Theresa May ... ‘T-1000 in the form of a woman’. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
The Tory party seemed to have been blown apart by Brexit, but coalesced like the T-1000, this time taking the form of a woman. Andrea Leadsom, a sort of defrosted Theresa May, said that she was withdrawing in the national interest, but the suspicion will remain that she was ordered to stand aside by some blasphemous, tentacled demigod addressing her through a screaming mirror. You would have thought that having two women competing for the job would have gone down well with the Tory cabinet, rekindling fond childhood memories of the trial-by-combat phase of their nanny selections, but May was seen as the safer pair of hooves. She immediately vowed to unite Britain – my guess is against the poor. She will no doubt introduce a cap for migrants. Probably an orange cone with an “M” on the front that gives out an electric shock if they stray too close to a golf course.
You’ve got to say that at this crisis point the Labour party should be concentrating on doing what it’s good at, and surely that isn’t elections. Jimmy Savile armed with a cloak of invisibility let loose at Hogwarts would have more self control than the Labour party. A headline in the Guardian quoted a colleague describing Angela Eagle as “tough – in the best possible sense”, although personally when I think of tough in the best possible sense, I’m thinking maybe al dente pasta rather than voting for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. There are those on Corbyn’s side who suggest this is a struggle between the top-down and bottom-up ideas of parties as social movements. I mean, it might be; it might also just be a struggle between people who don’t really seem to know what they’re doing and people who have some really firm ideas about how to change direction that are terrible. Eagle was widely derided for not putting forward any policies at her campaign launch, but really I think everybody knows the kind of things she stands for, and she was wise not to mention any of them. Indeed, given the makeup of the electorate, the whole thrust of her campaign should be to try to stop people remembering what she represents, and ideally who she is.
It’s hard to know whether all this is taking it out of Corbyn, due to his clever tactic of starting each day looking like he slept in his car. Yes, the media is hugely, systemically biased against him, and reason in general, but his one-note response seems to be going nowhere. He has this manner with interviewers where he seems to think that he is calmly talking sense to a lunatic, when really he is talking to the machinery in an abattoir. It’s probably worth noting that the referendum will have been seen at Westminster as a huge reaffirmation of the power of Murdoch generally, the Sun and the Daily Mail. Looks like it’s going to be a long time before senior politicians start turning up to the weddings of bloggers.
The fallout from the referendum continues. Some people are finally saying they’re embarrassed to be British, admittedly because we’ve left a trading union, rather than the centuries of mass murder, but it’s a start. House prices have dropped and you won’t be able to use your phone abroad – good, my kids can buy a flat and won’t be bothered by work calls on holiday. This all sounds as tragic as a conga line through a cocktail bar so far. Yet there’s no doubt racists feel vindicated by the result. It’s like a dam has burst. Finally we’ve thrown off our politically correct shackles and can tell it like it is – “That tapas ... It ain’t a meal. It’s just snacks. It ain’t right Terry! Pizza! They’re havin’ a laugh. It’s just cheese on fuckin toast! That Polish. Where’s the vowels? It ain’t right. It’s bad enough we let the Welsh get away with it.”
But let’s remember that the referendum vote wasn’t to normalise racism; that was the one we had in May 2015. Remainers have spent so much time online calling people racist that Chinese primary school children are getting a raise for mining the lithium for their new batteries. Seriously, do you want the right to stop acting as if the Brexit vote was a mandate for racism? Stop telling them that it was a mandate for racism. A generation of liberals who voted for Blair and then Clegg are demonising the people who gut their salmon at 4am for not knowing that leave were lying to them. “We were changing the EU from within!” cry a group of people who stayed home watching Netflix while 21 Ukip members were voted in at the 2014 European elections. Meanwhile, Farage spent the referendum taking a group of undecideds and, with Nazi imagery and a pledge to let Syrians die, got their support. A trick he learned from Hillary Benn.
So where are we? Well, we have an opposition dedicated to opposing itself, and a country so heavily dependent on money laundering that we just brought out a waterproof fiver. Churchill’s on the back, presumably because he best reflects the current state of the UK economy – “Never was so much owed by so many ...” We also have a ruling class that has trained itself to look for opportunity in every crisis, no doubt wondering how it can get rid of all the best bits of EU membership and retain the most iniquitous. For now, we will just have to hold tight and watch Theresa May do her considerable worst, praying for Dorothy’s house to fall on her.