...By the mendacious, deluded, confused, and opportunistic.
All but the most hardened Brexiter must wonder if this leap into the unknown is a good thing; "It's divorce Jim, but not as we know it."
Let's hope we can keep it amicable. But know now that some part of this grey and windswept nation will miss the rest of Europe; but if the rest of the family, including the deluded grandparental generation, demand we move house or change churches or sack the servants, that is what happens.
So I pen an apology to Europe, from the 48%.
Sorry we couldn't make the argument stick; we did give it a go but sometimes events conspire to form a perfect storm. Or a near-perfect FUBAR.
It is time to rebuild. And rebuilding our relationship with the other half, as well as with the neighbours. Having embarrassed the neighbours with our very public squabbling, and then left with a flourish (v. poor taste, that) I wonder if there is a place where a nation can go for relationship therapy. Or maybe a court order can be imposed governing the behaviour of all concerned.
Let's minimise the damage, hey? Much though I loathe the thought of travelling along a route with BoJo at the helm; he's at the wheel, and the ship is sailing on. I didn't elect him captain, but enough others did to give him the authority to take charge of the destination, schedule, and course.
I'm a democrat (ish). Recriminations will happen anyway, as the long view back has assured us. We need to put our backs into dealing with the new circumstance.
Anyway, I guess Boris is on for an Earldom no matter what the outcome. But would he turn down such an honour as Sir Winston did? When Churchill was offered the title of Duke of Dover in '45 and then Duke of London in '55 (an unprecedented honour - even the Royal family had never used London in a title, and no-one not royal had been made a duke for some time) he declined both for a number of reasons:
He had not the income to support such a title; living as a duke costs lots.
His son, Randolph, had a career in politics, and at the time it would have hampered Randolph's position in the House of Commons - at the time no member of the House of Lords had been PM for an age - that precedent was later broken by Alec Douglas-Home, who had to renounce his peerage and find a safe seat in the commons. The ability to renounce a title to sit in the commons only happened with the Peerage Act of 1963.
And, maybe more importantly, it let the grand old man have one last great rhetorical flourish.
What will BoJo's great rhetorical flourish be, I wonder? He has written himself into history in the way few chancers, even if Old Etonians, have ever managed. Some years ago, Terry Pratchett (Kt.) wrote a number of books about a reformed con-artist in Ankh-Morpork. But the great thing about M. von Lipwig is that he had Lord Vetinari pulling his strings.
Alas, we have Dominic Cummings; who makes a very poor Vetinari, whatever anyone else thinks.
Our present predicament has led me to coin a new bastard word:
Autoschadenfreude.
I don’t even think I need to define it for you, I’m pretty sure you can do it accurately yourself.
Put it in the dictionaries, please. And for my next trick I shall write a paper on “Cultures which self-harm, and specific ætiologies apparent in the Anglo-Saxon logosphere.”