Right. We’ve all had enough politics. Too much Maybot. (Isn’t she an odious human being, say angry lefties claiming to campaign for a kinder politics.) Then there’s Hard Brexit. Cliff-edges. Frictionless trade. Transitions. Soft Brexit. CU ECJ. EU. WTO. WTF. Second referendums. The DUP. Deranged ultra-remainers driven round the twist in the heat screaming this is all the end of Brexit. Demented Brexit ultras supping their beer in pubs and talking darkly of forming a resistance movement.
Accordingly, I’m getting off the treadmill for 36 hours to have a more leisurely walk along the Thames (without throwing myself in) and to reacquaint myself with my family after the maddest political spell since last year.
But two brief related points before I do that – one disturbing and one utterly hilarious.
1) Andrea Leadsom saying the broadcasters should be more patriotic on Brexit was disturbing, but not for the reasons given endlessly since she said it. I know what she means, even if she chose the wrong target. Really, has there ever before been a negotiation when so much of elite British opinion backs those on the other side of the negotiating table? They thrill to the sound of Juncker and Tusk in a way that is downright weird. Go on! Please punish naughty Britain, you big powerful eurocrats, because we are merely a pathetic little country. For anything remotely similar in term of mindset, you have to go back to the Cold War and Jeremy Corbyn and co in the 1970s and 1980s when they blamed the West for daring to stand up to the Soviet Union. Anyway… I run the risk of getting anti-Brexit friends annoyed now. Of course, the EU is not the Soviet Union. It’s much worse that that. Joke. Leadsom is of course demonstrating that she does not understand the role of a free media. Its role is not to cheerlead. That’s the cabinet’s job, whoever is in it this month. What is really distrurbing is that Leadsom clearly fancies another run at the Tory leadership. Reaction revealed almost exactly a year ago questions about her CV and she crashed out after blaming Rachel Sylvester of The Times for asking her questions in a car crash interview. She can’t be running again? It is said so. Or is it the case – as various people suggested on Twitter – that putting Leadsom up now is just a ploy by what is left of Team May to scare the country into keeping May in place? Stop being nasty to Mrs May or you’ll get Andrea Leadsom. Perhaps Andrea Leadsom will press on and achieve the impossible and unite the country? Against her leadership ambitions.
2) The truly hilarious aspect of the Leadsom row about broadcasters is the response of the SNP, which has condemned her. The SNP’s Stephen Gethins MP, a good man with a sense of humour, somehow kept a straight face when he issued a statement calling her comments sinister. Good grief. This is the SNP, whose supporters literally marched in their thousands on the BBC during the 2014 referendum to demand that journalists be sacked for asking difficult questions about the SNP having no answer on a post-independence currency. Former MP Alex Salmond – I’ll say that again, former MP Alex Salmond – described the mob’s visitation to the Beeb in Glasgow as “civic” and “joyous”. It was a terrifying scene, and a bit of a tipping point too in suggesting to sensible undecided voters that a hubristic Team Yes had gone so bananas that they were a clear no-no. Now, the SNP defends a free media and deplores the supposedly authoritarian Tories for being mean to journalists. It is actually very funny.
Anyway. Enough.
