This is Brexit in name only to keep the plebs happy

My wife has decided she likes Dominic Raab, the latest poor sap to be despatched from a hamstrung, spasticated government to negotiate our exit from the European Union before a plethora of sniggering pygmies from the Low Countries. I think it’s the sound of his surname, those consecutive vowels, because I’ve noticed she also likes aardvarks and once expressed a wish to visit Aachen. I can’t think of many other reasons to like the chap. He surely knows what we all know, Leavers and Remainers alike — that the route our Prime Minister dreamed up one night while out of her box on skag, presumably, is not Brexit at all and would leave us in a far worse position than if we remained within the confines of that increasingly totalitarian bureaucracy.

It is in fact that thing which has become a hallmark of the staggeringly hapless May’s administration, the botched quick-fix designed solely to keep her in office for a few more weeks. Everybody knows this — in Europe and inside our government and out. It would have been better if she had said simply: ‘We’re not leaving the EU. That referendum counts for nothing, so stuff it. We, the establishment, know better, and we’re staying in.’ That would be far more honest, and preferable for the country too. These cosmetic genuflections to the will of the people become more emetic with every day that passes. Brexit in name only, to keep the plebs — the thick northerners, the racists, the England supporters, the, er, democrats — happy, because they know no better.

May was a Remainer, of course, so we understand that she does not have an ideological investment in Britain leaving the EU. It is why she should never have become Prime Minister. But she ascended to that hugely unlikely role because of political failures more grave than her own: the Tory Brexit-eers and, in particular, Boris Johnson.