Proposed and Disposed

Poor little Dominic Raab, the Minister in Name Only for Brexit, is having quite a time of it. Appointed to fill the shoes of the blustering prima donna David Davis (shoes which we can only hope the Civil Service has labelled L and R in a nice, clear sans-serif font), he immediately proved himself worthy of his predecessor by failing to have the appropriate paperwork ready for debate in the House of Commons. Then, while he was facing a committee and doing his best to break the English language in new and independent ways, the dead-eyed warden's minions casually informed the Press that the actual work in Raab's department would from now on be handled by the grown-ups in the Cabinet Office. Raab responded by spraying testosterone across the tabloids with a threat to renege on the agreement to pay our dues unless the Euro-wogs started playing fair: a threat which the consigliere of the Brusso-Strasbourgian mafia casually brushed aside today, along with Tumbledown Tessie's fantasy fiction from the recent Chequers bloodbath. Although no piece of paper which results in the loss of Davis and Boris Johnson can really be called hard-won, the Euro-wogs' intransigence must be a bit of a disappointment: who could have imagined that the EU might prefer its customs policy not to be outsourced to a foreign power which regards EU rules as a crypto-Nazi straitjacket? The disappointment must be all the more acute as Her Majesty's Government still has not caught up with the fact that Michel Barnier is the EU negotiator, rather than the twenty-seven heads of state at whom Britain is still, with all the entrepreneurial gumptiom it can summon, barking orders.