On Brexit island it’s all getting a bit Lordships of the Flies

Marina Hyde

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How promising to learn that there is going to be another cabinet “crunch meeting” next Tuesday to discuss the customs issue. Cabinet “crunch meetings” on Brexit are like Super Sundays on Sky Sports. There seems to be one every week, and the only thing that changes is the definition of the word super. And now the word crunch. A friend of mine at university once pressed snooze on his alarm clock for eight and a half hours. Can you imagine? Every 10 minutes – a sort of torturous, self-punishing deferment that ends up being the worst of both worlds. This remains Britain’s Brexit strategy.

You can’t do it for ever, obviously, as was pointed out this week even by auto-satirical political entity Nick Timothy – not so much a man as a piece of performance art about the limits of self-awareness. In his latest newspaper column, Nick breached his political restraining order to tell his old boss to ditch her customs partnership plan, and back the “max fac” option. Furthermore, he explained, No 10 needed to “get on with it”.

Can anyone – doesn’t have to be election-caller-and-cocker-upper Nick Timothy – think of a reason why the prime minister finds herself even further up this creek than she was a year ago, with the clock ticking ever louder? Whatever that reason may be, it is not mentioned in Nick’s article. Never is. Nick Timothy is the opposite of the Ancient Mariner – he’s compelled to wander the world not telling the story of what he’s done to everyone he meets.

‘Nick Timothy is the opposite of the Ancient Mariner – he’s compelled to wander the world nottelling the story of what he’s done to everyone he meets.’ Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Last year, a senior figure on the leave side reflected to me that “the trouble with Brexit is that it’s the British establishment that has to deliver it”. I mean … who did they think would deliver it? A technocratic brains trust featuring Pep Guardiola, the late Steve Jobs and Oprah? Alas, such fantasising is common among Brexit’s architects, who will eventually tell us that the problem wasn’t Brexit itself, but the way Brexit was done. A lot of people still reckon the same about communism. It’s a nice thought, I suppose, but it isn’t going to butter many car plants.

There was Vote Leave mastermind Dominic Cummings, who explained, just the six months after Article 50 had been triggered, that we needed to “reboot” the civil service and Downing Street. And now there’s Daniel Hannan, who popped up this week to agree the bed was being shat – I paraphrase slightly – and to concede that those suggesting Brexit is not working out quite how he thought it would “have got a point”. As Hannan put it: “I had assumed that, by now, we’d have reached a broad national consensus around a moderate form of withdrawal that recognised the narrowness of the result.” Had you? “Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups” – and if you weren’t a plastic populist, you’d have picked that up from Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.

Ingénu-in-chief, naturally, is our wantaway foreign secretary. Ever anxious to leave the scene of his own fart – presumably so he can sweep in with the Airwick next year – Boris Johnson spent the early part of the week indulging in more provocative insubordination, calling the prime minister’s customs plan “crazy”. Perhaps this is yet another crack at suicide-by-cop. It’s certainly a reminder that Boris will always be the Tories’ Raoul Moat – lionised as a #massivelegend only by a particular type. You know exactly which type; unfortunately we don’t use the word in the Guardian unless it’s in reported speech.

Yes, it’s all getting a bit Lordships of the Flies on Brexit island. Rather cruelly miscast as Ralph is Jacob Rees-Mogg, who this week said of the upper chamber: “It is not a loved institution, it is a tolerated institution.” Bernard Jenkin is another arch-opponent of Lords reform who now conveniently regards the other house as preposterous. How’s Bernard managing this contortion? The Lords are, he reckoned this week, “drunk with their own prejudices”. At some level, it feels apt that Brexit has already descended into a pub car-park fight about who’s more drunk, given that heavy drinking is the only discipline in which we would probably win the world cup every time.

Indeed, the customs endgame is starting to feel like a warm night in a European square, with England two disastrous matches into a tournament. Rees-Mogg is already in a plastic tommy hat and eyeing the cafeteria furniture – the analytic equivalent of the fan who thinks the reason the side aren’t doing well is because they aren’t playing with enough “passion”. They don’t want it enough, was basically his verdict this week on the UK’s negotiators.

Eventually, alas, these big men will settle on a scapegoat they can actually win against. They will find a way to blame the “other” that Brexit was supposed to guard us against. But for now, as the New Statesman’s George Eaton noted this week, the House of Lords joins the BBC, the judiciary, the civil service and the free press in the range of British institutions being blamed by Brexiteers for sabotage. This, more than anything, confirms that the UK has officially left the aegis of Eurony, the EU irony agency, and is operating in a non-regulatory deadzone.

What is the England (and it is an England) that this particular type of Brexiteer is trying to get us back to, if it isn’t the House of Lords, Test Match Special on the Beeb, the quiet Rolls-Roycery of the civil service, out-of-touch high court judges, and a press who’ve mostly printed any old lie about the EU for the best part of three decades? No offence, but that is their romanticised past, their Albion, their Britain as it might dare to be again. Don’t turn on it now, guys! We see you!

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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