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In the news:
Campaigners against dementia are arguing that footballs should be sold with a health warning, similar to cigarettes. I reckon if you’re trying to smoke a football then you’re long gone anyway…
Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein “shared several dinners” Couldn’t they afford to buy 2 main courses?

Once more thought it’s been the Olympics in the news with the closing ceremony this weekend and as per usual there is the ludicrous proposal put forward saying that the EU would ......

There’s an old expression about how fate only gave hope in order to dash it and how if luck is lady then her name is Miss Fortune, or possibly Nicola Sturgeon. Either way, the England team once more failed to win the Euro 2020 cup and once more it was on a penalty shootout, an Irony that was obviously not lost on Gareth Southgate, unlike the match itself. Marcus Rashford may have an MBE and he may be a passionate campaigner against child poverty and homelessness but at the end of the day all that social outreach stuff doesn’t leave a lot of time in his diary for practicing penalty kicks. Two of the players that missed were brought on minutes before the game ended, presumably with the sole job of “being good at penalties” and I really don’t blame the England team for prioritizing that as a specialist job but in retrospect it’s like hiring a pilot with a fear of heights or employing Michael Barrymore to be a pool attendant.

For me, it’s always interesting to see how articles are seemingly instantly published on news websites but then I guess part of writing for a newspaper is that stories will have been pre-written in advance and the editors were simply waiting until that final whistle in order to know which one to publish. In some respects things are made easier if the newspaper operates a separate printing operation in Scotland where the story about a once in a generation England victory can be very quickly edited into an article celebrating the Italian win.

Another interesting point in all of this is that if England had in fact won the cup then it would presumably put an end to the “Football’s coming home” song, the crux of which is that England haven't won anything in a long time. I’d genuinely like to know whether Baddiel & Skinner have an edit of that song ready to publish as soon as the facts change. It’s akin to the argument of what the Scottish National anthem would be in the event that independence was achieved, seeing as how the current one only makes sense if Scotland is under the brutal subjugation of the English parliament.

Anyway, only one year to go until the World Cup in Qatar and I do have the term “World” in the channel name so here’s some other quick stories I spotted. A man in Austria was bitten by a python this week after sitting on his toilet and it frankly serves him right for sitting on a snake’s toilet
Richard Branson blasted off into Space. I wish him the best of luck when he lands, discovers that they lost his luggage and he has to spend weeks tracking down the location of his camera.
Wildfires are destroying vast swathes of the Western US, yet another Hollywood remake. I recently googled how do wildfires start and it came back with a lot of matches.

Happy Chinese new year, apparently it’s the Year of the Ox, not to be mistaken for the year of the pox, which was last year. One of my favourite stories from China this week was the communist party’s decision to ban the BBC due to its “Unfair, Untruthful Journalism” which kinda makes me wish that Boris took a leaf out of Beijing’s book: if the PM wants to sort out the thing with the French fishermen he could start treating the English Channel the way that they treat the China sea. Obviously don’t copy everything, the genocide thing is a bit out of whack and I’d rather make sure the pets on Blue Peter were never involved in a cookery segment on the show but I would like to see the UK sticking two fingers up to the green agenda and getting petrol back to 70p/litre like it is in Shanghai.

So what does the BBC have for us this week? Stories on the front page include articles like: “What is Slovenian cuisine”, “NASA’s pioneering black women” and an article on “Racial imposter Syndrome” so I’d have thought if it’s the BBC then they might have illustrated with a picture of David Dickenson in orange-face or that time when Doctor Who was an African lady. In all honesty the private sector isn’t much better when it comes to newsworthiness, the Mail’s website have a story about how Ben Affleck went out on a motorbike and Hugh Jackman apparently owns a wooly hat.

There is real news out there but it doesn't fit the narrative about how Britain would struggle without help from overseas and so we end up with a "news page" filled with social justice wokery and a relentless fetishization about Donald Trump. There's his constant ability to not pay taxes, the fact his wife isn’t divorcing him, he never did any of the bad things the BBC said he would, plus he got covid and despite it being 100% deadly he lived to laugh another day. Then we have his acquittal in the senate and his troll-like response that he might well run for office again. It's hilarious really, they really want him to be in jail for something but there’s just no darned evidence. This is what happens when a news organisation hires hires kids from college who have never been told that sometimes you don’t get your own way no matter how much you scream and shout. That only works if you’re Tom cruise and possibly for Brian Blessed if Gordon’s Alive.

Of course in the real world the story being shouted from the rafter should be that Britain has been taking off as a world-leader in both covid vaccination as well as research into the new variants. The EU had to back down on its threat to militarise the Irish border, after it realised that without Britain to co-opt, the EU doesn't actually have any military presence in northern ireland to use for such a thing. Bizarrely they chose to apologise with reference to how people make mistakes and that only the pope is infallible. That's an analogy that would struggle to go down well in Ulster unless it was perhaps in an episode of Father Ted with an inebriated chief Jean-Claude Juncker playing Father Jack. Back to covid though, it seems to be available in many different variations this year. Much like when you buy a car you can get classic base model, or you can opt for the 2021 update features and just like a car some versions of the vaccine include an improved transmission. Except unfortunately that’s a bad thing in the case of a virus. Although in the BBC worldview, big pharma can’t be trusted or relied upon to combat the new variants and we should stop trying, given in and join with the EU in relying on masks and capitulation and an inability to win. With that sort of attitude it’s no wonder the BBC love Wimbledon so much.

This past year people might not have been paying attention but the Brexit clock has steadily been ticking along, although for me the only clock it reminded me of is that one in the movie Groundhog Day where it flips over ever morning and Bill Murray has to do the same story to camera day after day after day. But in a year where Covid has dominated the news story it’s almost somewhat refreshing, a throwback to last year, seeing Michel Barnier stumbling out of a limo spouting a bunch of nonsense from behind a blue and yellow-starred facemask. If the recycling of old news continues then I guess it can’t be long until CNN returns to it’s live search for that downed Malaysian airplane off of Australia. At the time of that story I came up with two terrible Malaysian Airline jokes, the first one got no response and the second one was shot down in flames. I wonder if they’re retelling that joke it at Diego Garcia, at least I think that was one of the conspiracies doing the rounds at the time.

Anyway, the main Brexit story as I said has been the EU going back to its Theresa May era tactic of refusing to budge on a couple of important things on the assumption that Boris will concede in much the same way that he’s had to when confronted by his former ladyfriends’ lawyers. There’s probably some good euphemistic jokes in there about how Michel Barnier wants to do to the PM what Boris did to Guardian journalist Anna Fazackerley. Supposedly the main sticking point in the EU negotiation has been fishing rights and given Emanuel Macron’s current unpopularity at home, if he were to somehow pull off this political feat then it would be one of the most spectacular surprises involving fish since that story about the 5 thousand and some loafs. Certainly leaks to the press heavily imply that everyone else around the table on the EU side are keen for Mr Macron to just be quiet so that they sign some kind of lose trading agreement, mostly involving German cars, and get on with the important business of whether to order the lamb, the chicken or the veal or discuss whether Han Shot First

The UK and the EU have until the end of the year to agree a trade deal as well as other things: especially getting round to translating whatever document comes out. EU law requires that it be published in several languages before they can legally pass it. It does lend a certain irony to the fact that draconian anti-trust laws and fines against Google are being legislated for at the very time when they need Google Translate more than ever. Unless of course Boris employs a retaliatory French move, stands up lighting a gauloise cigarette and walks out the room as someone plays some Debussy on the piano, safe in the knowledge that Germany is too terrified of a trade war to let anything very much actually happen. Perhaps was the plan all along though, that the EU needs to stick to indefensible demands in order for everyone to walk away from the table blaming the other side and with the UK no longer holding back further integration. Or perhaps they’re just stubborn. There’s a only expression that to Err is human but to successfully blame it on someone else shows political shrewdness and to really screw it up probably involves a plan. There’s also another one that to Err is human but to Arr is pirate and to Oar is canoeing.

A year ago seems like a different world, there was no Coronavirus (apart from inside that Chinese laboratory), and most folks were just desperately wishing that the news would stop going on about Brexit, I almost found myself reading the sports and entertainment section of the newspaper. But by far and away, the main people wanting to not hear about Brexit were the politicians trying to stop it. Most were just hoping that they could delay and delay and wear the public down until people eventually got tired of the idea, move on and forget about the whole thing, like when we gave Robert Mugabe a knighthood when brilliant actor Michael Caine starring in Jaws 4. Anyway, with the PeoplesVote ultimately being about as popular with the general public as that shark-related mess of a film, it looks like Brexit will finally be going forward at the end of the year, very possibly under WTO rules which is more than anyone who voted Leave ever thought possible. Strange as it seems, it was ultimately people like Tony Blair and Ken Clarke that directly facilitated Brexit by preventing Theresa May’s deal being passed. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, or the suede loafer in the case of Clarke.

May’s deal was, we were told at the time, a national suicide note. Not being in the EU would bring about the end of the world, or at least the part of the world not lining up to form a federal armed forces headquartered in Brussels, presumably managed by whoever can still identify the Sudetenland on a map after two bottles of Claret. Nonetheless there have been a number of very positive economic stories this year about what the post-Brexit financial landscape will look like so I thought I’d mentioning half a dozen.

1. Unilever. This was a massive story in 2019 after the company initially said that it would relocate to Rotterdam to remain in the EU. Then it turned out that the shareholders would have to get a say and ultimately the company concluded that it would restructure itself to be based in the UK and not the EU. For Remainers, this was the sort of U-turn equivalent to that time Napoleon “changed his mind” about invading Russia. There was of course next to no mention of this story, at least until the Dutch government said that they’d create a law forcing the company to pay a €11bn “exit tax” if they moved to the UK. This was quickly twisted and around and respun as the case of a British Company being forced to spend billions all because of Brexit. Rather than a company potentially choosing to spend €11bn and relocate in order to not be in the EU
2. Toyota is the world’s largest car manufacturer by which I mean the most cars. The manufacturer of the largest car was probably Cadillac in the mid 70s before the oil crisis; those things were massive. Nonetheless, in 2016 we were all warned that Toyota would teach the UK a lesson by closing all its UK factories and moving all the jobs to places where the staff didn’t vote for Brexit. In a surprise decision though Toyota recently affirmed their commitment to making money rather than squandering it and that they’d continue manufacturing cars in Derbyshire, not that you’d hear Victoria Derbyshire talk about it much on the BBC. They’re also going to be manufacturing Suzuki’s new hybrid car there for them and the factory is actually in Edwina Currie’s old constituency so I therefore wonder if John Major ever visited it, years before he was celebrating it’s potential closure to teach Leave voters a lesson.
3. Nissan. Another car maker but there’s that expression about how Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, not to be mistaken for those who fail to delete their internet history and are doomed to have to explain it. Nissan’s Suderland plant is massive, every year it manufactures more cars in one factory than the whole of Italy. Nonetheless, a lot of people with relatives employed by the EU would rather it close and relocate to Italy or Spain so that they EU can justify all-expenses paid trips to it. Alas Neil Kinnocks relatives will have no such luck ever since Nissan announced they would be instead be closing their Barcelona factory and laying off 3000 EU workers in order to expand their operations in post-Brexit Britain.
4. The other volume car manufacturer is Jaguar Land Rover, who are building a new 3m sq-foot distribution centre in Leicestershire. It’s always nice when a story involving lots of money and Leicester doesn’t turn out to be about Keith Vaz breaking the law. It’s especially good though when it’s yet another story completely at odds with the narrative being spun by the likes of Vince Cable and Michael Hesseltine
5. One of the main criticisms thrown against Brexit at the time was from commentators who rubbished the idea that British train manufacturers could ever hope to succeed or sign deal abroad without EU politicians wining and dining the foreign buyers first, preferably with 5-star accommodation thrown in. Despite this, one of the big stories to happen post-Brexit was Bombarier winning a £2½ bn contract to manufacture trains for Egypt’s new monorail. The UKs other big train manufacturer Hitachi also announced that they were going to spend £400m improving their County Durham plant. If it’s in County Durham, maybe Dominic Cummings can turn up for the grand opening, just to annoy Labour activists on Twitter.
6. Finally I thought I’d mentioned my favourite, if the last few minutes were a meal then this is dessert in so much as it takes the cake for the biggest about face seen in British politics since the time that Nick Clegg switched his position from abolishing tuition fees to increasing them to £9k. Up until now we have talked about private companies but you’d generally assume that ,fair enough, EU funded bodies would indeed relocate their operations to the EU post-Brexit. It was therefore painful to the likes of Ian Blackford when the European Space Agency decided that it was going to spend 100s of millions of pounds building its new Business Incubation Centre in England and not the EU. If Caroline Lucas wasn’t infuriated when she saw the carbon footprint of an Ariane 6 launch vehicle, she was probably incandescent with rage when she discovered that the people who designed it would no longer have the legal right to emigrate to Romania, or see their children run into an Olympic stadium proudly waving a blue flag covered in yellow stars. It does make you wonder if the EU is all just a long term ploy by Belgium or Luxembourg to do well at the Olympics by claiming a shared “European victory” in the velodrome rather than earning 6 medals and watching Team GB come in the top 5, #DespiteBrexit

I had a bit of computer problem last week but I’m not the government so it cost less than £10m to fix and unlike some politicians I didn’t later get a visit from the police to ask about the hard drive’s contents. But at least this week we finally have something to talk about this week other than Corona. Yes, it’s a return to Brexit which as any BBC panel show contestant would tell you, “sounds a bit like a breakfast cereal” and which most viewers would interpret as a sign that they were watching a repeat on Dave. The thing with repeats on that channel is that QI stops being “quite interesting” once you’ve heard Stephen talk about it for the 3rd or 4th time.

But something we have heard 3 or 4 times is that Boris is going to get Brexit done and so this week saw eyebrows raised and pro-EU keyboards smashed as the government took the inevitable step of reneging on past promises regarding Ireland which is hardly a surprising turn of events given the past 5 centuries. In this case it relates to a previous promise made to keep unified laws in northern and southern Ireland. Doing so would in effect make Northern Ireland a defacto EU state given that the Republic of Ireland’s laws regarding trade and customs are largely dictated to by Brussels. London would lose control of goings on in Northern Ireland in much the same way that John Delorean did when the FBI knocked on his door. Thus the only two options are [a] splitting Northern Ireland from British control, or [b] agreeing that the two places will in future be subject to different rules, goodness knows what will happen when someone realises that Guinness is owned and controlled by Diageo which has a stock market listing in London, not Brussels or Frankfort.

The expression being brandished by the BBC is “breaking international law” is also curious in two main respects

1. It happens all the time, notoriously by EU countries yet most notably by Tony Blair who invaded Iraq not long after he agreed the very Northern Ireland treaty in question this week. From hero to zero in less time than it takes him to get a spray tan
2. The concept of international law implies that there’s an international court or jurisdiction to which the UK needs to answer. Where is it? Strasbourg? The truth is that “international law” is a synonym here for “EU law” and that kind of gets to the crux of it. If an EU court passes judgement then whether it the UK complies is up for grabs, especially with a trade agreement on the table and EU’s member states keen sell cars and wine to Britain. The Northern Ireland troubles were a terrible time, but 2 decades on there is no demand for an renewed armed uprising, not least over Brexit. Ironically, in an era of violent looting and “peaceful protests” Belfast is one of the few places in the Western world without racial or sectarian violence. 2020 is indeed a strange place, perhaps I should put £50 on West Ham to win the Premiership.

Well Britain is finally rid of the EU and so depending what side you're on it's either time to open some sparkling wine, or start opening up those hundreds of tins of canned food that the BBC warned you'd need to stock up on. Either way it's better than the old diet where you have nothing but Brussels and keep losing pounds, billions of them. Talking about tinned goods though, it would actually be fairly ironic if the Coronavirus became a global pandemic and the stockpiling thing turned out to have been the winning move all along. Like how Mark Wahlberg was booked on the 911 flight but took a different plane in the end. And actually, I read recently that the Duchess Of York was going to be in the twin towers that day but was running late because of an interview. Weird.

Anyway back to the subject of the EU, the UK is out, even if it took so long that Geras, the Greek god of old age has passed away. Going forward though, certainly the one thing that we'll maybe see less of now is middle class people sitting around Westminster Square with EU flags painted on their face. I always found that a strange one not least because Brexit was never so much about European countries, so much as the specific bureaucratic institution. It's a bit like if those people had painted the Lewisham Council logo on their face or worn a cape embroidered with a map of Waltham Forest singing songs about local government and how nobody was able to work in a different borough until the local government reorganisation back in the 60s

But thus ends Brexit and after 3 years, which television series finale did it turn out most like? If we'd been filming it like Cheers, I guess Nigel Farage would start to walk out the door before turning around for one one last look and flicking of the light switch. In the Game Of Thrones style Brexit ending, Boris is on the Throne and everyone knows that the years long plot about Theresa May being overseas was a waste of everyone's time. The Sopranos style ending would be a good one, you'd see Question Time start up with a panel full of remainers before it cut to black and the credits rolled. As it is, there's the US and EU trade deals to negotiate so it's probably more like Breaking Bad where the ending is pretty satisfying but there's a spin off series coming, featuring some of the same characters. I hear that it features an American tv host in a lead role, let's look forward to that then I guess.

Hello again everyone and apologies about being on hiatus the last 2 week, I was on holiday without access to a laptop, which is presumably the same sort of expression that I imagine the Americans will use to describe Julian Assange's extradition to the US ("on holiday without a laptop") before he mysteriously disappears. On the other hand, it's not as if we missed much, it was mostly another two weeks of procrastination as Westminster sat around doing nothing before I arrived home and they decided to agree to holding a December election.

The Brexit deadlock, October edition, saw Boris achieve the impossible task, no not that of a sensible haircut, but that of getting a much better deal than anyone hoped for. Then it was of course voted out by the MPs because at this stage they've backed themselves into a corner where they'd only rubber stamp a Brexit deal if it ignored the referendum and committed to full European integration. No matter how sweet the deal Boris was able to get, it was always going to bombed more than the RAF over Dresden.

And so finally with Brexit stalemate metaphors running low the MPs have finally decided to toss the dice at an election in December with the outcome almost certainly decided by how many people the Brexit Party put up and whether the public vote tactically. There's a lot of talk about the Leave vote being split but frankly if MPs are as keen as they've been to defy their party, is there any Brexit-related difference between a pro-Remain conservative winning his seat vs is being won by the opposition. In all honesty I think the main story in the whole shambles has been that 50 or so MPs are stepping down. And many of them got about as much say in their removal from office as JFK did.

A couple of weeks ago it was was commanded by the courts that parliament must return to session; it MUST sit, lest civilization collapse, like the England football team in a penalty shootout. So everyone was sent back and almost no work was done because there's frankly little that can actually be done now by MPs until the Prime Minister decides the next move. It's like the bit in a chess game where people are staring at the board while the clock counts down and half the audience are actually starting at their phones looking up the latest scores in the Rugby. Highlights of next week's empty schedule include the appointment of a lay member to the parliamentary expenses watchdog. I've seen video footage of 1970s car factories with more work being done.

The latest proposal on Brexit was to make Northern Ireland part of the customs union but removed from certain other parts of the single market such as freedom of movement and the like. Brussels said no which was a bit reminiscent of that time the band Queen sang "I want it all" mostly because the band ceased to exist a couple of years later. Brussels has made it clear that the single market is sacred and can not be picked at, it's like a bronze statue of a bull like the ancient Sumeraians worshiped, rather than the Sunday beef roast that gets picked at for several days. In both cases, Jean Claude Juncker has brought some wine though.

Of course, that means either no Brexit deal, or London just has to accept Northern Ireland being part of the EU and not the UK. At which though point we have the plot twist requirement that Boris Johnson legally has to suggest an extension, although it's unclear how this will actually play out. Some hope he wil lindicate how he has no intention of chaingins his mind but he'd like to waste everyone's time next year too, at which point many in the EU are keen to just decline the offer. Others have pointed out that a number of countries, Hungary being suggested as one, will threaten to veto any extension unless they get send billions of euros of additional grant money. Again, does the EU really want that to continue indefinitely or will Berlin count on them staying nice and compliant like they were in the 1940s.

One of the major things that hasn't been discussed much is what Nigel Farage has been up to for the past few weeks. He has spent some time in the UK but much of it has been spent annoying people in Europe, giving speeches and using his EU expense account to turn up at pro-nationalism events with the very deliberate aim of poisoning any good will that remains and focus all the EUs animosity that exists towards Britain in one last push to get them to pull the plug. At which point I look on the BBCs Europe news page and they do have a major article about what's been goin on in Vienna "selfie museum aims to make art more enticing" which seems to me about as newsworthy as Jeremy Corbyn's recipe for curried parsnips, and about a good as use of public money as that time the NHS tried to buy a computer.

The last couple of days at Westminsters have been a mess, certainly far worse than anything I've seen and I'm in the process of toilet training a 3 year old. But let's try to simplify and lay out the process of how we got here:

1) MPs don't want to want Brexit to happen, even though the public do and many of those MPs were explicitly elected promising to deliver it. As an analogy This is a like me promising to buy kitchen roll from the corner shop, then spending the money on wine and later refusing tidy up a spilled glass of the wine rather than admit that I didn't want to buy kitchen roll

2) This would normally be resolved by an election, except the MPs will lose their jobs, many are being actively deselected by their local constituencies, and now that Boris Johnson is in power, everyone knows that all they can do is try to delay Brexit as long as they can. It's like watching football supporters calculate how their team can still technically quality for Europe. I guess in this scenario, the constituents live in a small town up north and don't care because the MP supports a different team to them, probably Chelsea in this scenario, it's a London team and come on, only 1 win all season?

3) The upcoming election, when it comes, will comprehensively destroy the Labour party with the majority of its votes going to either the Brexit Party or the Lib Dems, depending on where they are. It will be an English repeat of what happened after the Scottish referendum changed the political landscape from right vs left to right vs wrong as the whole thing transformed overnight into a religious style crusade for vengeance with a show of Scottish anger that hadn't been seen that time Gordon Brown threw a laser printer across the room. Allegedly.

4) What happens next will be determined by who plays the system better. The thing about an unwritten constitution is that it's not written down. The bill supposedly forcing Boris to ask for an extension to article 50 might get lost or amended into uselessness. Maybe Boris will forget to ask the Queen to sign off on the bill, perhaps the EU won't want an extension anyway and don't forget it's also possible that the member states hold the power to veto the decision. I think I'm actually right in saying that (as a member state) Britain could veto it which would frankly be hilarious, watching Boris signing the veto and once more calling for an election while the Facebook servers caught fire. What is certain is that most MPs pushing for Remain seem to believe that it is a temporary thing or one where they are on the popular side, utterly fail to grasp both public sentiment outside of Westminster as well as the vast swell of resentment they're building up outside that bubble.

Ok, so here's a joke to lighten the mood back up. Vincent van Gogh is sitting in a bar and Picasso walks in, "Do you fancy a drink, Vincent?" "No, I've got one ear"

I was once recommended that if you're buying lottery tickets then you should wear apache war paint and an American Indian head-dress because apparently "fortune favours the brave" and talking about that expression, Boris Johnson certainly upped his game this week, finally moving the Brexit saga into the end stage and putting an end to the bespoke stalemate and 3 years of can nothingness that Theresa May had so expertly crafted, in order to grind everyone down. The last couple of years have seen so much can kicking, it was starting to resemble one of those old black and white videos of children playing football. But now May has gone, Theresa May has gone, summer has nearly gone and it's time to take a stab at goal.

Anyway, there's a couple things in life that can be relied upon, like for instance the more out of shape someone is the more liable they are to refer to their favourite football team as “we” and this week was no exception with an especially partisan response from the media. The PM decided to have the usual September break for the party conference season, but he also added on an extra 4 days which was portrayed by many as something akin to a violent coup in sub-saharan Africa. References were also made to Caesar and Napoleon, carefully leaving out the bit where those leaders were wildly popular at the time. It's a strange world the Remainers live in, no doubt they sit round dinner tables discussing how ghastly The Beatles were because of how they smoked, and perhaps (unlike the rest of us) they all thought that Game of Thrones ended brilliantly, if only because the chap sat on the throne at the end of it was disabled.

Really, though, those four days at the end of the standard time off are what the outcry has been about, 4 days when at the same time the complaining MPs could have easily called for an early end to their summer holidays but hey, there's a lot of good shows on Netflix to catch up with. I suppose that in the mean time, life goes on and November draws ever closer. However, two people will benefit immensely from all of this [1] frivolous lawsuit filing Gina Miller who'll be making plenty in tv appearance fees when she's not suing people; seems like she'd really be a lot happier in life if she moved to the US and filed vast predatory lawsuits there, for things like... I don't know... a footlong sandwich only being 11 inches long. Someone else: [2] Shane McGowan from the band The Pogues who will undoubtedly be racking in a few extra royalties after people go online and misspell the word prorogue. Maybe he can use the money to buy a new hedgerow to drag himself through.

Looking over the news this week, I wondered if the climate protesters were up to their usual tricks in London but it turned out to just be the 50th anniversary of the Beatles Abbey Road album and a bunch of idiots commemorated it by blocking the zebra crossing, which happens to be on a major road, while observing motorists sat motionless, wishing that the fans would start recreating the latter minutes of John Lennon's life.

There's also headlines about a power outage, although on further inspection that's something to do with the electricity and not the remainer powers that be losing control of the situation as it dawns on them what I've been saying for months which is that if nothing happens and Boris doesn't actively sacrifice his reputation for the sake of the EU, then the status quo is a no-deal Brexit no matter what they say or do, the timeline of events in already enshrined in law with a approaching sense of optimistic inevitability. It must feel like when you get one of those cards from a delivery company and the depot isn't open until after the weekend but you need that stuff tomorrow. In that analogy, maybe it's FedEx or UPS but Jeremy Corbyn claims to be a mix of the two: "FedUP" or at least he claims to be, on the off chance that he could call an election and get back to making spurious promises and soundbites. Honestly, I think if I had to listen to him stand in Trafalgar square giving a speech I'd rather lie down and cover myself in birdseed, it would be more fun being pecked to death.

Nonetheless there are now legitimate commentators talking about a 3 or 4 Labour front-benchers giving up their vitriolic anti-monarchy work online to visit the Queen and ask her nicely to sack her new PM and appoint them so they can beg the EU for an extension to article 50. It's at this stage you realise that Corbyn is less like Tito the authoritarian Dictator of Yugoslavia and more like Tito out the Jackson 5, a figure of fun, of entertainment value and yet a sideshow while the main act is going on.

The craziest part of all is the idea that a Corbyn government would either have support of the Labour Party, many of whom despise him, or indeed want to stop Brexit in the first place, given how most hard-left policies are now illegal under EU law anyway. All as part of the EUs policy of eventually making all nation state laws illegal I guess.

If scientists ever develop a beer that comes in capsule form, then you could say that it was a "bitter pill to swallow" Apologies, that was dreadful, but something that is going to be a bitter pill to swallow for establishment politicians is that there's some elections coming down the line. In the past you'd normally get 2 parties, both of whom were variations on the same, like having to choose between water and molten ice. However, in both Europe and the US the last year or so has seen the emergence of parties and candidates that look set to do well, even if in past year's they'd have received fewer votes than if Botswana offered to host the Winter Olympics.

All across Europe there has been a resurgence in smaller nationalist parties and the first demonstration of this will be this weekend where Spain will have it's 3rd election in 4 years. Possibly a preview of what Theresa May's upcoming future of never-ending leadership challenges will look like. In truth however, it's more a preview of next month's European elections when traditionally a low turnout combined with a solid vote from the main parties' bases has guaranteed a stitch up and a return to business as usual. This was how Nick Clegg became a member of the European Parliament back in the 90s, when he won a seat after a few dozen Liberal Democrat activists and a stray dog turned up to vote that evening.

This week however saw not only the emergence of Nigel Farage's Brexit party, it also saw it go straight to the top in the opinion polls with many local Conservative Party activists switching allegiance faster than a sports commentator who, having realised that the previously "British" athlete is going to lose, reverts back to describing them as "Scottish" The Scotland connection really is the most amazing part in all of this really: The rise of the SNP in Scotland following the Independence referendum saw the utter collapse of the Labour Party in areas where votes used to be weighed rather than counted, and yet now the Conservative Party is surprised to see the rise of a mainstream Brexit party challenging it, somehow also geared around a singular issue. No concept of cause and affect, no learning from history. The only thing that comes close in political short-sightedness is the SNPs new apparent policy that referendums don't have to be binding, that's one that they may live to regret in another decade or so when Scotland one day votes in favour of independence and Tony Blair once more comes out of the woodwork to lecture BBC listeners about how people earning less than 100k/year are too racist and ill-informed to know what's best for them.

Of course Theresa could kill the Brexit party dead in the water by actually just leaving the EU without a deal, but that would be like when you promise to give up wine on December the 31st - easier said than done. And Theresa May might not like wine quite as much as Jean Claude Juncker does but she does like the EU just as much.

I was once told by a motivational speaker to stand up for what I believe in, and I wondered, "what if it's comfy chairs?" Well this week Theresa May continued to stand for nothing and show no shame as she decided to invite Jeremy Corbyn in for talks, in a similar but different manner to that in which the Ulster police used to regularly invite in Mr Corbyn's friends in for questioning. This has of course gotten nowhere because Jeremy Corbyn is ideologically opposed to both aspects of what she's asking for: [1] helping the UK remain part of an emerging federal state which has strict laws preventing everything the hard left stands for from happening [2] helping Mrs May remain prime minister, he doesn't like that at all! I imagine Jeremy Corbyn has the same desire to help the PM out as he does to go fox hunting. In the mean time, Labour have no doubt promised to back changes to the deal under the condition of reopening coal mines or renationalising the phone industry or introducing a new bank holiday to commemorate Hammas.

The whole pathetic exercise in duplicity and constitutional vandalism is largely futile because any negotiations, especially those involving Europe and trade, take years to conclude and so Theresa May trying to clobber something together in the last week or two before riding off into the sunset is like someone eating all the after eight mints before leaving half past seven, just as the guests arrive. If there was ever any chance of a good deal being struck, which there wasn't, then the government had 2 years to prepare it in and it wasted half of it by calling an election and gambling on the assumption that they'd win more seats and bribe those new MPs with ministerial salaries if they helped legislate for a brexit deal that was nothing more than a rebranding exercise. That kind of idiocy is the reason why the gene pool needs a life guard.

There's that expression "third time's a chart" but it's not always true, as Theresa May found out this week after her third attempt at passing her "deal" achieved about the same level of success as someone heading into a pub claiming they can only stay for one. The Prime Minister's actually discussed having a 4th go at it and it's almost become like watching someone repeatedly failing to give up smoking or learn a foreign language. I wonder whether Theresa has a copy of the novel Finnegans Wake on a shelf, waiting to be started for the 6th or 7th time?

The problem with Mrs May is that you're increasingly unsure whether she knows that she's trying to sell a terrible deal that achieves nothing, or whether she actually believes the lies and spin that her staff repeat to her several times per day, like some kind of weird cult where everyone wears bracelets with the words "strong and stable" etched on them.

The most telling part of the whole vote at Westminster was that its defeat was celebrated as much by Brexiteers as Remainers, at this stage nobody has a clue what will happen, though in the real business world nobody cares, employment is up and the scare stories being put out by number 10 seem about as believable now as a Scooby Doo story set down at the old abandoned amusement arcade. Personally I'm inclined to think that the EU will tell London to sling its hook and that Remain supporting Theresa will have, in the end, unwittingly delivered a WTO rules brexit that, for people like myself who've devoted decades to the cause, will be quite a surprise. And it's pretty hard to surprise me these days. What, there's a toy inside the Kinder Egg? Woop-de-doo, what a surprise.

In the mean time, we can only play the waiting game and possibly await a general election this summer involving yet more deselections, parties splitting and the swingometer replaced with a strange 4-dimensional thing. Still, whatever happens at least we'll be discussing policy and the viewpoints of the candidates, rather than Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich, or the David Cameron story that also by happenstance featured a pig.

It's been an especially violent and confrontational week but luckily today is St Patricks day, when we can forget about everything as we sip on a pint of Guinness and contemplate Ireland's long and famously violence free history. Q: What do you call a bulletproof irishman? A: Rick O'Shea Anyway, for now I'll stop, or should I say "backstop" because I suppose I should get back to the Brexit news.

The week saw Theresa May return to Westminster to have a second go at passing her Brexit agreement and the result was exactly the same, an irony seemingly lost on those wanting a second referendum, In the process, nothing was achieved although a few more MPs gave up any last vestiges of hope in May or Corbyn and Nick Boles actually quit his local constituency party. The lesson there is presumably that he thinks it's better to quit an organisation than to remain inside and reform it from within. I would say that's the definition of irony although surely the definition of irony is not knowing the difference between a definition & an example. Anyway, the next stop in Brexit now is when Theresa May goes to Brussels to ask for an extension to talks. If any one of those 27 countries says "no" then it will be a WTO rules exit in 2 week's time and those wishing to remain will for once be the ones putting the blame on the East Europeans or whoever it was that refused to kneel before Brussels' demands.

The other main story of the week was the shooting in New Zealand. One of the victims was overheard telling the assassin to "stop brother" to which the response was seemingly to point out the bit in the Koran where the Cain and Abel story takes place. There's probably a joke about the IEDs of March in there too but I think I'll just stop for now.

If we have to finish up on a lighthearted note, I did read a story about a prison officer who had been discovered to have had a relationship with an inmate and was sentenced by the judge to four years in jail. I'm not convinced that's going to be much of a deterrent.

With Brexit and President Trump hogging the headlines, sometimes it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of news out there and I don't mean the sports section of the newspaper, or that advertising section selling either made-to-measure chinos or perhaps premium rate phone numbers, depending on your newspaper of choice. I thought this week we'd look elsewhere and talk about 2 other things that happened in the world this week.

First of all to Zimbabwe and here's a joke for you: How does Robert Mugabe like his eggs in the morning? Answer: with the whites separated and beaten. But what has he been up to since he stepped down as president? Well this week it turned out that he'd been the ironic victim of theft. A briefcase was stolen from him containing $1m in cash. They even turned out to be US dollars, not Zimbabwean ones, so all in all pretty serious! Certainly if he was planning on using the money to get his driveway tarmac'd cash in hand then you'd expect it to be long enough to show on on Google Maps. The thieves apparently spent the money on a Toyota Camry, a Honda, livestock and a house, so all in all a mixed and dare I say astute portfolio of assets. Between their investment save and propensity for crime, I imagine that if they don't go to jail, they'll do very well in government.

Next to Macedonia or should I say the "Republic of North Macedonia" after the country changed its name this week, following decades of disputes over the name with neighbouring country Greece which will presumably now be able to throw everything at its dispute with John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Greece has long claimed ownership of the name, it has a northern region which it calls Macedonia and the country to the north, for the past 20 or so years, has formally been titled the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" which I imagine is an era in history that either means nothing if you're young or is tarred with bad memories if you're old and actually lived through the communist era, very much like most of Jeremy Corbyn's policy handbook really. And very much like Jeremy Corbyn, Greece can now get back to running its economy on the profoundly misinterpreted premise/joke that "debt pays off in the long run"

This week Theresa May finally grasped the idea that her deal has about the same chance of being formally enshrined in law as the 5-second rule or that one about stepping on the cracks in the pavement. A few days later and she flew out to Europe once more, expecting the EU commission to ditch ideological purity in favour of pragmatism or economics. There's about as much chance of that happening as there is of seeing Jade Goody being the face on the back of the new £50 note. After 2 years Mrs May seemingly still doesn't get it that the EU will never settle for anything other a deal that involves More Europe. To them the deal as it is gives them Northern Ireland. That's a cause for which the IRA fought unsuccessfully for decades, yet Brussels managed to do it in less than 2 years. Unless I'm wrong and the Prime Minister's simply adopted a mantra of "aim low so you’ll never be disappointed"

This last week Mrs May also finally faced a vote of confidence by her party in which she won albeit she received less than 2/3rds of the votes. This vote may have been a great song and dance number for the news media to discuss for 24 hours but in the long run it was ultimately as meaningful as deciding whether to wrap your fish and chips in the Telegraph or the Daily Mirror.

At this stage it doesn't matter who's in charge of the Conservative party, which I guess is good seeing as how nobody is. But as of this week it's now 7 days less than it was last week and Brexit is steadily coming down the line in March. Also in March? It's St Patricks Day so you can kiss goodbye to any chance of Jean Claude Juncker being in a sober state to make any last minute changes to the timetable. The irony really is that it was the remain camp that insisted that everything having to go before parliament. Now even if Mrs May formally came out and decided she wanted to cancel Brexit, she'd have to go with the LibDems instructions and get parliament to vote on it. It's likely the one single policy to have come out of the words of Nick Clegg and Tony Blair that I wholeheartedly endorse. On that bombshell I'll leave it.

This week we got to see Theresa May in action. Wait, hang on, there's no space in there, it's one word: inaction. This week we saw inaction from Theresa May, a lack of action or persuasion, the amount of productive work you'd normally more associate with a Mediterranean country on a hot afternoon. Even she knows the Brexit bill is terrible but her advisors think that promoting it alongside Jeremy Corbyn on a BBC televised debate might make it seem more palatable, like a prawn sandwich that's past it's sell-by date but still smells sort of ok.

The Brexit bill will be coming to parliament and some Remainers are promoting it with the excitement level you'd expect if Led Zeppelin or The Smiths were getting back together whereas the bill itself is more a knock-off tribute band you'd see if you were on the ferry over to Zeebrugge. Or a get-together of the Brotherhood Of Man except not a lot of back-benchers will be 'saving their kisses for' May.

Currently there's a hundred back-bench government MPs voting against it, the government's science minister just resigned from the cabinet in order to vocalise his objection to it and in this topsy turvy up is down world I for once actually find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with the EU commission because they finally said in so many words what so many of us have wanted from the start which is that we either get a bad deal, or preferably no deal. By which they mean a no deal where you can purchase non-EU goods like Australian wine, coffee, computers, Dysons and a half the Argos catalogue without it being subject to European import duty because it wasn't made in France. Want to buy a Tesla? Wait until it's £10k less because the German car industry isn't passing laws to discourage you from buying one.

Whilst the continent would dearly love to rename Ireland "West Flanders" it stands that this time next it will remain exactly as it currently it because nobody in either Dublin or London is proposing actually building a wall and, as with Mexico, nobody's willing to pay for one even if they wanted it. If that means there's different rules on each side of the land border then it would mean it's exactly the same as it is now currently, with wildly different levels of taxation, business rules, different currencies not to mention a sudden break between the metric system and miles per hour that does little to help anyone other than those wanting to give a misleading 0-60 time for their car, quoted in kilometers.

It seems that British companies might have to start trading with the EU without getting a say on the rules of the game, the same torturous position that companies such as Apple and Toyota have to live with. If you're buying an advent calendar this weekend, get 4 of them, because whilst it's 25 days until Christmas, it's just over 100 until Britain leaves the EU and by a combination of blind incompetence and parliamentary procedure that makes it impossible to legislate for a new referendum in time, nor rewrite a new deal, we're going to be going WTO, by which I mean either "World Trade Organisation" or "Without The Obstructionists"

Theresa May has a couple of different residences: sometimes she lives in Number 10 Downing Street, sometimes Chequers but for the most part she's living in fear and denial.

She's also living in cloud-cuckoo-land as she flies off this weekend to get the EU to sign off on her deal, under the misapprehension that a majority of MPs will vote for it when it comes back to Westminster. When you see the prime minister talking about how great an idea her deal is, it very much reminds of a contestant on the Apprentice proposing some dreadful idea like baby toys made out of lead or a steak+kidney flavoured chocolate cake. I suppose the irony is that Sir Alan Sugar is actually in the House Of Lords.

The latest agreement in many ways has been designed to effectively keep Britain within the EU's framework of laws and regulations, whilst allowing Theresa May to claim that Brexit has apparently happened, I half imagine in a few months she might give a speech from the new Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier with a huge "mission accomplished" banner behind her, like George W Bush did, one year into that never-ending quagmire of deceit and murder.

There's also been an attempt by Downing Street to make Mrs May look professional by squaring down Spain after a spat about Gibraltar that was likely planned weeks in advanced. In truth a Spanish veto was never an issue due to majority voting, and any 'written assurance to work hard' is worth less than the paper it's printed on. Possibly less than the paper an verbal statement isn't printed on.

The only positive thing to come out of Mrs May's trip to Europe is that the local news is likely giving a lot of coverage to the fuel riots in Paris. Perhaps she'll get a sense of what might happen in the UK if she's not too careful. Though perhaps the French wouldn't have to worry about the cost of petrol if they weren't setting fire to so much of it in the streets.

This week Theresa May finally unveiled the details of her Brexit plan and in doing so became about as popular as Peter Sutcliffe at a WI meeting. Troops were mobilised, ministers resigned, letters were written, pieces were given to camera and if a week's a long time in politics, this upcoming week will likely feel like the DFS sale.

If you're clicking the refresh internet news website, waiting for an announcement of a leadership election, it almost feels like the old days waiting for a Ceefax page to tick over and I imagine that the prime minister is currently frantically watching the clock tick by, like a football fan in the 89th minute, aware that the more time that passes, the greater the chance she'll have escaped once more time.

In the meantime, following resignations, there were new cabinet appointees because as they say, "as one door closes, another one opens" which is a great lesson in life but also highly annoying if you have an Ikea wardrobe. Those new ministers then: Stephen Barclay as new Brexit Secretary. It's a job which largely involves signing off dishonest press releases and claiming expenses, ironically the exact sort of European Parliamentary thing we're supposed to be leaving. Amber Rudd is the new DWP minister, the 6th in 3 years by the way, and Northern Ireland minister is Remain fanatic John Penrose. Fans of optical illusions will know that a "Penrose Triangle" is the formal name for that 3D impossible triangle illusion so perhaps it's all just a high-brow joke, placing him in Northern Ireland, the unsolvable part of the Brexit riddle.

Except I doubt anyone right now is in charge or sensibly in control of anything. On the plus side, it is perhaps only now, with Angela Merkel also leaving her job, that it's dawned on Brussels that the same incompetence to negotiate anything of substance, is the same incompetence that makes Mrs May unable to sell their backstop scam and that the UK now looks increasingly set to leave with no deal. The most annoying thing is that were that to happen then in 10 years from now almost certainly be subjected to Europhile careerists insisting that they were playing a long con from the start and they supported a no-deal Brexit the whole time.

Theresa May has had a fairly bad run of luck with her Brexit plans so when I heard that she was heading out to Austria, I half expected her to land in Melbourne after a miscommunication. Nonetheless, the plane touched down and she began a quick round of negotiations that turned out to be about as productive as a Venezuelan factory.

Mrs May had gone over to Salzburg in order to push her Chequers proposal again but whilst Salzaburg was once home to Mozart, this week it was more Like that John Cage piece where there's utter silence for 4 minutes and nothing meaningful happens. The EU's position, like a pretentious European art film is very black and white: you're either in the club or not and Theresa May can either leave with no deal or sign one in which the UK continues to benefit from all of the EU's "freedoms" such as freedom of moment, freedom for the EU's court in Luxembourg to overturn British legal cases, and of course freedom for the Labour party to not have to get round to deciding their position on any of the issues at stake. For Brussels who want ever closer union, Britain gaining special status would be seen as the start of something precipitous, the diplomatic equivalent of a tv show introducing celebrity cameos or major cast changes.

One other option on the table is the Brussels Backstop, where England Scotland and Wales get to go their own separate way but Northern Ireland becomes permanently annexed into being an EU protectorate in very much the same way that allegedly independent Kosovo has experienced over the past decade.

Just as there will only ever be two series of Fawlty Towers, in this political farce there will only be two options on the table: one of which breaks up the UK and one of which likely leads to the overall break up of the EU. In amidst all of it we might also even see the Labour party break up with the more moderate MPs departing to form a new anti-Brexit centrist party at Westminster. Let's hope not though because electoral charts and graphs are already too colourful and garish in my mind without a new pink or turquoise block having to be add to the mix, all for the sake of Tony Blair or Chuka Umunna's vanity.

Lots of Theresa May news week. I don't think there's been this much activity at Westminster since that time Cyrill Smith discovered it was possible to clear his internet search history. Over last 7 days, MPs had had a bit of time to read the details of the Brexit paper that Theresa May put out last weekend and was about as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip

David Davis resigned, as did Boris Johnson along with a number of lesser known ministers and it's currently a case of seeing whether enough Conservative backbenchers (or front benchers) will get round to writing letters to the 1922 committee to trigger a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister. Curiously, the number needed is 48 and 48 BC was when Pompey was assassinated and I'm rather surprised that Boris didn't make a reference to that, classicist that he is. Nonetheless, Theresa's hoping that it's too late for anything other than her plan. I wonder if her and her husband act like that at home? I can imagine them sitting down to see Star Wars but then Mamma Mia starts to play and she points out that they've already paid for the tickets so they may as well just watch the remainder of it, regardless of what his views are on the subject.

Then just when things were starting to settle down, President Trump made his visit to the UK and a whole bunch of people decided to protest, although it was a weekday and if none of them had jobs to go to then I suppose it was something to keep them occupied at least. I just checked and Weatherpoons' share price ended 8p down at the end of trading, tells you a lot really. There was discussions about the trade war escalation with China, there was talk about the US pulling troops out of NATO countries and there was also talk about Stormy Daniels being dragged out of a bar in Ohio after the President's former companion was arrested.

In the end though, very little has changed since this time last week. It's like a sitcom where things happen and everything resets for next week's episode. Except Boris is no longer in a job so I suppose it's much more like President Trump's episodes of The Apprentice.

If you wanted a great visual analogy for Theresa May's premiership then you could do worse than watch a news report on those kids stuck in a cave in Thailand. They're trapped, in the dark and at risk of not making it to the end of the month, and that's just the Prime Minister. Mind you, because those kids have been living under a rock for the last week so they haven't had watch the round-the-clock build-up leading to a football match. Very similar to those other football matches you get most Saturdays. If you want to watch Harry Kane kick a ball around for 90 minutes in a game where half players aren't from England, the Premiership starts in a little over a month's time.

So, the Brexit deal though, what is it? Well you're best asking a civil servant in Brussels, they're the ones that appear to have written almost every page of it seeing as how Mrs May is apparently devoid of ideas. No doubt the interesting parts will be hidden in the appendixes, like when Gordon Brown managed to destroy all the final salary pension schemes by hiding extra taxes in the small print. Will there still be EU regulations for companies not trading with Europe? Will the UK still be majority voted into migration quotas? Will Guy Verhofstadt get majority voted into getting a new haircut? I doubt even the Germans could pull that off.

Right now, let's play a game: imagine that Theresa May has just handed you a wrapped up birthday present, you don't know what's inside but the wrapping paper has the same vague shape as a bottle of wine and it's the same sort of weight of a bottle of wine. Then you open it up and it's an empty bottle of wine but Theresa tells you that in spite of the critics, it's actually a fantastic gift because you can use it to decant wine into in case you need to store some.

Perhaps the idea is that this deal is purposely designed to fall apart so that we can get a no-deal Brexit, something that many want but which is broadly politically unsellable to the public at large. Except that unfortunately Theresa's not that sort of leader, remember that she spent the weekend at Chequers, not Chess.

It's Easter weekend so maybe you're watching this before heading out to a church service or in many cases, the pub. Just be sure to look out for Russian spies because if you see someone lying in the street in the gutter outside Wetherspoons then it could be that it's in fact a former Russian businessman or outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. I'm sure that nerve gas is a good excuse if you return home and you're met with questions about why it took 6 hours to go to the shops and why you're now stumbling around like Shane McGowan attempting to play hopscotch. I digress.

Anyway, the past week saw Russia and the West expelling each other's diplomats: 150 or so, from each side. There was even a mildly amusing incident when New Zealand promised to send all the spies and diplomats back to Moscow but there weren't any in the country at the time. It's a small place mind and more of a red wine drinking sort of a place at that. As for Mr Skripal, he remains in a critical but stable condition, his daughter Yulia's condition is said to be improving and Theresa May is probably concerned that someone, in this case a doctor, is using the term "stable" to refer to something other than Brexit for once.

This week marked the 1-year countdown to Brexit. Mrs May did a small tour around the UK, making generic speeches and invoking all the sparkle and excitement of a car going in for its annual service. If you were watching the news and accidentally reset your TV and had to sit through 5 minutes of it retuning all the channel listings, you didn't really miss a lot. Certainly you wouldn't have missed much about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party's ongoing anti-semitism row, it's not as if the BBC or the like would want to run too many stories about their Messiah in the week leading up to Easter.

Finally, talking about not reporting the news one of the things that the press seem to me missing out in the Skripal case is the link between Sergei the man who was poisoned and Christopher Steele - the former British spy who compiled the dossier alleging that Trump colluded with Russia. Something to go look up now if you've got a spare half hour to waste on youtube and have some tinfoil to hand with which to construct a hat for yourself.

It's snow joking matter, the UK's been so cold that pickpockets have been keeping their hands in their pockets and the counter-terrorism police have considered extending their remit to combat both ISIS as well as just regular Ice.

It's been a while since the UK last had a winter, nearly a year in fact and as usual their's the shots of slow moving motorways, roving reporters wandering deserted small town high streets and my favourite, the shot of hundreds of children sledging and hanging out at the park. It's never explained why the school run was was impassible, leading to the closure of schools, yet the road down to the nearest big snowy hill was apparently clear. In the mean time however, lots of trains have been cancelled although Southern Rail customers have been told that trains will run the usual timetable, by which I mean that you may as well roll a dice if you want to know whether your train will be there. And Scotland was forced to issue a red weather warning which is obviously worse than an orange weather warning but it's still probably preferable to a yellow ice warning.

The snow has also given the news agencies something to talk about other than Brexit. There were a series of speeches this week with very little in the way of new information and it's telling that most people were less interested in Jeremy Corbyn's opinion on the customs union than they were in a few inches of snow landing in his North Islington constituency. Northern Ireland remains a point of contention with the EU attempting to force a situation where a no-deal outcome would involve North Ireland somehow retaining all EU rules and oversight, effectively coming under the sovereignty of Brussels rather than London. A policy presumably borrowed from Nicola Sturgeon. Theresa May decided to borrow an idea too, suggesting "5 tests" purposely designed to fail - an idea borrowed from Gordon Brown and the Euro debate. That's where we are, British leadership relying on borrowed ideas from one of the worst prime ministers in the past half a century.

This week I'd initially planned to talk about Theresa May's cabinet reshuffle except that frankly the most visible change was that the various cabinet ministers changed their shirts and ties between day one and day two. The main news this week (of course) was from Washington DC where the president decided to draw attention to himself. Sure presidents love to steal the show, Bill Clinton famously carried a saxophone with him in order to outshine George Bush or Ross Perot should the situation arise, and there was rumours that he brought the saxophone to the Northern Ireland peace process after someone said that he was going there to support the Corrs. Geddit, support the Corrs? (That Irish band)

Ok, so back to President Trump. The Washington Post this week reported that he'd supposedly referred to the 3rd world using a word beginning with 'S' that was (to use the letter S) a synonym for stool, more severe than the word 'suspicious' and a simply silly suggestion to spout to the scribes. As with many of Trump's proclamations though, even if you do agree with his America First policy, he comes across as a hypocrite as quite lot of his staff at Mar A Lago in Florida happen to be migrants from impoverished parts of Latin America; perhaps he'd have had more success if he'd accompanied the gaffe with an announcement that the Trump organization would cease employing migrant labour and start paying $15/hour for long-term US residents. On the other hand, he did suggest that he wanted people from Norway, a fairly left wing place, to move to the US so that's perhaps as close an olive branch towards centrist politics as we're going to get.

Also, one take away is that if you find yourself living in an economically depressed post-industrial part of the UK, or France, Germany or well anywhere north of the Mediterranean then congratulations, according to president Trump, you're not living in a cesspool after all. It turns out that even if your shopping precinct was recently filmed as part of a video montage for a news report about urban decay, just be glad that you're lucky enough to not be beset by the sort of problems they have in Southern Asia with it's sun and its cheap lifestyle and it's 7% annual growth rates.

Anyway, a day later as part of an encore there was an announcement that the president will no longer be visiting London when the new US Embassy opens up in Battersea. In all honesty though and speaking as someone who used to live near Kings Cross, a lot of Londoners would probably agree with his decision to not venture south of the river.

Big political moves in Westminster and Alabama this week; two places that don’t often have much in common although if you’re a politician from the West Midlands and fancy a holiday to America, why not spend a week at the Hilton in Birmingham - Birmingham Alabama that is - and try submitting the 1st class airline ticket as an “honest mistake” ?

But first let’s discuss the Brexit vote in Westminster. Essentially the parliament will now get to vote on whether they like Theresa May’s deal or not. It’s like the end of a dinner party when the host asks the guests what they thought of it but still refuses to disclose what type of meat was in that stew. But the powers in Brussels are certainly happy enough to move onto the next stage of the talks. They eat frogs legs and raw chicken though so who knows how the second stage will go.

That vote though, according to the press it was the result of a betrayal by capricious tory rebels akin to something out of a John le Carré novel, and now the Labour Party will get the chance to race in on horseback as saviours at the end of the process to vote down the deal and prevent Brexit. Or at least they would be, had the date not already been placed in law and were the EU not already moved onto planning a more federal post-UK Europe. It’s a fact that in around 18 months the UK will now either drop out with Theresa May’s deal, or the likes of the LibDems and the more metropolitan wing of the Labour Party will win their vote and thus deliver a WTO rules Hard Brexit. And a few days later, event at that stage, the Labour Party will no doubt put out a serious of contradictory statements about the future of the customs union with about as much coherence as a Diane Abbott attempting to read the football scores.

So now to the US. This week saw Roy Moore loose his run for the US senate seat in Alabama and the deeply conservative stage chose their choice of spokesperson from the same party as Hilary and Nancy Pelosi. That’s the kind of End-Of-Days black swan event you might imagine featuring in a montage in a disaster movie. But we live in odd times, Scotland has several Conservative MPs after all. But this was more a condemnation of the system. Moore shouldn’t have been the candidate in the first place but not enough people cared during the primaries to kick him off the ballot and once his name was there, they were stuck with it, like a badly installed bathroom. In all honesty I think in the longer term it was probably a good result for the Republican party. If he’d won, the Democrats would have used him as the mascot for their campaigning next year to destroy what was left of Trump’s powerbase. It’s a bit like how in 1992 the Conservatives won a narrow victory but the resulting 5 years destroyed what was left of the Party’s soul and public credibility. They ultimately paid the price for that win. Perhaps if the likes of Jonathan Aitken had lost their seat in ’92 then things would have been very different in ’97.

Brexit news: don't look now but apparently it's going pretty well, for now at least, supposedly. People talk about politicians being out of touch but I always think that for those ministers involved in the Brexit process, getting stuff to happen must be a good analogy for us regular folks trying to get an old car to scrape through an MOT for one last time.

This past week actually started out looking quite bleak on the Brexit front, I'm sure Theresa May was imagining the upcoming news headlines in the way that I used to look forward to an upcoming Shakespeare essay at school: you know how it is, it's Sunday night and you know it's due on Thursday and you know that your claims on what you know are further away from the mark than when when Michael Bay made Peal Harbour. But for now things seem to be vaguely on track; sure the Remainers in the cabinet are still trying to haggle the EU upwards on the fee side of things but on the other hand, the EU federalists seem to be increasingly keen to get rid of Britain and get on with the task of subjugating the continental Europeans without pesky nationalism getting in the way.

But if we want to look for a real dispute, proper gnashing of teeth and wailing, let's look to the wailing wail itself in Jerusalem. This week President Trump decided to say that Jerusalem was the Israeli capital. That went down about as well as a visit by Martin Shulz to Alene Foster's house. This annoyed a lot of people: the Palestinians, the Arab world and don't forget the regular pub quiz enthusiasts like myself who was relied on the knowledge that Tel Aviv was the capital to earn themselves an extra point or two every few months. Bizarrely I saw some Scottish Nationalists getting angry on the internet about it, you'd think they'd sort out the Edinburgh vs London capital city debate first really. But who knows, one day the Middle East might reach a peaceful settlement and send an envoy to head to Glasgow and sort out the ancient Rangers vs Celtic football conflict.

If you’ve been near the high street recently you’ll have seen all the commercial Christmas tat back up. It’s still only November but it’s returned like a bad rash, and you’ll possibly be counting down the days until you can finally open that SmartTV you bought yourself, I mean that you bought for the family. Children are maybe drafting letters to Santa this weekend but in Downing Street, Theresa May’s hoping she’s been a good girl this year as she writes down what she wants and flies off to Europe once again to meet with the leaders of Belgium, Lithuania, Denmark as well as Donald Tusk.

I was going to make some kind of analogy here involving whatever the hot toy is this year that all the kids are after but that would of course imply that the Theresa’s cabinet had a united position on what they were after; right now the demands are something like a train set that comes with hair accessories and plays Nintendo games and costs somewhere between free and £40 billion at John Lewis. Still, it’s probably better than having negotiate the visa conditions for Tracy Island following Brexit or persuading Anthea Turner to come and show Theresa how to construct a Brexit agreement at home with stuff that’s just lying around.

In the mean time though, Angela Merkel won’t be taking part in any of this, she has her own problems at home following the failure to reach a coalition deal and elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s government faces the similar threat of fresh new elections and the Spanish haven’t agreed on what Spain actually consists of. Perhaps the Christmas toy analogy I should have gone for would be a Rubik’s Cube, except it’s some kind of bizarre unsolvable a cube with 7 sides and Germany’s far right AfD party don’t 6 of the 7 sides. And I just remembered that St Nicolas was actually from Southern Turkey and I try to keep things short and succinct so let’s just leave this metaphor at least for now and we’ll wait and see what President Erdogan gets up to in the next few weeks.

Another week and it’s pretty much still the same shouting match from Spain. The central government in Madrid has said that it’s going to take back direct control over Catalonia, while the seperatists have declared that they’re going to prepare an imminent motion for independence. But nobody’s actually done anything, it’s like a nightclub bar at 9 o’clock and everyone’s waiting for someone else to go onto the dance floor first. I guess Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood would be the girls standing round a handbag, knocking back Sambucas before eventually being thrown out for attacking Theresa May with a stilleto shoe, possibly in response to changes to the benefit system, possibly because she was looking at them funny, or possibly just because it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and they don’t like the English. Back to Spain though, they love football, so in the absence of any proper developments maybe a better analogy for both sides in the conflict is: “take a shot at goal or pass the ball”

Also in the news this week though has been the release of 2800 previously classified files on the Kennedy assassination. And around 30,000 files will remain secret because presumably it’s an open and shut case and the CIA don’t want have to waste anyone’s time. I could waffle on about the various conspiracy theories but frankly I’d rather outsource that to the part of the internet that isn’t x-rated videos or Instagram pictures of cats. It has been 54 years since the “lone gunman assassination” or “deep state coup” - depending on where you stand on the issue - and 54 years is almost the same amount of time, as there is YouTube content about the events of Dealey Plaza back in 1963. Lest to say I’d trust a promise from Nick Clegg from before I believe the the contents of the Warren Commission but for now let’s all agree to disagree until we actually get to see what it is that the CIA are so desperate to never let us read.

Catalonia was back in the news this week, the Madrid government has triggered Article 155 to remove autonomy from he region and just like when the UK triggered Article 50, the EU doesn’t like this one much either. It would be true to say that Brussels has the same regard for these articles as Polly Toynbee does for Quentin Letts’ articles. Nonetheless, the powers that be are trying their hardest to make sure if there was any chance of reconciling with the Catalan separatists then it’s up there with Harvey Weinstein’s chances of being trusted to organise a film reboot Charlie’s Angels.

Years ago the EU sat on the sidelines and did nothing while the balkans descended into a bloodbath. Belgium itself has always been close to fragmenting into Flanders and Wallonia and yet Brussels has shown the sort of objectivity and maturity to nationalist movements that makes a student council meeting look like the illuminati. Madrid could have offered an olive branch to Barcelona, figuratively and literally: they love olives in the Mediterranean after all. Except they just decided to transfer thousands of banking jobs out of the region. Now the separatists are encouraging Catalans to respond by emptying their bank accounts and starting a run on the banks, like a sunny version of what the UK saw with Northern Wreck, I mean with Northern Rock. Let’s just hope that Madrid doesn’t go nuclear and escalate things by getting Gordon Brown to fly in and help out, then we’ll be in serious trouble.

Anyway, see you next week; but one thing to look out for by then is this coming Thursday, the 26th, when all the remaining Watergate and Kennedy Assassination files which are set to be declassified. Let’s just hope that ‘events’ don’t happen and that President Mike Pence doesn’t use his first act in office to add another 25 years to the waiting time.

A lot of page filler about Brexit in the papers this week. Essentially nothing of substance has happened for a few days and there’s no proper developments as such. Yet at the same time, there’s no debacles from the White House this week and from a legal perspective, the newspaper lawyers would certainly prefer that their columnists discuss rumours about Phillip Hammond than those surrounding Harvey Weinstein’s ongoing ‘legal difficulties’

The supposed ‘Brexit Battle’ is that Phillip Hammond has refused to set aside money in case there’s no deal whereas other ministers say that we need to at least acknowledge that there’s a possibility of it happening, otherwise we don’t have a proper negotiating position. At the same time though, the EU has said the talks aren’t going anywhere anyway unless the UK writes writes out a cheque, a huge cheque too, like the sort that Nigel Farage might sign after a big Friday lunch at Simpsons, or that a locksmith might make you write out if you were unlucky enough to need their services on a bank holiday.

There are of course some legitimate reasons for some kind of settlement, like paying for the pensions of the EU civil servants that the UK has, after all, employed for the past few decades, and there’s our commitment to some scientific projects that will continue for years to come. But the EU’s costs aren’t itemised in any way and there’s zero explanation of where they got their suspiciously ballpark €100bn figure from other than perhaps reading a beginners book on negotiating and guessing that if they go in silly high like that then the UK will somehow be obliged to meet them halfway in the middle because that’s how they think business works when the option of bribery’s off the table. Perhaps we should just copy their approach, play silly buggers and claim that Brussels actually owes the UK money, then meet them half way at zero.

The big story of the week was supposed to be Theresa May’s Conservative Party Conference speech which, let’s say “didn’t go according to plan” unless that plan was “let’s make a pilot for a political comedy show in the style of Frank Spencer” There was a coughing fit, a prankster, the sign behind her literally fell apart and by the end I was looking around the stage to see if anyone had put a bucket of wallpaper paste at the top of a strategically placed ladder.

On the other hand, it’s been a busy week elsewhere: there was the massacre in Las Vegas followed by the ongoing political situation in Catalonia, which (depending on who you speak to) is either “a constitutional disaster” or “a damn good distraction from events at home!” Personally I’m just looking forward to when Spain vetoes Catelonia from being allowed into the EU and Brussels is forced to decide whether it wants to A) side with the Catelans and therefore support the implicit concept of nationalism or B) support Madrid but in the process let the world see that Catalonia didn’t crumble without the benevolent overreach of Brussels.

As someone from Scotland though it’s pretty incredible seeing how things are playing out in Barcelona. I suppose a Scottish equivalent would have been for David Cameron to have sent the the army into Glasgow 2 years ago with Union Jacks flying, and of course hope that Celtic fans didn’t mistake it for an overzealous troop of Rangers fans. The British army has some of the best troops in the world but I’d question their chances against 500 east-end football fans who’ve spent all lunchtime getting lager’d up and singing support for the IRA. Certainly on the topic of football I do find it amazing that Nicola Sturgeon is so keen to support Catalan independence, it’s hard enough for Scotland to qualify for a major tournament these days without there essentially being a 2nd Spanish team to contend with.

It’s going to happen though, it’s more a question of how long it will take, what the rest of Europe will do to suppress similar secessionist movements and of course how Texas will react. It required someone like Abraham Lincoln to hold the US together last time anyone left the union, but Donald Trump turning out in the end to be remembered as a unifying figure, a new Lincoln or George Washington? It seems about as likely as Theresa May doing something really brilliantly well, whether it be winning an election or just giving a well delivered popular speech.

It’s been a pretty bad week again in Central America, more tropical storms, Mexico suffering a another major earthquake and the other day I turned on the 10 o’clock news and for a while it seemed as though there were now dinosaurs on the loose in Costa Rica but then I realised the clocks don’t go back until next weekend and it was actually just the last half hour of Jurassic Park. The film holds up reasonably well actually, although if I wanted to see an older bearded man introducing dinosaurs I’d turn over to BBC Parliament in the next few days and watch the Labour Party Conference.

Also in the next few days we have Theresa May travelling for Brexit talks in Italy and shortly afterwards it’s the German Election. Everyone’s predicting Angela Merkel will romp home easily, but they also said that about Theresa May and political opinion polls these days seem are about as reliable as a promise from Boris Johnson to not be “up to something.” Never one to shy away from naked political ambition in the past, the foreign secretary has spent the last week or secretly plotting a takeover of number 10 with the sort of quiet scheming subtlety normally more associated with a vagrant outside a wine shop attempting to allegedly purchase a bus ticket.

At least when Vince Cable claims that he and his dozen MPs have a good chance of assembling the next government you can see it for the piece of subversive performance art that it is. Even when Ed Miliband’s claimed he would be the next PM, his expectations equally matched by his desire to wind up his brother.

It’s hard to tell, there’s a thin line between delusions of grandeur and politicians taking the piss. Boris may well fancy himself as a modern day Churchill figure, and he may very well end up as PM but for those who’ve read their history, or who were alive at the time, the 1950s were a pretty grim time for Britain and Churchill’s post-war record isn’t terribly great in any sense of the word. Although for now, Theresa May styling herself as a female Anthony Eden ain’t too great either.

One of the problems with making promises is that you tend to be held to account, so this week we saw a promise about getting rid of petrol and diesel cars by the tear 2040. That’s 23 years from now when a lot of the politicians will be retired, deceased, rotting in a club in St James’ or simply arguing about how many more leadership elections it will take to oust Jeremy Corbyn. Given how electric cars have been coming along though it’s all fairly silly really, there’s an expression that the stone age didn’t end because we ran out stone. Volvo’s already planning a complete switch without needing arbitrary legislation to make them do it and BMW just announced plans for the new electric Mini, which will be build in the UK, #DespiteBrexit

And that brings us onto the other news story of the week, the Labour Party’s Europe policy, or lack thereof. Either way it’s a viewpoint with about as much coherence as bad Game of Thrones fan fiction. They say they want to leave the Customs Union, but still keep it on the table and Corbyn has ruled in and ruled out Single Market membership while Dianne Abbott and John McDonald went on record saying it will still definitely possibly probably maybe be an option. As far as this Schrodinger’s Cat of a manifesto debate goes, it’s probably also questionable who out of the shadow front bench could even define the actual difference between the Customs Union and Single Market.

But for now it’s the weekend people so go out and enjoy the sun! According to a report just out this week, drinking cuts your diabetes risk, so why not open a case of red wine, or possibly some scotch just to be on the safe side. I just my local loan shark walking down the street with a blood stained cricket bat so I guess even he’s off to enjoy some time in the park.

This week the EU claimed that if Britain wants to leave, it’ll have to pay €100bn and it reminded me of that scene in Austin Powers where Dr Evil goes back to the 1960s and demands $100bn and is met by much bemused laughter. Perhaps Brussels want the cash to pay off the Greek national debt or bribe President Erdogan into staying friendly, That is if they don’t embezzle it first. If you ask me we should maybe we can try to kill two birds with one stone by seeing if we can pay any bill by getting them to take RBS off our hand. Or maybe see if we can get renowned financial expert Diane Abbott to settle the bill.

Abbott was on the radio this week displaying her financial prowess in a car crash of an interview where she implied that you could pay the police with glass beads like a conquistador in new world or something like that. Jeremy Corbyn eventually told us it would cost £300m, although he’s also promised that money to arts funding and he’s set it aside for schools and it’s been ringfenced for the NHS as well. Boris lied about £300m once on the side of a bus and look how his campaign for becoming prime minister ended up.

Last year the Remain campaign came out with some ludicrously over-exaggerated claims about what Brexit would mean: 3 million jobs lost, huge tax rises as well as the Islington branch of Waitrose having replace all the artisan Polenta dip with lard or whatever it is that Nick Clegg thinks poor people eat. However, now that Brexit is happening, they’ve decided to double down those stories and the latest claims is that a full scale military war with Spain is coming our way. I imagine that if it were to happen then thanks to cuts in the defence budget it may well end up being settled by a drunken brawl outside a nightclub on the Balearic islands; I don’t know what’s worse really, a shot from a G36 assault rifle or a Club 18-30 quadruple shot of cheap ouzo drunk out of a shoe. The whole thing is utterly bonkers though, even General Franco didn’t try invading Gibraltar and he kinda had a thing for starting wars in Spain.

And talking about Fascists, this week Ken Livingstone came out of his house again and again and again to talk about Hitler and he was subsequently suspended for calling the Labour party into disrepute. The historical point he was claiming is at best dubious but the thing to take away really is that apparently you can be suspended or expelled from Labour if you say things that make the party look unprofessional or disreputable, which I suppose would at least explain why the leadership have kept their mouths shut when asked about policy or what they think about Brexit.

Anyway, for now, if we get drafted into a war with Spain, I’ll see you on the beach, mine’s a pint of San Miguel and otherwise see you next week!

Article 50 has finally been triggered! It’s like the starting pistol of a race going off, if that race was about 400 miles long and nobody had gone near a gym in years and everyone was already bored hearing about it.

So what else has been happening? Well we’re a currently a few weeksinto Lent and for those who are curious, Theresa May decided to give up crisps for 6 weeks. Shortly afterwards, true story, Walkers Crisps announced that they were closing their factory in County Durham with the loss of up to 400 jobs. Makes you wonder how many crisps she was eating, can’t be healthy for you.

On the subject of Health though, America this week saw the latest plan to reform health care fail. As with the Russian stuff and the immigration situation, it’s another ongoing mess, but as Trump himself put it, “Nobody Knew That Healthcare Could Be So Complicated”

It is a tough nut to crack though and I wonder how long it will be until we get a Facebook group set up in order to find a solution? Sean Spicer could put out ideas and his followers could Like or Dislike the suggestions. We do after all live in an age of crowd sourcing. If you’re a businessman short on cash you go on Kickstarter. If you disagree with a news site’s coherent or balanced reporting, you can check out the comments section beneath it for some alternative facts and if you’re the attorney general, you can always ask your twitter followers for legal advice.

Donald Trump built an election strategy on a platform on nationalism and how the country to the south is some sort of dangerous failed state and it seems like it’s a policy idea that Nicola Sturgeon is keen to emulate. Thus we have the proposal of yet another referendum on Scottish Independence. Apparently when people say “no”, they mean “yes” although that seems like a part of the Donald Trump, Bill Clinton repertoire she might want to clarify as being strictly about politics.

Cards on the table, I was in favour of Scottish Independence last time around but sorry, if it now means adopting the Euro and passing control of everything over to Brussels then, like many Scots, I’ll say screw that for a game of soldiers. If I wanted to see what being a small country run by the EU is like, I’d move to Greece; at least they’ve got cracking weather and cheap wine.

The reaction of the financial markets to the shock news though: absolutely nothing because, at least for the next 5-10 years, Scottish Independence is in that basket of “things that won’t happen”, alongside Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister, Heathrow getting a 3rd runway, a coherent budget without U-Turns, or the Lib Dems having a view on last year’s Brexit vote that is either Liberal or Democratic.

Oh, one last thing, it’s Cheltenham this week so a top racing tip to readers, that would be Lunch Hour, 12/1.

Following a High Court Ruling, Brexit was the main topic of conversation at Westminster this week and the opposition benches are in in a confused mess over the whole thing. Labour MPs have really still not come to terms with last year’s vote. Most of them still haven’t managed to wrap their heads around how the public were stupid enough to vote “Yes” – when they were asked whether Jeremy Corbyn should remain party leader. The Conservative side’s not too much better mind, although at least you can rely on people like Osbourne or Cameron to dramatically change their stance to whatever the new PM wants, as long as there’s an all expenses paid speaking tour thrown in. I reckon Kenneth Clarke might even vote yes to Article 50 if you offered him a grotesquely large slap up dinner and threw in some tickets to see Wynton Marsalis playing at Ronnie Scotts.

However the big news was across the pond with Mr Trump, reiterating that he thinks he can get Mexico to pay for a border wall. If he can pull that off and convince Mexico to drop $20 billion on it that then fair play to the guy but I expect it’s going to be a bit like politely asking the BBC to appoint Jeremy Clarkson as Director General. In the mean time Theresa May’s popped in to say hello at the White House this weekend and I imagine there was a lot to discuss, like why it takes about 4 hours to pass through US border control or why he spends more time on his hair than she does.

And finally in entertainment news, Michael Jackson’s daughter came out this week and claimed her father was murdered. New evidence suggests that the finger of blame should be pointed at “The Boogie”

Hello everyone. A long time ago I used to do a lot of cartooning but I’ve not done anything in a few years and I wanted to get back into it. Anyway, as it’s the new year I thought I’d start recording what’s going on in the world with a new cartoon each week.

It’s the end of 2016 so if you’re a celebrity it’s safe to come out from behind the sofa. Probably. In the mean time, here’s Theresa May up on a government building working on the government’s secret 6-part Brexit plan.