Brexit – silly, sappy, snappy word – is not a fact, not an event. It’s a condition. It’s the new weather. Brexitosis is what it is. One would rather just groan, or scream, or swear, or feel seasick about the whole thing. All we know is there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s in the future, and it’s in the past, it’s both something that happened yonks ago (maybe hard feelings left over from 1066, or the Field of the Cloth of Gold, or Malplaquet), and something that is promised still to happen. Hence our peculiar helplessness and strickenness. You can’t fix it in the past, and you can’t fix it in the future. It’s like coming round after an operation – when they took out the wrong organ, and then went and left some of their ironmongery in you, for good measure – and swearing, not like a trooper (I don’t think troopers even swear), but like a patient.

None of the major players is having a good Brexit. (As indeed there is no good Brexit. The underwhelming Corbyn now scores worse than May, which takes some doing. Or in his case, no doing.) Only the experts and the commentators. We live for the cartoons, because we’re living in a cartoon. Everything is one toilet, one stinking corpse, one unending Zeno-esque funeral pageant for one undead ghoul in leopardskin fuck-me pumps on the cliffs of Dover. If the country had any sense, it would put itself under the command of Colonel Steve Bell. More »