Brexit is Groundhog Day all over again

For once, I’d say Jeremy Corbyn got it right. Theresa May’s statement about Brexit was very much, as he said, “Groundhog Day”. She said that everything was fine, apart from the Irish border question. Which is where we have been since the last time we had a “Brexit breakthrough”, just before Christmas last year.

If you remember, that was when the EU came up with the “backstop” idea of an economic border down the Irish Sea, and, desperate, the UK solemnly agreed to it, albeit as a theoretical construct. The Commons (ie the Tory rebels) subsequently passed a law making such an arrangement illegal anyway. Now Ms May quotes the clause in the statute with misplaced pride. The backstop was, by the way, also something that Boris Johnson and David Davis, as cabinet ministers at the time signed up to. No wonder the British are referred to as “perfidious Albion”. Treachery sprouts everywhere.

The only way those of us writing about Brexit can keep sane, well I speak for myself, is to remember that the Irish border issue is a conundrum with no answer, like many an Irish question before it.

It is as if, with goodwill all round, the British, Irish and other EU leaders, plus the DUP, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Gerry Adams, for that matter, all agreed that we’d all really like for two and two to make six, and all we need to do is to set the officials to work and they’ll find a way to make two and two make six. Dominic Raab would add that if Michel Barnier matches his own ambition and pragmatism, we can easily make two and two equal six by Christmas. Really? Fermat’s Last Theorem, by the way, which was in principle amenable to logic, was solved, after 358 years work by the world’s greatest mathematicians.

Tomorrow, then, we will all have another go at making two and two make six, and we will fail. And the next day we will do it all over again. And again. And again. Try and stay sane. (And let the PM know if you can make two and two make six).

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor