More Charm, More Offensive

Since the whole point of Brexit is essentially militant self-pity - our sunlit uplands are cold and drizzly and it's got to be somebody's fault, so let's go out and kick a Muslim - it is just possible to see a sort of sense in the Imperial Haystack's latest wheeze to bring the EU in line with mainstream thinking. The idea is for the Imperial Haystack to engage in a bit of personal diplomacy, much as his spiritual father Churchill attempted with increasingly pathetic results during his interminable senility. Tired of Nazi-style punishment beatings from the legalistic commissars of Brussels, the Imperial Haystack will toddle off and negotiate the country's withdrawal from the EU with somebody other than the EU, because the EU's negotiator is a bit of a stickler for EU rules, which individual EU members, being merely members of the EU and probably gagging for independence themselves, self-evidently will not be. In addition, Angela Merkel is a filly, and we all know what the Haystack can do when he gets his hands on a filly. If the plan succeeds, well and good; but if it fails, as it did when the Tumbledown Tessie administration tried it at some point more or less within living memory, that will be fine too; just as it will be fine if the Imperial Haystack is eventually driven to seek an extension to Article 50. It will be fine because, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Norway Campaign and the last few hundred times a Conservative was caught in a lie, it will represent merely a temporary setback against overwhelming odds, to be borne with all the pluck and fortitude of a brave little nation of fox-hunting wog-bashers, until the deserved victory materialises at due cost to somebody else. Then again, it may simply be that the Haystack, like Tumbledown Tessie before him and the puce Head Boy before her, cannot in fact be bothered to plan very much beyond the present news cycle, because he's got the media, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Liberal Democrats making sure he doesn't have to.