Although he failed to emerge from an Airbus waving it, MP Mark Francois had in his hand a piece of paper. “My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-day veteran,” he thundered to the news cameras on Friday, shortly before ripping up the aforementioned document. “He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son.”
Leaving aside the somewhat bathetic description of Rommel’s Atlantic Wall defences as “bullying”, can you guess what Mark’s piece of paper actually was? Certification of a history doctorate? (He amusingly already holds an MA in war studies.) A letter from his future self reading simply “Don’t be a thermonuclear dick, Mark – it ends badly”?
I’m afraid not. The document was in fact a widely reported missive from the German CEO of Airbus, Tom Enders, who employs 14,000 people in this country and supports a further 110,000 jobs in the supply chain. This week he expressed intense frustration that “more than two years after the result of the 2016 referendum, businesses are still unable to plan for the future … If you are still really sure that Brexit is best for Britain,” Enders concluded, “come together and deliver a pragmatic withdrawal agreement.” Or, as Francois counter-reasoned: “Tom Enders was a German paratrooper in his youth.”
Incredibly, given this competition, Quote of the Week must still go to Nadine Dorries, who went on telly to express contempt for Brexit-cautious MPs “who really don’t care about their careers going up in flames”. Did the erstwhile gobbler of kangaroo testicles just say that out loud? To hear Nadine speak at the best of times feels like intruding on private stupidity, but even by her standards, this is eye-catching from the member for Mid-Bedfordshire. It can’t really be that Nadine should have been in parliament for almost 14 years without anyone informing her that politicians are in fact SUPPOSED to act out of a higher sense of duty than personal career advancement.
Far more believable is the idea that someone has actually flipped her wiring, so that the things Nadine ought to say remain only secret thoughts, while her inner monologue is now broadcast in all its epoch-illuminating glory. Hilarity ensues. Or possibly catastrophe. Ask me again in 63 days.
Indeed, as the Brexit clock ticks down, Nadine may well be regarded by future historians as the archetypal thinker of the era. Even at this incredibly late hour, vast swaths of parliament are doggedly placing self-interest above national interest, apparently bolstered by some vague belief that Britain is too big to fail. Or, as Holly Golightly liked to think of Tiffany’s, that nothing very bad could ever happen to you there. If they hold fast to their current priorities and shun the personal inconvenience of compromise, no deal could very conceivably be stumbled into.
Of course, there would be no stumbling about it for some. Consider the lavishly preposterous MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, Daniel Kawczynski, who this week took it upon himself to announce that he has written to the Polish prime minister and requested “formally” that Poland veto any request by the UK to extend article 50. We can’t be sure what formal channels this MP believes himself to be operating within, but openly demanding that foreign powers subvert the will of the UK legislature did seem to be the second hottest take on parliamentary sovereignty in as many days.
The hottest take, as so often, belonged to Daniel’s European Research Group (ERG) colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg, who on Wednesday gave an address during which he suggested that the Queen should, if necessary, suspend parliament to stop things not going his way. Great to see that prorogation has officially entered the game, as yet another reminder that Brexit is rarely about the things it says it is about. Nothing says “I believe passionately in parliamentary sovereignty” quite as convincingly as demanding that the sovereign shut down parliament.
Rees-Mogg believes Britain could surf the wave of no deal. He’s really very like Patrick Swayze in Point Break in that respect – except with an opera coat, no charisma and zero personal exposure to the 50-year storm. Yet people continue to misread him as dependably as his father used to misread the future. At Wednesday’s event, the economist Roger Bootle introduced him as “a modest man … too modest, almost, for his own good”. To which the only sane reply is: lololololololol. If you had to distil into one personage the British people’s gibbering historical deference to terrible ideas advanced by low-to-middlebrow post-feudal shitlords who openly detest them, this plastic aristocrat would be it. Rees-Mogg is the logical end of whole centuries of barking up the wrong tree. In the most recent leadership polls of Tory members, obviously, he trailed only Boris Johnson.
And so to Brexit’s best-paid influencers. What an inevitability to learn that the former Brexit secretary David Davis has walked straight into a £60,000, 20-hour-a-year gig to advise the digger manufacturing firm JCB. That works out at £3,000 an hour, which feels like the sort of rate that might be expected if your workplace was a glass coffee table in Riyadh. Boris Johnson seems to be on ten grand a pop from the same source, suggesting he provides services too grotesque even for metaphorical allusion. It certainly feels more fitting than ever that he made last week’s speech at JCB in front of a great big hoe.
Perhaps the best that can be said for JCB’s Brexiteer chairman, Sir Anthony Bamford, is that his business is, at least for now, still headquartered in the UK. News that the leave advocate James Dyson is to relocate his HQ to Singapore is proving harder to spin, particularly given he’s said: “It’s to make us future-proof for where we see the biggest opportunities.” Still, it will be one upside if we’re no longer required to genuflect and defer to Dyson on matters other than suction. I wonder if it says something about Britain that its Greatest Inventor makes vacuum cleaners and hair dryers and so on. Nothing wrong with that, of course – we all need them. But it’s hardly the premier league of inventions. Oh, you can give it “the airblade” all you like. But faced with an attacking move by the creators of artificial hearts or water-powered engines, Dyson and his hand-dryers would be hopelessly outclassed.
Mark Francois may believe Britain could never be outclassed, even as he talks in a way that might reasonably be expected to appal the actual participants in events over which he has only heavy-breathed. But others on both the leave and remain sides may judge the UK’s self-respect to be hanging by a thread.
And that’s where we stand as Theresa May heads into the latest of her crunch weeks – although Philip Hammond has reinforced the government’s reputation for can-kicking by suggesting that Tuesday’s vote doesn’t have to be “the sort of high-noon moment … It’s a great British tradition to compromise and find a solution,” he judged on Friday, “rather than standing throwing rocks at each other from different sides of the argument.” Mmm. Is Hammond watching the same Brexit you’re watching? The UK’s mad yen for self-dramatisation is a big part of what got us here; perhaps the sense of ourselves as instinctively great at this stuff should be abandoned as the need for a solution moves into its emergency stage.
