There is only one conceivable benefit of “getting Brexit done” (© Boris Johnson’s stuck mouth). It might rid us of Nigel Farage, as he’ll be done too.

He’s been there for years, a piece of used chewing gum stuck beneath the nation’s shoe.

Carelessly disposed latex sap he may be, but Farage is a highly effective politician. US President Lyndon Johnson said of his dangerous rival J Edgar Hoover: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

The crude image stands the test of time, and you cannot imagine Donald Trump saying something so cleverly contained.

Farage has been standing outside the Westminster tent and pissing in for years. Must he all that beer he drinks.

He has been unable to enter mainstream British politics because no one wants him for their MP. And he won’t be standing in this general election (eighth time unlucky isn’t a good look, but then neither are those mustard cords).

An elderly passer-by in Wales buttonholed Farage on the BBC news, condemning his cowardice. And, yes, he is a coward and a bully and a Brexit braggart.

But he still wins without winning. He influences our politics in devious ways, using allegedly suspicious money and the dark arts of social media to spread his message. Like his pal Trump, Farage is anti-politics in the sense of wishing to smash the system and rearrange the pieces to his benefit.

Yesterday Farage announced was pulling his Brexit candidates out of the 317 seats won by the Tories at the 2017 general election.

This is surely a pact by another name, and a typical Farage manoeuvre. Raise a racket saying you aren’t going to do something; then do it anyway.

His decision is a boost for Boris Johnson. But it should concern anyone who fears a hard Brexit. Farage has only ever wanted the sort full-metal Brexit that throws Britain to the deregulated winds.

If we’ve learned anything, and God knows it’s hard to remember what that might be some days, it is this: if Nigel Farage approves of something, then it’s a terrible idea that will benefit him and be bad for us.

And if it’s reassurance you seek, don’t hang around here. What we could end up with is a hard Brexit as divvied out by Johnson, Farage and Trump. How sweet that Farage should change his mind shortly after being told to do so by his pal Trump the Tweet.

As Farage has been recorded mouthing off about how we need to sell off the NHS to insurance companies, the thought of what that trio might agree among themselves falls many feet short of comforting.

Farage is managing to upend our lives without being a proper politician. Instead he is the self-appointed MD of the shady company known as the Brexit Party. Incidentally, all those 300-plus oddballs who were going to stand as Brexit MPs paid a non-returnable £100 each for the right to be considered. That presumably nets Farage £31,700.

Plenty remains unknowable about this election. Will this latest act of attention-seeking from Farage be as good for Johnson as it looks?

Maybe.

If Farage and Johnson have reached some sort of accommodation, the so-called progressive parties need to do the same. Unless Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson would prefer to carry on hating each other while letting the real nasties scuttle through.

Boris Johnson just did the piffle-waffle shuffle in Downing Street. This dance requires two left feet; or, in his case, two right feet.

He’d just been to see the Queen, he said. Tempting to imagine the royal muttering: “Oh, God, look it’s him again, Bad Penny Boris. Last time round he conned me into giving a totally unnecessary Queen’s Speech – and it wasn’t my speech at all, but a disguised Tory party political broadcast. If he wins, he’ll be asking me to give another Queen’s Speech. Think I’ll give it to Charles – or maybe Meghan, that would be a giggle…”

Johnson boomed; Johnson waffled. Johnson pretended none of this was his fault; Johnson trundled out old gags, a comedian with thumb-smudged material.

Like the one about how you don’t want an election, he doesn’t want an election – it’s all the fault of those pesky MPs who won’t do his bidding.

Johnson wanted to eat his own tie in frustration over Brexit. Which is funny because I want to chew my own fist whenever he begins one of his choppy speeches, all booming cadences and empty-vessel rattle.

I don’t know about the state of upper-class dentistry these days, but Johnson must have lies for fillings. Every time he opens his mouth, they come flying out.

Johnson said again his Brexit deal was “oven ready”. That deal isn’t oven ready but frozen solid and slowly dripping cold blood. And it will continue to drip for about ten years. Oven ready for Christmas 2029, yummy.

Johnson bragged about his “108 or so days” in office and smuggled out a few questionable claims. The biggest investment in hospitals in a generation with 40 new ones on the cards; 20,000 more police on the streets. Ahem, those hospitals are a Tory pledge not an actual achievement – as are the 20,000 coppers; and all those ‘new’ coppers would only replace ones lost to austerity.

“So I say, come with us,” Johnson boomed.

Oh, no thank you. I don’t like the look of the company you keep.

Johnson kicked off the Tory campaign a day after the Conservatives united in looking horribly out of touch, shabby and cheaply opportunistic (other views are available, but they might not be right).

Day 107 Or So in the Posh Brother house saw Jacob Rees-Mogg say on the radio that the Grenfell Tower fire victims did not use “common sense” when they stayed put in the burning building.

Leader of the House Rees-Mogg told LBC’s Nick Ferrari that if either of them had been in a fire they would “leave the burning building” – the implication being that those who died were somehow not as smart as him.

That was certainly the implication burnished by fellow right-wing Tory Andrew Bridgen, who suggested Rees-Mogg was cleverer than those who died in the fire.

Both men later apologised; then a different sort of Tory apology bumbled out into Downing Street to deliver his stand-up act.

Day 107 Or So in the Posh Brother house also saw the Conservatives put out a party-political clip on social media apparently showing Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, unable to answer a question put to him on ITV’s Good Morning Britain.

Starmer had answered the question but the footage was doctored to show him unable to explain Labour’s Brexit position. A fake advert on behalf of a fake PM.

Day 108 Or So the Posh Brother house: a huge quote from Boris Johnson on the front of the Daily Telegraph compares Jeremy Corbyn to Stalin. Oh, piffle-waffle shuffle off please, mate.

I’m meant to be listening to BBC Radio 3 in the mornings instead of swearing at the Today programme. In my defence, all I did was wander into the kitchen and turn on the radio; and there Michael Gove was, doing his usual horrid turn, oleaginous and shouty in the same short breath (we all have our talents and that is his).

It’s about time someone invented a radio that turns off as soon as Gove starts speaking.

That man is so irritating, he gives Nigel Farage a run for his money; our money.

I am happy to be corrected and to be told that Gove is an awfully nice man. Perhaps his wife, the Mail columnist Sarah Vine, will send good word. But based on our radio acquaintance, all I can conclude is that Michael Gove gives a good impression of being a nasty creep.

Presenter Mishal Husain asked Gollum Gove why Downing Street was sitting on a report into alleged Russian interference in UK democracy.

This report has apparently passed through the usual security clearance process, but No 10 is said to be stalling on its release until after the election. As the report examines Russian activity and allegations of spying, subversion and interference in elections, you might think we should hear about it.

Normally we would, but Downing Street is gaming this election as best it can, pulling every dirty trick in the book, and a few that haven’t made the book yet.

Gollum didn’t answer the question from Husain (and what a cool yet smart presence she is). Instead he just said “Corbyn is the real threat to national security” for five minutes.

Let’s untangle this one: Jeremy Corbyn can’t be trusted on national security says the government that refuses to release a report how the Russians might have interfered in our elections; ahem.

This report from Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee was finished in March and referred to No 10 on October 17, according to the BBC. No 10 seems to be shoving it under the hall carpet until after the election. As this report considers how our elections may have been tampered with by the Russians, it’s clear we should see it before voting.

Ah, yes, the election. I know how I won’t vote and that’s a start. It won’t be Tory for reasons stretching back all my voting life; it probably won’t be Lib-Dem because they seem possessed of an unearned cockiness under new leader Jo Swinson. It could be Green because they talk sense; or it might be Labour as normal, even though the hand that makes the cross may feel heavier than usual.

One thing to consider is that promises made at election time might as well be written on the wind. David Cameron pledged in 2015 to build 200,000 so-called starter homes. A report today from the National Audit Office says not one of those new homes has been built. Not one.

The government response, again according to the Beeb, is that it had a “great track record” for house building. Ah, yes, much in the way that I have a great track record for writing best-selling novels.

But if anyone would like to invent that Gove-silencing radio, I’d be up for one. It could switch off for Farage too, of course, and Johnson. Oh, and in fairness, it could fall silent whenever Labour’s Barry Gardiner has his turn at being annoying.

A bellyful of politics is going to be our lot almost until the bellyful of food interlude.

Perhaps you are sated already with the bread sauce of Brexit, stuffed with the glum pudding of another election.

Understandable, but one story this weekend offers antacid to neutralise the indigestible load. It is that the Daily Telegraph has been forced to apologise for a column written by Boris Johnson shortly before he gave up his day job of dashing off last-minute columns to become a prime minister who dashes off last-minute policies.

The Telegraph coyly avoids mentioning the prime minister by name, referring to him only as “the columnist”.

Johnson had falsely claimed something, you see – hardly surprising from a man who could swear dusk was dawn, even as the morning chorus rises to heckle him.

In his column, Johnson claimed the UK was set to “become the largest and most prosperous economy in this hemisphere”. Throwing in “this hemisphere” is typical Johnsonian hyperbole, a colourful phrase plucked from the drawer where he keeps a tattered collection (anyone who writes has one of those, Johnson’s is just deeper).

He also said the British economy would overtake Germany “in our lifetimes”. The Telegraph admitted the claim in effect was based on glancing at a real economic forecast from the OECD. It was “the columnist’s own extrapolation of this data beyond the timeframe of the forecast” – a lofty way of conceding that he’d made it up.

The data was only based on European countries, so could not justify Johnson’s boast about the UK economy outperforming all nations in the northern hemisphere.

The Telegraph had to print this apology because of a complaint to Ipso, the newspaper regulator – the third such bit of in-print grovelling in relation to Johnson’s column.

This makes me wonder if we shouldn’t have a new regulator for politicians who knowingly speak blatant bollocks – a weighty responsibility, it is true. Johnson alone deserves his own personal regulator, dedicated to correcting his lies, exaggerations and slippery evasions.

A telling anecdote about how Johnson operated as a journalist is to be found in a report on the Guardian website. This has been told before in other contexts, but here goes.

Media editor Jim Waterson reminds us that Johnson always left writing his Monday morning column until the last possible moment, leaving a brief window on Sunday afternoons, before sending it off. “His copy would often arrive shortly before the Telegraph’s print deadline, leaving little time for editors to make changes and fact-check his claims, according to individuals who had to deal with it,” Waterson writes.

A strategy to make himself the most important writer in the room – and a breezily arrogant way to dodge the rules as they apply to everyone else. A selfish but effective tactic as a columnist, but you can see how such entitled behaviour rubs into the political cloth, too.

Bluster and blab, make something up, exaggerate a shrivelled acorn into a mighty oak, and you’ve got yourself a workable policy.

Or workable for five minutes until you spot another wheeze (ban fracking, raise the pension, cut taxes, open a few hospitals, replace all those police officers your lot laid off, and so on).

Columnists like a colourful phrase, as I know. Ex-columnist Johnson cannot shake off his old habits, referring this weekend to his “oven-ready” Brexit – and yet, even then, he muddles his metaphors in rush. This “oven-ready” Brexit is ready to “put in the microwave”, which doesn’t make sense: one is ready for the oven, the other for the microwave.

If nothing else, this suggests he doesn’t know how to use an oven or a microwave.

Personally, I’d prefer a Brexit that was ready for the freezer, to be forgotten amid a frosted pile of boxes and plastics bags that have lost their labels.

Donald Trump’s intervention in our general election breaks all conventions. But never mind, it’s of fleeting value as everything he says nowadays sounds two strides the far side of completely bonkers.

His praise for Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and his accompanying contempt for Jeremy Corbyn, should surprise no one. But the manner of his intervention tells us something about the way politics is being devalued.

You don’t have to dig deep on Twitter to find burrows full of Jeremy Corbyn supporters complaining about the right-wing media and the BBC. Yet let’s push that argument aside for now and have another one instead.

Trump made his comments in a call to Farage’s own radio show on LBC. Never mind Laura Kuenssberg being mean about Saint Jeremy; surely Farage having his own Fox News-style phone-in to promote himself and the Brexit Party, while upending our politics, is much more of a media outrage.

Not only has he been given this shoddy broadcasting platform, but he gets his buddy the president to phone in the praise. All many shades of wrong, although there is room for debate about the benefits of Trump bigging you up. While he praised Johnson with one fork of his tongue, Trump also dragged him through a hedge too, criticising his deal with the EU.

As well as blathering on about how great Johnson and Farage would be as a team, Trump said Corbyn would be very bad for Britain. And that from the man who has dragged the US down every available ditch (including one or two that didn’t contain Boris Johnson).

On the day that Corbyn launched his election campaign with a stirring defence of the NHS, Trump insisted the US wasn’t interested in owning parts of our health service.

The Sun says today that this “destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s most powerful attack line”. Well, perhaps – but only if you are prepared to believe a tatty word Trump says, and no one should ever do that.

Another line on Trump’s intervention is that it’s a boost for Corbyn, defining who he is by what he stands against. If Trump’s against you, it can’t all be bad and might well be for the good.

Corbyn’s launch, as viewed through the allegedly hostile lens of the BBC News, looked impressive. The Labour leader lives for this stuff, if not much else, and knows how to woo a friendly crowd – a skill he shares with Johnson, who also tickles the faithful. In anything, an on-form Corbyn is the better speaker, as Johnson soon descends to spouting improvised platitudes and spluttered nonsense.

Most of the front pages today, an old-fashioned metric perhaps but one I still use, concentrate on Trump wanting a Boris and Nigel love-in. Only the i newspaper plays a straight bat on Labour with the splash headline: “Corbyn vows to transform UK by tackling wealthy elite.”

Oddly, the Labour-supporting Mirror eschews proper politics with a bit of nonsense about departing Speaker John Bercow allegedly wanting a million quid to appear on I’m A Celebrity. Not greed, it seems, but deliberately pricing himself out of the show.

As for the NHS, the potency of this as an election issue is shown both by the chanting supporters at Labour’s launch and Boris Johnson spending more time in hospital than a junior doctor (thankfully, a real junior doctor heckled him yesterday during yet another opportunistic hospital visit).

There is something distasteful about the way Johnson uses hospitals and schools for a rolling party-political broadcast. Does there come a point where this shouldn’t be allowed? Especially from the leader of the party that devoted a decade to austerity, and only woke up to the benefits of state munificence when an election loomed on the horizon.

Incidentally, my favourite pun on the Trump intervention in our election comes in the emailed Mirror Politics morning newsletter: “All the president’s phlegm…”

Nice one, lads and lasses of Mirror Politics. But a threesome with Trump, Farage and Johnson? God, no thanks…

Workington Man will decide this election, according to the Conservative party think-tank, Onward.

Apparently, no women live in Workington, or if they do their voice doesn’t count.

These labels always slip between gruesome condescension and downright stupidity. In this instance, it would be understandable if the people of Workington resented being stereotyped by Onward as rugby league-loving men who live along the M62 corridor and might just vote Tory.

Well, corridors have doors and perhaps those doors will slam shut.

Workington Town put out a statement saying they wouldn’t be responding to all the media requests coming in for comments on “Workington Man”, saying they were an apolitical club.

Incidentally, Onward describes itself as “a powerful ideas factory for centre-right thinkers and leaders”, which perhaps is all you need to know. I have no idea what an ideas factory looks like but suspect it’s all meetings and no smoke coming from chimneys.

Thanks to Miranda Green in yesterday’s Financial Times for reminding me about another lost tribe – Pebbledash People. They were going to swing the 2001 election for Tory hopeful William Hague. His strategists calculated that some 2.5m people lived in pebbledash 1930s semi-detached houses in marginal seats.

You can have as many strategies as you like, but it doesn’t mean they’ll be any good. Hague lost that election and Tony Blair was returned with a landslide majority.

Other voting-intention groups have included Mondeo Man and Sierra Man – both now sounding as dated as the cars that attended their christenings.

But Pebbledash People must rank as the least successful political grouping of all. Back then, we lived in an Edwardian terrace and remained free of political assumptions based on vertical adornment to the front of our house. Funnily enough, we now live in a 1925 semi with a spot of pebbledash out front, so if you want to call me Pebbledash Semi Man That Could Do With A Spot of Work, that’s fine by me (it’s the house that needs smartening, not me – unless it’s a particularly lax day).

Anyway, I am glad to be reminded that the Pebbledash People did for William Hague and like to imagine that they pelted him with pebbles borrowed from the front of their houses.

These groupings are not only condescending, they are also old-fashioned and generally based on notions of how people used to vote. They don’t speak to the whole country but pay homage to the shabby idea that pandering to clusters of swing voters will win you the election.

But at this Christmas election, we are all swing voters now. Either that or to a man and woman we belong to the Oh Piss Off With Your Election It’s Nearly Christmas Party.

Early presents of a dubious nature will be shoved under the tree soon. Boris Johnson’s elves are no doubt already busy wrapping up lies and shoving into stockings the latest issue Tory-issue myths and exaggerations.

Jeremy Corbyn is dusting off his Socialist Santa outfit. And, you know, it’s a good look and at least he believes in what he says; whether he can deliver any of those parcels is another matter.

Oh, go on, if you insist, here too is Lib-Dem leader Jo Swinson, swearing that she ain’t gonna help no such Santa, and telling everyone she can win and become prime minister all by herself.

According to a Huffington Post article by Paul Waugh, Swinson is following what her advisers term a “bicep kissing strategy”. I am guessing this refers to kissing her own biceps as a show of strength and self-belief, although frankly I have no idea what goes on at those Lib-Dem parties.

That unusual strategy, according to Waugh, is to “make big, bold claims about how tremendously you’re going to do, in order to convince the public that it’s possible”.

Perhaps we should all club together and buy Swinson a video of David Steel’s speech as Liberal leader in 1981. It’s very long and boring, but it ended with words that have never been forgotten ­– “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government”.

Spoiler alert, that didn’t happen.

Mark Francois, the bumptious Tory MP, has been one of the incidental pleasures of Brexit. You may recall call that Francois said the country would explode if we hadn’t left the EU by Halloween.

I’ve checked and the country hasn’t exploded. Boris Johnson isn’t dead in a ditch either, although I keep looking into that muddy rut.

As for Francois, from the deepening puce of his face he could explode at any minute, so best stand back. If Farrow & Ball are looking for a new colour, they should scan a photo of his furious visage and bring out a paint called Ox Blood on College Green or something.

That’s where Francois seems to live nowadays, bumble-bumming between the cameras outside the Houses of Parliament, an over-boiled kettle made too solid flesh.

Still, entertaining as he is, Francois is a but a bit-player on this sorry stage. Boris Johnson sits at the eye of the storm – a tempest mostly of his own making.

Yesterday, Johnson failed in his latest bid to get a snap election, but will try again for a fourth time this afternoon. Yesterday’s wheeze tripped over the rules of the Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 – as smuggled under the sheets by the Lib-Dems during their love-in of convenience with the Tories.

Johnson told the BBC the other day that we needed “to be released from subjection to a parliament that has outlived its usefulness”.

An anonymous No 10 source, that curse of our politics right now, then lobbed another brick into the pool, telling reporters: “If parliament refuses to allow Brexit and refuses to allow an election, then what’s the point of parliament?”

Johnson says this parliament must go because it is “dysfunctional”. The thing is, this parliament isn’t dysfunctional – it’s just not functioning the way Johnson wants it to. It even functioned well enough, on his terms, to see the beginning of the end of Brexit – only Johnson then stopped the withdrawal agreement bill, to which he had allocated three measly days in the House, insisting instead on an election on his terms.

This all chimes with his posho-thug attempts to upend the norms of political life in this country, tearing up the usual laws, rules and procedures because they don’t do what he demands.

Johnson didn’t want parliament to discuss or probe his agreement – almost certainly because he didn’t want anyone reading the small print. He wanted a hurried agreement, no questions asked.

He wants his election in the hope he can then smuggle through an even harder Brexit than he is owning up to. Brexit remains essentially a hard-right plot to undo British life, dressed up with a swag of sovereignty to fool the masses (and a spot of xenophobia to charm the charmless).

That isn’t how parliament operates, and this one should stand firm against a prime minister on the make. Better still, this parliament should deny Johnson his election. Sadly, that seems unlikely as Jeremy Corbyn has just issued a statement saying Labour will support an early poll.

In this morning’s newspapers, to conflate two unflattering headlines, Corbyn is the snookered chicken of British politics. Snookered by his indecision over Brexit (or his even-handed and mature brilliance, if you believe the faithful) and his reluctance to call the election he has always said he wants.

The opinion polls are dire for Labour – a depressing thought when you consider just how appalling this bunch of Tories are. The faithful still believe the saintly Corbyn will gather up his robes, or his grey suit, and win round voters once he starts canvassing. That’s what (almost) happened in 2017; and it can happen again, or so they say.

Corbyn has been around for a while now as leader, and the danger is that voters will now have fixed their views about him. If Labour loses, the Corbyn Experiment will be over for sure.

Whatever happens, the BBC will soon be dragging out Brenda from Bristol – “You’re joking, not another one!” – that unlikely star of the 2017 election. As too will I tomorrow in a lecture about vox-pops.

Brenda, by the way, has a point: we have far too many general elections in this country, and they don’t seem to solve much.

Sometimes the soundest opinions come from the least expected quarters. Tony Blair talking cool good sense on Brexit, for example. Or the political commentator Peter Oborne on Downing Street sources.

I’ll be inviting Oborne along to my lecture on sources on Monday. Not in person, sadly. But he’ll be there in print and in a clip from Channel 4 News. Unless he fancies rolling up, of course.

With luck my journalism students will take notice – no talking on the front row, please; just listen to the old bald bloke at the front.

Oborne says much that is surprisingly sound for a writer usually cast as being on the right. He’s the former chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph and now writes a column for The Mail on Sunday.

On the Open Democracy website, you will find an excellent article headlined, “British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine”. In an accompanying interview on Channel 4 News, Oborne referred to the “gang of feral smear merchants” working in Downing Street under Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s political adviser and strategist.

Cummings has attained a sort of mythic status as a dark political genius, although it’s fair to say that those who rise darkly sometimes fall the same way (here’s hoping).

Oborne’s article is too long to quote at length but do give it a read. His main point is that political journalists are being “guided, managed and manipulated by the Downing Street sources”. On the Channel 4 clip, Oborne mimes air quotation marks around the last three words.

Sometime the stories based on these anonymous sources are complete baloney, and only supported by that unnamed source. Oborne cites a splash in The Mail on Sunday (mentioned here before) in which an unnamed Downing Street source supplied the headline: “No 10 probes Remain MPs’ ‘foreign collusion’.”

The single quotes supplied for the last two words tell you all you need to know. This isn’t news, because it didn’t happen – but it might just have happened, and The Mail on Sunday happily put out a message approved by Boris Johnson.

As Oborne writes in his Open Democracy article, “Of course this bogus story fitted like a glove with the dominant Downing Street narrative that the Benn Act – which ruled out a No Deal Brexit – was actually a ‘surrender act’ designed to thwart Brexit altogether.”

He phoned Dominic Grieve, one of the Remainers mentioned in the article, who said that he “had not sought the help of any foreign government ‘in drafting and tabling a British statute’”.

Moving on, Oborne attacks the BBC and its political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, for being manipulated by Downing Street, often by breathlessly tweeting stories based on those anonymous Downing Street sources. “This compliance is part of a pattern,” Oborne writes. “Political editors are so pleased to be given ‘insider’ or ‘exclusive’ information that they report it without challenge or question.”

A BBC spokesperson tells Oborne: “While our journalists always prefer on-the-record quotes, there is a well-established practice in politics of reporting information from unnamed sources to give audiences a greater sense of what is going on in Westminster.”

The trouble with that line is that this isn’t reporting what’s going on in Westminster; it’s reporting whatever dodgy version of events Boris Johnson wants out there, without any supporting evidence.

Oborne even-handedly includes Robert Peston of ITV in such criticism.

Political reporting is a great line of work (wish I’d thought of it myself years ago), but it’s also to belong to a claustrophobic club. They’re all part of the same political gang – not a party-political gang, but a self-referencing babble of people pursuing politics or writing about it.

Oborne proffers the obvious solution: that those sources should be named. This is not a new suggestion, as a tweet from Private Eye shows.

As long ago as 1970, Auberon Waugh wrote in the Eye that newspapers should “refuse to use any story from a political source until politicians subject themselves to the same scrutiny as everybody else”.

Journalists should not be willing participants in the grubby game of passing on fake headlines scribbled in Downing Street. As Oborne points out, “there is now clear evident that the prime minister has debauched Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news”.

How telling it is, too, that Peter Oborne hawked that article around all the usual inky places, and no newspaper would print it.

BBC Radio 3 presenter Georgia Mann

We should all swap Brexit for Bach, the shitstorm for Shostakovich, or whatever. Only one digit separates three and four, but there’s a world of difference. On my hour-long commute yesterday, I switched to BBC Radio 3. This is a temper-improving way to escape the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. Three is now while this blog is being bashed out on  the laptop.

Ah, that’s better.

The Breakfast programme with Georgia on BBC Radio 3 is a soothing alternative to listening to Tory ministers lie and talk blatant bollocks on the Today programme, aided and abetted by presenters who seem unable to nail the fibs and watch the minister wriggle.

It doesn’t matter which minister, they’re interchangeable, all chosen not for their abilities but merely for their fealty to Boris Johnson and his determination to “Get Brexit Done”.

You should always prod a political slogan with a sharp stick – this one more than most. This isn’t about getting Brexit done, because Brexit can’t and won’t be done by the end of the month. Brexit will take years, decades even, to settle and sort, to untangle agreements and tie up new ones with whatever granny-knot fastening the government can manage.

No, this slogan is all about Boris Johnson; it’s all part of his plan. Getting Brexit done is all about Johnson being able to wing a general election by saying “I got Brexit done”. Anything that’s all about Boris Johnson should be regarded with extreme suspicion. The only person who should be happy about anything that’s all about Boris Johnson is Boris Johnson; the rest of us should scarper into the undergrowth.

The prime minister’s latest dodge is to attempt to get the WAB through parliament in three days flat. Apologies, I have been infected by the Brexit acronym bug, that’s the withdrawal agreement bill (115 pages, with an extra 126 pages of explanatory fibs, sorry, notes).

Three days is no time to discuss the biggest constitutional change this country has seen in decades – a change that will shape us long into the future, for good or bad (I’m choosing ‘bad’, but that shouldn’t be a surprise).

Those interchangeable ministers always say the same thing and isn’t that spooky? It’s almost as if they’ve been taken to the Downing Street basement and brainwashed by Dominic Cummings, the special adviser who pulls Johnson’s strings.

No sensible country would attempt to agree to something so complicated, and with such big questions hanging over protecting workers’ right and the environment, in only three days. But then no sensible country would opt for Brexit in the first place.

Back to Georgia Mann, who is burbling delightfully about Mozart.

Ah, that’s better.

Netflix is full of half-watched dramas. Up they pop when you log on. “Continue watching” or “because you watched”.

Brexit is much the same – “continue watching” or “because you watched the first series of this rubbish, you might like this shitstorm of a follow-up”.

The ‘star’ actor changed recently, jumping gender and class background, and still Brexit rolls on, unalterable. And don’t believe the enthusiastic reviews in the Tory papers for Johnson’s New Deal – those right-wing luvvies will type up any old tosh in defence of that indefensible posho.

Much as some liberal-minded types will rattle out any old tosh attacking Boris Johnson, that misleading man of our times (because you watched “You really are a nasty piece of work…”).

In the run-up to yesterday’s ‘Super Saturday’ episode of the long-running parliamentary soap, several witty women were tweeting about how Boris Johnson’s ‘new’ Brexit deal was just like when a woman suggests something in a meeting only to be ignored – and then a man says exactly the same thing and is clapped on the back as a hero.

This is true and it would be possible to feel sorry for Theresa May if, well, she wasn’t Theresa May.

On BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning, someone reviewing the papers said that May had been “magisterial” in her speech yesterday. Magi-what? Last time I checked in the dictionary, magisterial didn’t mean peevishly repeating yourself until the cows turned around, deciding not to come home because they just couldn’t stand another minute of listening to that.

In yesterday’s unusual Saturday episode of WestEnders, Boris Johnson tried to get his super-new-same-old deal through parliament, telling everyone how super and new it was, and reminding everyone how super he was for having rewrapped that old parcel Theresa May left in Downing Street.

Johnson was rebuffed again, continuing his spectacular record of never winning anything. MPs ignored his bullying monologues and instead voted for an amendment put forward by Oliver Letwin. This welcomed Johnson’s deal in principle but stopped him smuggling Brexit out in a rolled-up carpet at midnight when no one was looking.

The Benn Act obliged Johnson to write to the European Commission to seek an extension to the Article 50 process – something he’d sworn he’d never do, preferring to be found dead in a ditch (“Because you watched Brexit the Zombie Apocalypse”).

Our misleading man did as was required, sending a letter to the commission, but declining to add his signature. Instead he signed another letter saying why he didn’t want the extension he’d just been forced to ask for. And then he said that puppy he got to generate good headlines had eaten his homework.

Those critics in the right-wing newspapers continue to big up this episode as the people vs parliament, as democracy derailed and – in their latest rumbled mantra – Just Get This Thing Done.

Please don’t be fooled by that line. Yes, this has been going on forever, but that was always built into Brexit. It isn’t parliament’s fault this is happening; it’s because Brexit is a contentious idea, pushed on us in a referendum where the winning side knowingly told lies, and tipped the vote with a stream of illegal last-minute campaign ads (see Carole Cadwalladr, anti-Brexit Twitter warrior of the Observer).

Any minister cornered about Brexit now rolls out this “get it done line – the people are tired, etc”. This is just another bullying slogan dreamed up in Downing Street, in line with all the other bullying.

Parliament isn’t the problem and should be the solution. And I don’t care how many more episodes there are, Brexit is a terrible idea – a pointless and monumental act of self-harm built on blatant false promises.

Oh, what’s this? Because you watched Iain-Duncan Smith, Michael Gove and Mark Francois fall off a cliff while singing Rule Britannia in a fog of their own making.

Oh, hang on a minute – when was that on? I’m up for that episode.