just as easily watch the charade on TV? Save me the effort of having to queue up to go through security and hang out with a few sycophantic cabinet ministers, half-witted ambassadors and naive business leaders. Wasters, the lot of them.
Hell, he’d have been doing the speech via his Facebook page from a cupboard inside No 350 given the choice . Just as he had on Friday night with his uninterested three minute ramble to the nation when he had wanted to get on with the real business of knocking back a £ 350 bottle of wine with the Brexit establishment elite. But Dominic Cummings had told him that this time he needed to throw on a suit and turn up in person. And what Classic Dom wants, Classic Dom gets.
And after Boris appeared from behind a screen that completely blanked out the grandeur of the setting – on TV he looked as if he could have been almost anywhere – it soon emerged that for once he had been telling the truth. Because he only had eccentric hand gestures and interpretative dance on offer. There never had been a grand plan to lead us to the Brexit promised land. Brexit had only ever been an end in itself. A narcissistic indulgence for both himself and the country. Now he was expected to deliver, he had a very vague outline of what might come next.
“If we get it right,” he began. This was one hell of an if. If we – typical of Boris to try to get the rest of us to share the blame for his own actions – got it right, then everything might be more or less OK. A bit worse than it might otherwise have been, but hopefully not so much as anyone would notice. He didn’t think to explain what might happen if we didn’t get it right. Best not to go there.
So here’s what was going to happen. Possibly, maybe. First everyone was going to stop saying the B word. Brexit was done, even if it wasn’t, and anyone overheard talking about it would be rounded up and sent to re-education camps. So no more B word. Ever. And no more saying that we didn’t have a deal. Because we did have a deal. A deal called the withdrawal agreement, which didn’t include any kind of deal.
At this point, it started to dawn on most people that the prime minister could be seriously unwell. A man so out of touch with honesty and integrity that he is now incapable of differentiating between truth and lies. A shapeshifter for whom reality is an ever moving target. The World King who demands loyalty to cover up his neediness and inadequacy.
Free trade was being choked, he insisted. The time for protectionism was over. Britain need to lead the world into a new era of mercantilism. One that could only be achieved by having a Canada-style deal with the EU that put up countless tariff and other barriers to free trade. It was full on deranged, but in the front row Liz Truss could only enthusiastically applaud. Boris barely acknowledged her. She would be reshuffled into deserved obscurity within a week.
Boris had only just started, though. There was to be no talk of a no-deal Brexit. From now on, no deal would simply be referred to as the Australian model. In that no Australian trade deal with the EU actually existed. It was pure genius. Boris could eliminate cancer from the world merely by renaming it. Why had no one thought of that before? This was the kind of innovation that was going to put the Little back into Great Britain.
Nor would we be bothering to align with the EU, because the EU was basically a bit shit. Who wanted to follow pointless directives on straight bananas when we could be our own banana republic? Besides, the EU shouldn’t nit-pick. It was obvious that the UK was trustworthy, said the proven liar. If something was obviously the right thing to do there was no need to have it enshrined in law. To take the lead, he was proposing to make murder legal on the grounds that everyone knew it was wrong. Several more members of the cabinet rose to give Boris an ovation.
There were no questions about Brexit at the end. Boris had made his position only too clear: the only plan in town was to blame the EU if the negotiations failed. Instead, Johnson found himself explaining why the Conservative government of the past 10 years hadn’t in fact been in government at all and that the Streatham terror attack was all someone else’s fault.
Over in the Commons, Dominic Raab was at pains to say that the government would protect the rights of journalists. Which was good to know. Perhaps he will now be able to explain why I was excluded from Greenwich and other reporters were banned from a lobby briefing. It looks as if the government is hell-bent on imposing the same tariff barriers to free speech as it is to free trade.
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