Imagine if Remain had won but been thwarted

Sometimes it’s worth addressing what didn’t happen. For one exasperating aspect of appearing on television news is leaving the studio kicking yourself for what you failed to say. Heading home from Broadcasting House, I’ll often impotently mutter all those killer arguments that fled my head when they might have counted for something. Yet during my last panel on Newsnight, the trouble wasn’t the usual deer-in-the-headlights stupor, but the fact that the lovely Emily Maitlis wouldn’t let me in. So let’s run back the tape.

Alastair Campbell is allowed a long riff on (surprise) Brexit. According to him, ‘Brexit’ means all things to all people. It is a ‘fantasy’ a-leap with ‘unicorns’, an elusive chimera that even its advocates cannot pin down. Whenever these delusional crackpots employ the word, they all mean something different.

Emily, Emily, pick me! If only I’d learned to be a better bully, I’d never have let him get away with it. I should have impolitely pounced: ‘Rubbish, Alastair, there’s nothing unfathomable about “Brexit”. It means economic and political independence. It’s called being a “country”, capiche? I come from a “country”, which in the States we never confuse with a mythological horned horse.’

See, throughout this three-year circus, a favourite Europhilic weapon of choice has been sheer bafflement. As Theresa May repeatedly returned to Brussels for revisions to the Withdrawal Agreement, Michel Barnier kept insisting that he didn’t understand what she wanted, although Parliament’s instruction was clear as day: an exit mechanism or an end-date for the backstop. I’m sorry, madame, but I cannot understand. AN EXIT MECHANISM OR AN END-DATE FOR THE BACKSTOP! I’m sorry, but… May might have been speaking to Siri in a heavy Welsh accent. Bafflement is a sly cover for intransigence.