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Why stop at an Australia-style deal? There are far more exotic realms out there
In 1981, tarnished by a legacy of nuclear embarrassments, the leaky Cumbrian atomic power plant Windscale was rebranded as Sellafield and the problems of public perception simply melted away, like hot uranium seeping into a water table. Likewise, we are no longer about to embrace a similarly contaminated no-deal Brexit. We are instead welcoming a nice, new Australia-style deal. But Australia doesn’t have a deal with the EU (even though it wants one). We are embracing a no-deal Brexit in all but name. It is, as the secretary of state Alok Sharma admitted to an unusually uncooperative Nick Ferrari on Monday, “just a question of semantics”. Ah yes. The Conservatives’ old enemies! Words! And their actual meanings!
On Monday evening, I opened my Anglo-Asian tandoori lamb vindaloo delivery and found a request to contribute to one of Dominics Cumming’s blue-sky, out-of-the-box think-boxes inside it, written on my poppadum in mango chutney. Cumming’s omniscient net-lords knew my every move. As usual, Cumming was looking for hot-ass cyber-freaks and batshit Ballardian head-jobs who could furnish him with shamanic sci-fi solutions. Apparently I was such a person because I had both written a comic book about a ghost and sung in 10th-century Anglo-Saxon on a dance record. Cumming needed a way to avoid identifying the incoming no-deal Brexit, which no one had wanted or expected, as the no-deal Brexit it clearly was. Sharma’s public admission that the Australia-style deal rebrand was linguistic smoke and mirrors had proved potentially problematic and threatened to unravel a number of other flimsy, fictional Conservative constructs, the implausible public persona of Boris Johnson having been deemed the most vulnerable to a moment’s scrutiny. Continue reading...