Political Journalist

It would be wrong to have a personal blog and not comment on this incredulous stuff that is happening at the moment. My daughter is a journalist, of the variety that tells you about closures at your local swimming pool, how the wind is going to lengthen your journey to work and strange things your neighbours like to do in their spare time, like dress up as a rubber-clad dog and sleep in a cage. There was a time, early in her career when she seemed interested in political reporting and seemed to spend most of her evenings at the local council chambers. Yesterday, I sent her a text and said, “I bet you’re glad your not a political journalist now.” She agreed as it is all too confusing. How can a journalist explain it to anyone else if they don’t understand it themselves?

Everyone you speak to thinks the BBC is biased.  They hate Laura Kuenssberg and her wonky mouth.  The funny thing is that leavers and remainers both think that she is biased in the other direction from what they believe. I hadn't noticed a particular bias but maybe that's because she's saying what I think.

No one is going to sack me if I’m wrong. I might get death threats on social media but it’s unlikely because very few people read my blog but here is my attempt to get straight in my own head what I think is going on. I’m going to do it as a list because lists always make things clearer.

1. The public were asked to vote on whether the country should stay in the EU by David Cameron in 2016 because he naively thought they would vote yes and the anti-EU element of his party would be quiet and let him continue to use  PM expenses to upgrade his kitchen.
2. Some people with money managed a very dodgy but effective campaign to explain how awful the EU was and how great we were.  
3. David Cameron was an idiot and completely mucked up his campaign because he couldn't confess that people were struggling because of his policies rather than the EU and so he tried to frighten everyone instead.
4. The public narrowly (yes 48:52 is a narrow margin) to leave the EU. People made their decisions for a variety of reasons and no one should assume what they were.
5. Cameron swanned off humming a little tune.
6. The political system fell apart. All it could think of was how to extricate the country from the EU. Funding schools, hospitals, libraries all stopped and two years later MPs only get into their constituencies to see their Chiropractor. (Yes, I did bump into my MP at the chiropractor last week and you can see why: all that sitting and tension will wreck havoc on your spine)
7. The conservatives handed the poisoned chalice to Theresa May because no Leaver wanted to do it and the Labour Party fought with itself. The Lib Dems didn’t take any advantage of recruiting the people who voted remain.
8. Theresa May saw herself as Saint Theresa Deliverer of Brexit and announced that Brexit means Brexit, triggering Article 50.
9. Once Article 50 was triggered they had two years to negotiate a deal.  After that time if a deal  hasn't been reached the law says we leave anyway.  This is what is being called a no-deal Brexit.  No one really knows what effect leaving in this way will have but there are enough predictions to make me believe it will cause several very difficult years at least.
10. Parliament spent two years taking their regular holidays and talking about Brexit but not to each other. Nobody really shifted their position and when there was no clear agreement on how to leave the EU all they could do was fight.
11. Theresa May has been to Brussels 23 times to negotiate a deal for leaving.
12. She finally got a deal called the withdrawal agreement (which I read and blogged about at the time). Most people didn’t read it but decided that it was awful, or according to the headlines “The Worst Deal of All Time.”
13. It can’t have been easy to get 27 countries to agree on something as big as this but it was all for  nothing because she forgot to check what her parliament would agree with.
14. To leave with the deal parliament had to vote to accept it.  Theresa May called this The  Meaningful Vote.
15. The EU had been working on what happens if we leave without a deal, which will be bad for them too, and published some very clear documents, which I read. If we have done the same work then we’ve kept it secret.
16.  Parliament voted against accepting the deal.  The prime minister decided that there would be another meaningful vote, making the first one meaningless.
17.  Theresa May told the EU that she needed to renegotiate the deal but as she had forgotten to ask parliament what it wanted she couldn't really answer when they asked what she wanted. Many of the 27 countries laughed.
18.  After a while, she read the Daily Mail and decided that what people didn’t like was the backstop. I’m not sure anyone really understands the backstop because backstop means backstop but it has  something to do with the Irish boarder, which has a very funny Twitter account. People worry that this protection for Northern Ireland will cause the UK  to never be fully free of the EU, which may be true if our negotiating skills don’t improve.
19.  St Theresa and the EU has another little all night chat, emerged smiling and thought they had added a codpiece (I think they probably meant codicil but I saw one funny autocorrect and from now on I will call it the codpiece) that they thought would keep everyone happy, even though they hadn’t actually asked them what they wanted.
20. Parliament got a second meaningful vote and still decided to reject the deal. Who could have predicted that? Even the DUP decided the bribe wasn’t enough.
21.  People got angry. Not politicians but real people. They are bored of the fighting and the confusion and because no one ever changes their mind - EVER  their positions just became more entrenched. They stood outside Westminster and shouted.
22. A load of MPs brought amendments to the bill. They like doing this because their name gets  attached to something and they gain brief notoriety.
23. Everyone got confused, including the chief whip, whose job it is to tell everyone in his party how the government intends to vote and then draw lines under it to tell them how important it is they vote with their side, drew three lines and then abstained (so he should probably sack himself) . The Brexit secretary voted against the deal he had negotiated and people who had called for a second referendum voted against that. The main thing they agreed on was that the  wouldn’t leave without at a deal (although I’m not sure how they plan to make that happen. You can’t take something off the table if it is the table)
24. In private Theresa May went ‘batship crazy’ and lost what little voice she had left.
25. MPs went back to their constituencies to see their chiropractor, children tried to warn MPs that they were missing the most important things by marching and refraining from eating the last gluestick in the school.

So, 25 points later and I’m still no clearer. I think the law says that we leave on the 28th with or without a deal regardless of how much shouting MPs do. I think they might have spectacularly messed up. This is comedy you couldn’t write, except that,  if you think about it, whatever your views, it’s just not funny.