It didn't have to be this way, even with the Leave vote. They could have pursued a compromise position which respected the views of Scotland and NI. They did not.
Instead, only the most extreme and aggressive version of Brexit was tolerated and anyone who disagreed was branded an enemy of the people. So this is where we are.
When the referendum comes, as it inevitably will, many Tories will insist on how much they value Scotland. If that was true, the party would never have elected Boris Johnson to lead it.
None of this would have happened if it was still, at its heart, a conservative party. It is not. It is party representing a kind of Tory Maoism - capable of tearing things down but not building them. The Union is likely to be its next victim.
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Lots of angry tit-and-tat over the Brexit deal, but a deal is easily doable and remains highly likely. Landing zones all over the place.
There'll be a bit more angry chatter and then there'll be a deal. I've been wrong before, of course. These things have their own momentum and it;s important not to underestimate the stupidity of the people involved. But that remains by distance the most likely outcome.
To fail to get a deal, given how small the distances involved between their two positions are, would be a failure of statecraft on a historic scale.
Everyone's emotionally in a very similar place aren't they. This kind of simmering anxiety, basically just awaiting a lockdown of some sort or another, bracing for the longest, harshest winter.
It's like we're learning as a species how to go into hibernation.
To me, this period feels less scary than spring, but somehow more depressing. I guess because of the cold & dark. The shock and this-is-just-like-28-days-later chat of March has turned into sullen predictability.
And before anyone starts with the 'isn't it ironic that you want to silence people as a liberal' horseshit: They murder those who disagree with them. They encourage violence against minorities.
Freedom demands that they be stopped. Only the most infantile, skin-deep understanding of liberty would allow them to continue.
Johnson speech just kicked off. I'm already struggling.
He started with the island-story-battle-of-the-blitz stuff within the first minute.
It's an after-dinner speech, as usual - his primary register. The kind of thing the crowd in the hall would have absolutely lapped up. But in this case delivered to silence.
So it took about five days to record the audio book, which I spent with this awesome engineer called Alex. He was extremely patient with me getting shit wrong, then launching into a stream of angry swear words, which he duly erased.
While we were doing it, he was hard at work recording his first album, where he was doing literally everything: the writing, the lyrics, the singing, all the instruments. That guy was dedicated to that shit. He was all in.
And now he just sent me the first single from the album - Modern Times. And the thing is... it's fucking brilliant. Even the missus, who usually despises what she calls my "whiny white boy music", says it is - quote - "not shit".