Advertisement

Welcome to Brexit purgatory, where it’s Groundhog Day all over again | Jack Bernhardt

Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond
Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond: ‘The definitive quote of our time, “Brexit means Brexit”, would have made no sense to someone from 2012.’ Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images

Have you seen the news lately? A prominent Brexiteer said something outrageously untrue about our relationship with the EU, earning scorn from prominent remainers. The EU expressed concern with the rate of progress of negotiations, but the British government dismissed them. An economics expert reported that we were heading towards financial disaster with Brexit. An opposition politician demanded that we cancel Brexit, while others said we had to respect the will of the people.

It was quite a week. Almost as amazing as last week, when the exact same thing happened. And the week before that. And the week before that. And, in fact, almost every week since 24 June 2016.

We are trapped like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, except instead of trying to earn the love of Andie MacDowell in the hope of release, we are condemned to woo the slowly deflating human Goodyear blimp that is Donald Trump, in the hope of a chlorinated-chicken-lasagne-inspired trade deal. There is no escape. There is no peace. There is no end. Only the same empty soundbites, and David Davis’s smug, incompetent face next to a Daily Mail headline that reads “I’LL BASH BRUSSELS WITH MY MIGHTY HAM CHIN”. Welcome to Brexit purgatory.

It happens every week: on Monday, a government minister comes up with a new ridiculous Brexit initiative, like patrolling the Irish border with remote-controlled planes. On Tuesday comes the inevitable backlash: the Liberal Democrats, remain bloggers and Twitter experts with serious black-and-white headshots of themselves looking into middle distance tear into the new initiative and demand that we cancel Brexit immediately – usually via a rambling series of tweets that start with “THREAD: short argument on why Brexit cannot work (1/309)”.

On Wednesday it’s the backlash to the backlash, where angry leavers rage against those privileged elites who are undermining the plucky underdogs of the Conservative party (featuring classic phrases like “You lost, get over it”, “[crying-laughter face emoji to denote happiness at the suffering of others]”).

By Thursday the whole argument has descended into chaos: remainers call leavers racists, leavers call remainers traitors. A “comedy Tory” – Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Redwood or Andrea Leadsom – says something that sounds like a villain in a kids’ action movie (“We would have got away with it too if it weren’t for that meddling Gina Miller”), sparking off a whole new wave of anger and outrage.

By Friday, the government has done a semi-U-turn on the initiative: they say it’s just one of many options they’re looking at, so the whole week of bluster has been wasted. On the weekend, they have time to think of more new terrible initiatives and the whole cycle starts all over again.

We stop measuring it in hours and days, and start measuring it in Boris Johnson gaffes

Brexit purgatory is a confusing thing – after so many of these cycles, time ceases to have any meaning. We stop measuring it in hours and days, and start measuring it in Boris Johnson gaffes. It’s been 15 months since the referendum, and we only have 18 months until we’re supposed to leave the EU, but we’re still having the same debates we were on 24 June 2016: over a second referendum, whether we can do a trade deal at the same time as leaving the EU, whether Labour is in favour of being in or out of the single market, like some kind of Schrodinger’s small business tsar. Last week we even had the return of everyone’s favourite lie, the “£350m a week”, from Boris Johnson, which makes sense given that it’s the Boris Johnson of campaign slogans – ridiculous, often-derided, maliciously deceptive and yet inexplicably successful.

One of the reasons Brexit purgatory is so hard to get out of is that Brexit is a confusing beast of a news story – unbelievably important but also super, super dull. It’s the most monumental thing to happen to British politics in 50 years, and yet it’s also mostly about technical EU regulations that excite no one except Herman Van Rompuy.

Bombarded with the technical details, overwhelmed by the scale of the task, we fall back into simplified arguments (Remainers hate democracy! Leavers hate ethnic minorities!) and focus on the tiny things we can understand (Toblerones are smaller now! Our passports can be blue again soon! Let’s go to war with Spain over Monkey Island! Make my Big Ben bong again!).

Brexit, lest we forget, is a nonsense word that was made up five years ago

For me though, the main reason is that 15 months down the line the government still hasn’t demonstrated what Brexit actually means, how it will work, and whether the way they are currently Brexiting is what the country actually voted for. The discourse needs more detail to develop, and we have no details. By its very definition, Brexit isn’t a policy, it’s an absence of a policy. It’s a black hole where ideas should be. Brexit, lest we forget, is a nonsense word that was made up five years ago.

The definitive quote of our time, “Brexit means Brexit”, would have made no sense to someone from 2012. It’s like finding out that in 2022 all of British politics will be defined by the quote “glornflarx means schplongtorks”, and that no one quite knows what “glornflarx” means. It might mean the people have more rights, it might mean all parliamentary power is consolidated into the hands of the executive, it might mean cats are our bosses now. At this point I have very little problem with that.

Really, we can’t leave Brexit purgatory until we know what’s on the other side, and it’s in the interest of the people in charge to make it as hard as possible to work out what that will look like. Unless something big changes, we won’t know until 31 March 2019 – which means another 18 months of Tory incompetence, opposition howling and apathetic despair to suffer through. I for one am going to ask a cat to enslave me.

• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer