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Boris Johnson is apparently AWOL and nobody knows where he is.

It's strange, loads of people insisted a couple of weeks ago when the Lords' amendments were being discussed, that everyone should just get behind the Government, that MPs didn't need to have input on the direction of travel and that anyone complaining about the Government's position was just weakening our negotiating hand. Weird how lots of them seem to have changed their minds.

The hardest working man in his own brain, David Davis has resigned.

They'll give it a week. It's obviously laughably illiterate, and they'll say no before too long. But it would be rude of them to point out that it doesn't work and is stupid when they've worked so hard to even get to here, without at least giving a bit of time to bask in the glory. It would look intransigent otherwise.

The latest customs fudge looks an incoherent, impossible mess - but it does seem to have set the worst people in the country (Farage, Bone, Paterson etc) into an apoplexy of rage. So maybe it can't be all bad.

That's an absolutely excellent post, and one that deserves a good and thorough answer. I can't give you that, so I'll have to go with a short, massively insubstantial answer, which is: I completely agree, the world is full of real, complex problems to which all the possible solutions are just differing shades of awful. Many of them on our doorstep and with our fingerprints all over them. Which is why it's extremely aggravating that rather than investing our significant political capital into that, our entire focus is on a load of trite blather about imaginary sovereignty and the minutiae of trading regulations.

Superlative idiocy from Irritable Duncan Syndrome today. Apparently the CBI shouldn't be trusted when they say that Brexit is a spectacular mess, because their precursor said that appeasement was the best way to deal with the the Nazis. Somewhat forgetting that another group who thought that appeasement was the best way of dealing with that problem was the Conservative government of the time. And the best place to publish these witterings? The at-the-time-Hitler-supporting Daily Mail, obviously.

If you can't tag fully half of your new recruits because they've been removed from Twitter for hate-speech reasons, well, you must be doing something right.

The Americans get it at least. From that C4 documentary filmed in the US embassy. "The government isn't interested in telling people, this thing that 52% of you voted for, here are your range of options - there's less good and there's very, very bad" The smirks on all the faces around the table seem to say "well, at least there's one major democracy even more politically incompetent than our lot..."

"Business" just won't stand for it. BMW will phone up Merkel and get her to change the rules of the Single Market. Any day now...

I definitely remember reading stuff like that somewhere before.

To be fair, I don't think he ever said he would resign. He said he'd lie down in front of the bulldozers. And I think that's a Boris promise that the whole world can get behind.

It's not really. He mocks Boris. Then she mocks Boris some more. I'm as happy as anybody to laugh when Tory MPs do and say stupid things and there's probably more opportunity to do that now than any other time in history. But this is nothing more than "Tory MPs who don't like Boris laughing at his weakness and hypocrisy". This is good, not bad.

They're taking the piss out of Boris.

(Andew Marr reads quote) Marr: “Do you agree with it?” Jeremy Hunt: “No.” Marr: “You said it.” Hunt: “I don't agree with the line of questioning"

One for those on the mid-point of the anti-bigotry / parent-of-a-two-year-old-and-thus-familiar-with-this-series-of-books Venn diagram.

BMW now following Airbus's lead. I wonder how many companies will have to leave and how many jobs will be lost before the cult followers will start to wonder whether this is the path they were promised...

Greg Clark has said that it's essential that free movement of UK labour continue. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jun/22/greg-clark-free-movement-uk-workers-eu-vital-brexit Can anyone offer any plausible justification why inward free movement of labour should be stopped, while outward free movement of labour should be allowed to continue unhindered?

Followed on The Times front page with "Government tells people 'hey, picking fruit for a living is actually a pretty good life" At least they've kept their sense of humour.

Absolutely. I expect that if they do try and force her out then she'd still survive the no confidence vote, as there is still no appetite amongst Conservation MPs to replace her yet. I don't see any mechanism for a new election unless the full-on apocalyptic Brexit happens. It'll probably be more or less the same as now until October, then we'll have constitutional crisis season then.

The above is basically a paper written by Henry Newman of Open Europe a couple of months ago. He's one of the slightly sharper minds of those who thought this was a good idea, in that he at least acknowledges what the problems are, rather than just thinking that ignoring them is the same as them not existing.

But as you say - there isn't a "more positively" solution. And it's a case of "which promise of someone saying they are definitely not going to do something" gets broken. Of the three that apparently aren't going to happen, 1) no border, 2) the UK agreeing to keep things just as they are from their side and 3) the EU just agreeing to keep everything as they are from their side, I'd say that (3) is the least likely by quite a long way.

Hmm. Maybe not the Premier League but... Biggest in the world at the end of the nineteenth century, muddles through much of the twentieth century with periods of extreme glory punctuated by periods of humbling decline, all the while having the feeling that we're never again going to be as big as we once were. The latter part of the nineties, the optimism picks up, under the stewardship of someone who looked like a bit of a saviour once upon a time, but by around 2005 pretty much everyone hates him and wants rid. When he finally does one, a new era starts at the end of the decade, with an unexpectedly professional feel, with new people in charge. The early glow doesn't last long though, and ultimately cutting back the finances means that things get worse and worse. Around 2016, the arse properly falls out the bottom of it, and the couple of years since see catastrophic mismanagement piled on top of mismanagement as we all try frantically to come to terms with terrible, self-inflicted decisions. And Sherwood is definitely the Farage of this tale.

Yes, no and maybe. It's important to remember this isn't happening in a UK / Ireland vacuum. If there is a "porous" EU frontier, then the other 26 countries aren't going to shrug their shoulders and carry on as before. If they feel that the external border of their internal market isn't being appropriately policed, they will do it themselves. So Irish exports into France and Spain will be treated as if they were coming from outside mutually regulated territory. Current opinion in Ireland (at least, the last time I saw it being reported) is pretty firmly behind Varadkar's handling of this, and anger there is mainly directed at the UK rather than their own Government. Whether that is still the case if they are being forced to deal with the fallout, who knows. However, if it is a proper, chaotic, crash-out at the end of March though, nobody's attention will be on sanitary checks on crates of butter and cheese going through Derry and Lifford for a long, long time.

[Speculation] A decent number probably think we left sometime in summer 2016 and haven't given it two minutes thought since then. [Speculation\]