“It can safely be said that the last three years have not been fruitful ones in the history of the United Kingdom. Politically speaking, the 2016 referendum has opened a political hellmouth straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which a seemingly endless procession of charlatans, mediocrities and outright monstrosities haunts the polis with messages that are alternatively idiotic, jingoistic, dishonest, preposterous, or downright sinister. Mark Francois, Andrea Leadsom, Esther McVey, Dominic Raab, Andrea Jenkins, Jacob Rees-Mogg — all these demons parade through our TV screens, proposing deals that cannot be implemented, promising futures that cannot be delivered in the way they say they can, ignoring evidence to the contrary and denouncing their opponents as ‘traitors’ or ‘Remoaners’, sabotaging plans that have already been well and truly sabotaged by the gulf between expectation and reality.

Stuck in this little shop of horrors, it would be comforting to find some consolation in the ongoing implosion of the Tory Party, which has been inflicting this nightmare — and so many others — on the nation in the first place. Punished in the recent local and European elections, the Tory Party, once one of the most formidable election-winning machines in Europe, has been shattered by its obsession with Europe, an obsession it has chosen to inflict on the whole country.  Its zombie government staggers on, visionless and ineffectual, crushed by its own incompetence and a Brexit process that has revealed it to be fatally out of its depth…”

My latest piece for Ceasefire Magazine.  You can read the rest here: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/hollow-man-boris-johnsons-delusions-grandeur-survive-reality/