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Brexit Means Brexit review – a political farce with terrifying implications

What a mess … Boris Johnson reflects on the political landscape
What a mess … Boris Johnson reflects on the political landscape. Photograph: James Gourley/REX/Shutterstock

Film-maker Patrick Forbes has been hanging about behind the scenes for the past year, making a documentary about the battle for the heart and soul of Britain. It’s called Brexit Means Brexit (BBC2).

Patrick’s not a political journalist; he mainly just watches, and listens. When he does ask a question, it’s almost embarrassingly deferential. “Forgive me for this, I have to ask a boring question,” he says to Boris Johnson, post the general election result, before just about managing to ask Boris if he is going to run against Theresa May. Not a boring question, and I don’t think Laura Kuenssberg needs to worry about her job. But the approach – more poodle puppy than rottweiler – does mean that they come and play with him, say things; a lot of things.

“The Daily Mail is an absolute disgrace, they should be ashamed of themselves,” shouts Anna Soubry, after Paul Dacre shouted ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE on his front page about the judges who ruled that parliament did have a right to debate Brexit.

Nicholas Soames agrees. “The most disgraceful, disgusting headline I have read in my life,” he splutters. The grandson of the bronze dude in the square with the pigeon shit on his head then calls Lord Pannick, who represented Gina Miller against the state, “as smooth as a vaselined otter”.

“Frankly, they’re just cowards,” Miller says of her critics. “I’m sorry, be a man – because most of them are men. Come and talk to me and find out my motivations. If you don’t have that courage, just shut up.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of her critics, and a man, albeit a rather odd one, doesn’t shut up. “People have all sorts of hobbies, some people like yachts,” he says, plucking a random everyday hobby from his hobby bank. “Some people like being litigates. Mrs Miller likes being a litigate.”

But when it looks as though the Brexit bill will be passed by parliament anyway, Andrew Bridgen MP breaks into song. “Spread a little happiness,” he sings, very badly in my inexpert opinion. And when Article 50 is triggered, man of the people Rees-Mogg says: “Salve, festa dies, toto venerabilis aevo.” Then he remembers that there may be a few oiks who don’t actually speak Latin and translates: “Hail festal day, venerable through all ages.”

Soubry talks more my kind of language. “It’s just a bit shit, isn’t it?” she says, unhappily. Meanwhile, in Stoke, another woman – not a politician, just a normal woman – thinks the leader of Ukip is a bit shit. “How dare Paul Nuttall show his face in this city,” she says. “Racist anti-immigration bastard!” Hear hear.

And in sunny Hunstanton, the previous leader of the same party tells an audience of old ’kippers who have actually paid to spend An Evening with Nigel Farage, that he’s not anti European. “I’ve married German women,” he tells them. Ha ha ha. Women? I think we only knew about one, didn’t we? The Other Frau Farage, that’s a story I’d like to read.

Guess what, the election that definitely wasn’t going to happen is going to happen. “She’s played a blinder,” says Alan Duncan. “A general election does pull the Conservative party together,” agrees Bridgen. “I think we’ll get a decent working majority,” says Soames. Ha ha ha. To be fair, he does later revise that forecast: “I worry for the PM that this could rebound on her,” he warns. In Broxtowe, Soubry’s constituency, someone urinates on her poster.

Now we’re nearly there, or here rather, the present. Polling day and “Boy oh boy oh boy are we going to be hung, drawn and quartered,” says David Dimbleby, actually not about parliament but about his own lot, and the pollsters, if the exit poll is wrong.

It’s not. “To put it mildly, it’s gone tits up,” says Soubry, who may have only just hung on to her seat, but she easily wins the show for her straight (and non-Latin) talking.

Forbes strings it all together with snippets of popular opera – Mozart, Rossini, Saint Saëns, Rimsky-Korsakov. In fact, he has pretty much turned the events of the past year, since the referendum, into a libretto – a comic, farcical one, opera buffa maybe? (Obviously, I don’t know what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, it is funny, and jolly, and light, tra la la, ha ha ha. Until you think about the consequences of all this and the ending, which looks like being anything but happy. And suddenly it sounds more like Wagner.