Remember when I wrote the Brexit book after the referendum. Was a weirdly depressing process, finding all these torturous details about how hard it was to extricate ourselves from membership, after it was pertinent to the debate.
We had the whole referendum debate on faff and nonsense and only afterwards looked at what the fuck we'd done and why it was such a nightmare. Then cue the last three years.
That is precisely what is happening here. We've got at least four documents in front of us: the withdrawal agreement bill, the withdrawal Act 2018, the withdrawal agreement with the EU & the political declaration.
And we're trying to piece them together, see how they impact on one another, imagine what the consequences are, note the tensions between sections, forecast the political circumstances in which that'll all play out over next three years.
But all that's really happening is an angry debate over numbers of MPs here, numbers there, govt efforts to force everything through, accusations of thwarting the will of the people.
We are making precisely the same mistakes all over again. It is completely counter-productive. The quickest and most efficient way of dealing with these issues is to give them time to be properly understood.
