ANYONE who feels there isn’t enough David Cameron in their lives should watch Inside Europe: 10 Years of Europe. This documentary is timely and surprisingly gripping.

The first episode considers the old Etonian’s calamitous journey towards the referendum. The pink acres of Cameron’s face are widely on show as he blithely bumbles towards a public vote he was obviously going to win as he was the sort of fate-kissed chap who naturally came out on top (spoiler alert).

Last Monday’s second episode concerned the Greek bailout of 2010 and was just as compelling.

If you want to know how we got where we are now, this documentary is a good starting point. Most of the main players appear as talking heads, although we are left to console ourselves with archive footage of Cameron doing his waffling head act. Perhaps he was too busy hiding in that expensive shed of his, pretending to write his memoirs.

Chief among the witnesses is today’s villain of choice: Donald Tusk, president of the European Council. Tusk comes over well in the documentary, having a sly sparkle and a ready wit, although that fact is missing from the coverage in today’s newspapers, especially the Brexit-besotted ones.

Tusk has got himself into an inky scrap with Brexit-supporting Brits for saying “there is a special place in hell for some Brexiteers”. That is a partial quotation, and it is one that the ‘pro’ lobby are keen to trundle out.

The selective quote misses the following section, where Tusk criticises those who pushed for Brexit “without even a sketch of a plan”.

This is perfectly reasonable, unless you are the editor of the Sun, where the leader column rages: “We knew one of the EU’s leaders is a staggering drunk – turns out the other is a staggering fool”. The editorial concludes that “these sneering, sniggering goons are exactly why we voted as we did on June the 23rd, 2016”.

Such windy bluster is one of the biggest problems with the way Brexit has proceeded: if those keenest on Brexit aren’t banging on about the war, they’re wittering on about foul foreigners who are intent on diddling us in some fashion or other.

Taken at face value, what Tusk says is sensible, and is also an understandable outbreak of frustration at trying to deal with our shattered politics and our stumbling politicians.

Those Brexit bandits who swore that everything would be a doddle – and who needs a plan anyway? – have made everything far worse by their Empire-like bluster and blather. Not really having any sort of a plan is one of the biggest problems with Brexit.

Still, I do hope there is a special corner of hell for those Brexit buffoons who rushed ahead without bothering to buy a map. Chief among those must be former Brexit Secretary David Davis, who loved Brexit from its incubation, and blithely insisted that everything would work out in the end, and don’t blink when you see the whites of their eyes. He is probably saying that even now, if anyone has the energy to listen.

With luck, Davis will share an incandescent corner of hell with fellow Brexit bandit Boris Johnson, who is paid more than £200,000 a year by the Daily Telegraph to write basically the same pro-Brexit column every single week: nasty work if you can get it. Johnson has been a keen proponent in proclaiming that all will be sunny in those EU-free uplands.

Davis and Johnson can share the hot pokers with Michael Gove, who pushed Brexit like the best seller of snake oil.

And let’s not forget Nigel Farage, however delightful such forgetfulness would be. Farage is the chief architect of the plan-free Brexit: no plan, just hunch, prejudice and bluster.

Hot pokers and boiling oil all round.

Come to think of it, just being cooped up in hell with Nigel Farage would be another sort of hell, an inner circle of endless torment.

And endless torment is, of course, a passingly good summation of Brexit so far.

It might seem an odd thing to look forward to, but the email update from The Washington Post is usually worth a look. It’s good to see a snatch of sober commentary from the US.

Recently, the headline in the email contained a word to cherish: “Trumpless” – used in connection with Donald Trump staying away from Davos for the latest World Economic Forum. That glowed in my mind for a while, a little coal of optimism.

Oh, to be in that prelapsarian state of a Trumpless world. Well, I guess we were hardly innocent and unspoilt before Trump arrived, but there is still a sense of having fallen somehow.

One of the important tasks the Post performs is to run a fact-checking service on everything Trump says.

In has long been a tradition of American newspapers that the journalists work alongside fact-checkers, who sift their words into a sort of truth flour. Such a notion would seem odd to British journalists, especially on some national titles, where ‘facts’ are whatever the editor decrees them to be.

US TV and radio stations, on the other jabbing hand, can be as partisan as they like.

The Post’s fact-checking service measures all the statements Trump makes against a truth ruler. The journalists in that department are kept busy, chasing all the ‘facts’ that run away from Trump like rats out of an upturned golf bag.

And those truth-seekers have been busy overnight, checking the key claims in Trump’s second State of the Union address – a sort of constitutional to-do list, in which a president lays outs upcoming measures before Congress. Or, in Trump’s case, lays his brags out in a row.

There isn’t time or space to list all the findings, but here are three.

Trump: “The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security and financial well-being of all Americans. We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.”

The Post: “By any available measure, there is no new security crisis at the border…”

Trump: “Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration — reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools, hospitals so crowded you can’t get in, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net.”

The Post: Trump exaggerates the link between immigration and crime; almost all research shows legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population…

Trump: “And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy.”

The Post: The United States has exported more energy than it has imported since 2015. Trump overstates the impact of his energy policy.

If you have the time, it’s worth looking at the full list of checked facts and untruths poked with a sharp stick.

Away from that, Trump’s address was as divisive as ever, calling for unity and bipartisanship, while continuing to shove his own agenda down everyone’s throats. That man does like to have his cake, eat it – and then spit the crumby mess in his opponents’ faces.

Is that last image a fact? Oh, over to you.

Is the world yet Trumpless? Sadly, that’s not a fact.

THIS morning let’s give praise to Daniel Kawczynski, the Tory MP for Shrewsbury. And if you suspect I’ve been at the irony jar, you may well be right. That stuff is sticky as honey and sweetens the lips just so.

In case you need a recap, the Brexit-besotted member for Shrewsbury has been roundly ridiculed for saying on Twitter that Britain got nothing from the Marshall Plan, the post-war settlement which saw the US make payments of more than $12bn to help rebuild Europe.

His tweet from Saturday has, according to the BBC, received more than 10,000 replies – most of them pointing out that he is peddling porkies.

A quick google could have told Kawczynski that Britain received more under the Marshall Plan than any other country. Historians and non-historians alike rushed to Twitter to point out that Britain accounted for about 20% of the Marshall money – the biggest share, in other words.

The MP remains unrepentant and apparently still believes he is right. There is no telling some people, even when they’ve told more than 10,000 times.

This shabby little episode teaches us a couple of things. One is that Kawczynski probably knew he was wrong and tweeted anyway, intent on spreading false history to serve his purpose. The other is that it’s about time we forgot about the war. Sober remembrance once a year is properly fitting – whereas banging on about the war at every opportunity is unhelpful and leans on that old story about our ‘greatness’.

It happens that there is a telling aspect to the Marshall Plan, and this is perhaps what Kawczynski was tapping into. It has long been a favourite British hard luck story that we won the war and lost the peace, because West Germany received the Marshall millions and rebuilt its industry, whereas we were left to struggle on our own with worn-out kit and whale-blubber bacon on stale toast for breakfast (or something).

As an archived feature on the BBC History website points out, “successive governments squandered billions of Marshall Plan Aid to support British world power pretensions, and so jeopardised the economic future of Britain”.

As for the ‘poor Britain’ story recycled in that twerpish tweet, “This is utter myth. Britain actually received more than a third more Marshall Aid than West Germany – $2.7 billion as against $1.7 billion. She in fact pocketed the largest share of any European nation. The truth is that the post-war Labour Government, advised by its resident economic pundits, freely chose not to make industrial modernisation the central theme in her use of Marshall Aid.”

What a resonant phrase there is in that first quote – “to support British world power pretensions”. Yup – we were at it then and we’re still at it now, only this time it’s called Brexit.

That Brexit-besotted MP is 47, which is surely too young to be obsessed with the war. I was born only 11 years after the end of the war, and it all seems a long time ago to me.

Anyone who continually mentions the war in a Brexit context should be sent for breakfast detention and told they are not leaving the table until they’ve finished that whale-blubber bacon.

The following paragraphs contain some mention of Brexit (sorry about that), more advice on a pub chain to shun, and a top tip on when to change channels.

I was already never going into a Wetherspoons pub again, and now I am never for bloody sure going into a Wetherspoons pub again. This is thanks to a curious pamphlet that dropped through the door yesterday, bearing the deeply questionable title Wetherspoonsnews.

This publication from Tim Martin, the beery baron of the hard Brexit, claims it is “read by 2 million customers”. Oh, yeah – and this little blog is read by (summons a figure out of thin air) thousands of loyal readers; or possibly one or two.

It’s a very curious publication. Scrappy stories about alcohol, like labels come away from the bottle, dropped into a toxic puddle of blind Brexit propaganda. Obviously, some people believe in Brexit and can’t wait for it to happen; others think it’s the biggest mistake this country has made in decades (that box got my tick, in case you’re wondering or are no longer capable of fully paying attention, and who could blame you).

I don’t wish to pass on much of what Martin has to say/rant/dribble, but the front page has a teaser headline: “How the metropolitan elite tried to con the British public about the need to ‘deal’ with the EU…”

As you can see, Martin has been going around the old Ukip bins and foraging for leftovers. Who might be a member of this elite? If you think that a multi-millionaire pub owner who wants the hardest Brexit while paying his staff low wages counts, you won’t be alone.

The way Martin uses his cut-price pub chain as a vehicle to push his right-wing politics strikes me as distasteful, and I will happily pay a bit more for a better pint in a pub that doesn’t echo to his rants.

Advice doing the rounds on Twitter includes sending this publication back as ‘unsolicited mail’ FOC to their headquarters and Wetherspoons foots the bill, or shredding it and dropping the spaghetti pile in a Wetherspoons pub. You can also follow Spoons Workers Against Brexit on Twitter, which I just did (thanks to Nick Love for pointing me in that direction).

Last night I was in the car when those fearsome words came on the radio… “And now the Moral Maze.” I wonder how many crashes have been caused by hearing that?

I stuck with this edition about the “moral duty of MPs” towards Brexit, at least for a few minutes. This was thanks to Paddy O’Connell being the guest presenter. One of the best broadcasters around, but even his verbal dexterity cannot distract us from the horrors of Melanie Phillips.

As soon as Phillips completely ignored what one of the MP witnesses had to say, butting in with “we’re not interested in hearing that”, and forcing the argument in her desired direction, I pressed the button marked three. God but that woman is annoying – a female riposte to the human skin rash that is Piers Morgan.

Ah, that’s better. On BBC Radio Three there was a concert. I arrived at the interval to hear a spot of Elgar, and that always calms the shredded nerves, and then it was on with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I only caught a bit the Purcell, but it was much more uplifting than Melanie Phillips.

A new classical radio station, Scala, is arriving soon, aimed at younger listeners (or maybe those who pretend to be younger than they are). The station hopes to attract the under-35s who are said to be turning to classical music as an escape “from the noise of modern life”, according to a headline in the Guardian (which often rattles to the noise of modern life, but never mind).

Shutting out that noise with classical music sounds like the better sort of idea.

AS I stumble towards the laptop, a Tory MP on the radio is going on about how ‘technology’ will solve the backstop. I didn’t catch his name and can’t be bothered investigating as those lemming loons all look and sound much the same.

The notion that a bit of unspecified technology can solve the Brexit logjam over the border with Ireland is the sort of flapdoodle you hear occasionally from the likes of Boris Johnson (it wasn’t Johnson on the radio just now as you cannot help but recognise him).

As much as one man on a ledge can understand anything, and that’s far from a given, the backstop is a sort of insurance policy that in effect pretends Northern Ireland remains part of Europe after Brexit. I hope that is approximately right, as keeping up/staying awake while contemplating these Brexit vagaries can be difficult.

It strikes me that relying on nameless technology is about as useful as summoning up Harry Potter spells – “Expecto Magickus Bollocksarmus”, or something.

This morning’s headlines contain two words you don’t often see yoked together – ‘Theresa’ and ‘Triumph’. The Daily Mail splashes that uncommon coupling across its front page, adding below that the prime minister “unites her party, crushes Corbyn…and tells EU: let’s do a deal.”

I am not sure she has done any of those things, and if she did ‘crush’ Jeremy Corbyn, it was only because 14 Labour MPs rebelled and voted with the government.

Mrs Maybe secured what the Mail calls “a dramatic victory” when MPs voted to back a Brexit deal that replaces the backstop. In other words, they voted to back something that reverses her previous position – and they voted to back something the EU has said it won’t agree to.

The food writer Diana Henry often cooks up a good political tweet. This morning on Twitter she says of that ‘Theresa’s Triumph’ headline: “In what universe?”

A good point. I am guessing the universe in question is the Tory Brexiteer one where all sense was long since lost in that fissiparous quarrel among shouty fools.

The shoutiest fool of them all, and it’s a tough gig to secure, is the MP Mark Francois. Last week the German CEO of Airbus, Tom Enders, who employs 14,000 Brits, with the supply chain adding an estimated 110,000 more jobs, expressed his despair over Brexit.

This caused Francois to splutter at the TV cameras: “My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son.”

He then ripped up a widely-reported letter from the German boss of Airbus. This sort of big-dick swagger would be beyond parody in normal times. Is it horribly petty to take comfort in the speaker of such stupid words having a name that sounds French? Oh, probably, but frankly, we should be past caring by now. And anyone who mentions the war should be banned from speaking further, especially as the whole point of European unification was to avoid the possibilities of further wars.

Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing how Theresa’s Triumph (the Labour rebels’ edition) turns out.

And now over to Brussels.

“She’s at the back door again. Quick, turn out the lights. She’ll only drone on and on about how she now knows what she wants. And what she wants is the thing she already agreed not to ask for. If we pretend we’re not in, perhaps she’ll go away.”

A new type of cat food has 11+ marked on the packet. This has nothing to do with entrance exams for grammar school, but it does have something to do with age.

We bought some for our cat because we calculate that she is beyond that marker now. It’s ten years since she took over the running of our house, and she was already a year or more when she arrived, sniffed a confident sniff and said to herself, “This’ll do.”

In an incident that went down in family legend, Lucy, who’d been on starvation rations at the cat rescue place, jumped later than day on to a kitchen surface and ate about half of a cooling cake.

That cat food made me wonder about human food being branded in the same fashion. Then I realised that sometimes I buy beer that has my age clearly marked on the bottle. Oh, hang on, I’ve missed out a decimal point here: that beer doesn’t say 62 but 6.2. Mind you, beer of 6.2 per cent alcohol is pushing it a bit. Wiser to drink beer that’s ‘younger’, although those strong craft ales do taste good.

Maybe there should be an inverse formula or something: if you’re 31 you can double your years to discover a suitable strength of alcohol in beer, while those of us of more advancing drinking years should opt for beer half our age. Doesn’t sound like much fun, though.

What other age warnings might be put on food? Some of the sourdough bread I make should perhaps carry an age caution. The other day as I took a bite, I heard the dentist tapping on the kitchen window to deliver a warning about unhappy meetings between ageing teeth and crusty bread. I turned away and carried on with a reckless chew.

Life can’t all be soup, even if some weeks life is all soup. Besides, that soup goes down better with crusty bread or toast.

It is to be hoped that the man who looks after my teeth didn’t spot the fruit and nut sourdough in the bread bin. Nuts are hazardous to molars, while dried fruit sits high on the dentists’ hitlist.

Apples already come adorned with annoying stickers, but so long as that label says ‘Cox’ on it, you can’t go far wrong at whatever age. No need for a sticker on toffee, not something I eat as a rule, especially the stuff that comes with a free filling-removal kit.

One of my grandmothers used to eat Complan, which seems to be baby food for old people. I’ve just googled and it’s still around, but with all respect to Grandma, I hope to avoid that sort of food. It will have to stay in the kitchen cupboard, along with the Methodism and teetotal wine served once as a lunchtime treat. A good year, but only if you liked your wine to taste like undiluted Ribena.

Fortified by a bowl of age-appropriate muesli, I set off to drive the hour to one of my jobs. It’s a cold morning and I search for gloves in my coat as I drive. Then I remove my wallet from the back pocket, because sitting on a wallet is not, as I have discovered, good for the back/arse muscles.

At work I let myself into the office where I have squatters’ rights, make tea and read all the emails from students who aren’t turning up today because they are ill.

Then I tap my empty back pocket and think, “Shit, where’s my wallet?” I dash to the car and search everywhere, but it’s not there. Back in the office, I drink tea and try to work it out. Then I spot the wallet in a side pocket in my leather bag, where it must have fallen when I removed it while driving.

Perhaps I should have had age-appropriate porridge instead. Isn’t it meant to be good for the brain?

Exterior forces and prejudices can influence our consumer choices. We don’t need a new vacuum cleaner right now; but if we did it wouldn’t be a Dyson on point of principle. And I don’t fancy a pint right now as at time of writing, it’s 11am; but if I did, I wouldn’t go into a Wetherspoons pub.

If we did need a vacuum cleaner, it would be another Miele as the first one lasted for years and years, and the second one is perhaps two years old (brand new in Miele terms).

If I did need a pint right now, I’d avoid Wetherspoons. This is partly because those pubs are like McDonald’s versions of proper pubs – cheap, yes, but kind of depressing. Mostly, though, it’s because of Tim Martin, the Brexit-bonkers boss of Wetherspoons, who is on a nationwide tour of his pubs to lecture the locals about the wonderfulness of Brexit. And you wouldn’t want to bump into him.

Before setting off on that desultory tour, Martin swapped English sparkling wine for Champagne in his pubs, and cleared all the French brandy from the shelves, replacing those neighbourly bottles with brandy from the US and Australia.

French brandy, you might have noticed, is made in France, that country just across the Channel, and therefore it doesn’t have far to travel. The US is 3,000 miles away at the closest coast, and Australia is nearly 10,000 miles away, so those non-EU bottles travel a hell of a long way just to satisfy the Brexit-besotted Tim Martin.

Now to Sir James Dyson, knighted presumably for causes to general British irritation (or is it just me?). Dyson finds himself in the news for saying that he plans to move his headquarters to Singapore, after spending ages banging on about the advantages Brexit offers to Britain. He maintains that this move has nothing to do with Brexit, but that didn’t silence the any-old-irony merchants of Twitter, who dusted off assorted disparaging puns connected to sucking.

Dyson maintains that the move is symbolic and that the company will continue to employ 4,000 people in Britain. Well, something that is symbolic can still suck. And Dyson sucks harder than his vacuum cleaners.

That’s why I won’t buy one of his clever-seeming machines. Besides, and this isn’t at all scientific, but on a trip to the tip once, Dysons that presumably no longer sucked where lined up in the electrical goods graveyard. Perhaps there had been a good offer on and everyone bought a Dyson and the same time and the all went suckless at the same moment; or perhaps Dysons stop working more quickly than, say, a Miele.

I went online to investigate, but the only decent-looking research was hidden behind the paywall at Which? and I wasn’t going to subscribe just to see if my anti-Dyson prejudice has legs.

Wealthy business people like Martin and Dyson are listened to more than they should be. It would be much better if they just met in a Wetherspoons and swilled their opinions privately with a glass of Australian brandy. And while they’re at it, they could invite along Luke Johnson, the Brexiteer businessman whose Patisserie Valerie chain has collapsed into administration. Luke could bring the baked goods, although, on reflection, perhaps he shouldn’t take anything from his own shops, the McDonalds of the French cake world.

And if there are crumbs on the floor, Dyson can do the sucking. That’s unless he’s buggered off to Singapore already.

Oh, I do like a binge watch. Netflix has changed me from a traditional one-bite-at-a-time viewer into an occasional glutton for televisual punishment.

My latest indulgence had been the British-made comic drama Sex Education about a teenage virgin with a sex counsellor mother played by Gillian Anderson. In a smartly written scenario, Otis (Asa Butterfield), a sexually repressed 16-year-old virgin, becomes his school’s relationship expert, offering sex advice to his classmates.

“You’re like some strange sort of sex savant,” his enigmatic pal/crush Maeve (Emma Mackey), the smartest, coolest most troubled girl in school, tells him.

I do recommend Sex Education. But I may have lured you in under the false pretence of not writing about the thing no one ever shuts up about. So, yes, while I do like a spot of binge-watching, I am not so keen on this Brexit binge. God, but his series never ends and just gets worse every time you sit down to watch. Talk about repeats.

The latest episode was another big disappointment. It was titled Plan B: The Big Reveal. But it turned out that Theresa May didn’t have a Plan B at all. Just plain old Plan A. Never mind the historic kicking Plan A got in the Commons last week, here she was again, robotically muttering out her Plan B that was just the same as Plan A, but with the letter ‘A’ scribbled out with the Downing Street biro.

Her cunning plan involves refusing to budge an inch and boring everyone to death, at which stage in Pointless: the Political Vacuum Edition, we all stumble into the cold light of a no-deal Brexit. Deal not done; country f***ed.

Jeremy Corbyn muttered that it was like Groundhog Day. He had a point, although it wasn’t the smartest insult from a man who is himself a walking-talking Groundhog Day, rarely saying anything new about Brexit, and relying on passive-aggressive ambiguity to see him through while he perches on that fence. This very morning, he may or may not be backing calls for a Commons vote on a second referendum.

We did get one new plot development, with Theresa May throwing in a twist about a second referendum “destroying social cohesion”, so those lips weren’t totally stuck on repeat. And you can see her point, what with the Tories doing such a splendid job on social cohesion, and this whole Brexit thing bringing everyone together in such a jolly fashion.

She also spoke about smashing up the covenant of trust or something, but I don’t remember watching that episode at all. Perhaps the covenant of trust was before I joined the national binge-watch.

As far as anyone can tell, Plan B involves Theresa May trundling off to Brussels yet again.

And can’t you just imagine the Euro-dialogue: “Oh, no, she’s at the door again. If we let her in, she’s just going to keep saying the same old thing again and again. And she’ll go on and on about the bloody backstop. I feel quite sorry for the poor woman, but let’s draw the curtains and pretend to be out.”

Just now on the radio, Iain Duncan Smith – the Voldemort of Brexit – said that anyone who thought something or other about Brexit (the detail has evaporated from my mind) was “living in Cloud Cuckoo Land”.

Oh, I quite like the sound of this Cloud Cuckoo Land place; when’s the next bus?

She said her door was always open and he said that open door was a stunt. She said again that her door was always open. And the door said that’s news to me, I’ve been shut for so long I thought my job had changed to wall.

And all over the country people remembered a boss they once had who said on the first day that their door was always open, and then walked through it and that was the last time anyone saw that door open.

She said her door was open and why don’t the two of them sit down to talk about this impossible thing. He said again that it was all a stunt and promptly went off to the coast for a stunt of his own.

Her stunt was the plainly untrue one about her door having been always open when it was the most shut door in the history of shut doors. His stunt was the plainly bonkers one of pretending that an election was about to kick off, so he dragged out his old election scowl, the one that sort of nearly won last time around.

She said that calling for elections was playing politics, seemingly forgetting that was what she did last time around when she shredded her majority and promptly led us all deeper in this deep mess.

She said that you can’t ignore the voice of the people. She told any ministers whose arm she could still twist to go on the radio and say that it’s democracy and you can’t ignore the voice of the people.

The people agreed, apart from those who didn’t. The people who agreed were the people-people, the ones who won by a squeak. The people who didn’t agree complained that they were now the non-people. No one listened to them, even though one of those opinion polls now says that the non-people would win another vote by 12%.

One of the non-people remembered seeing an old man on the TV news when the Bad Thing happened. I’ve got my country back at last, the old man twittered, doing an arthritic little jig before going for a celebratory sit-down in his favourite chair, the one covered in a tatty old Union Jack.

That old man might be dead now, like many of the people-people whose voice must be heard. The non-people people said that now that it’s January in this year we’re in, so many of the people-people who voted for the Bad Thing have died, and so many young non-people who don’t like the Bad Thing have turned 18, that the country is now against the thing it was narrowly for on one day in one long-ago month of June.

The non-people began to grumble that everybody knew that the people could sometimes be wrong. And anyway, when was it a good idea for a country without a constitution to decide something so massive with one dodgy referendum and no rules about how to conduct such a vote or what would happen next?

Even some of the people-people were beginning to wonder if this wasn’t a reckless way to run a country. But the people-people couldn’t fully agree among themselves, as other people-people swore and said it was democracy, so tough shit.

She’s doing a good job that woman, said some of the people-people. But other people-people put their heads in their hands and cried with frustration.

And then all the people of whatever persuasion wondered what that noise was and realised it was the sound of their heads banging against the wall.

She said her door was always open but she lied. He said he had a big plan but he lied too.

She said/he said…

If Theresa May is reading the ‘reviews’ over breakfast this morning, perhaps she should stick to the Daily Express (“DISMAY” with a bit of valiant butter for her dry toast) and the Mail (“FIGHTING FOR HER LIFE” with a pot of “Brexit vote bombshell” jam to go on top of that thin smear of butter).

Everywhere else there is only defeat and humiliation, as her dull stubborn progress earns her a 432/202 kicking – the biggest thrashing in our political history.

The editor of the Daily Mail might feel sorry for her, and his rival at the Express might, bewilderingly, still be mumbling that she’s the right woman for the job. But the rest of us can surely agree that she got us into this mess – and is incapable of getting us out of it.

It’s a Brexit car crash and she’s the one doing the driving.

There is a wider lesson here about the perils of certainty, but let’s first pin the blame tail on the woman who handed out the blindfolds before leading us towards that cliff over there.

Theresa May owns this Brexit balls-up, for it is a disaster of her own making. She put party politics ahead of the national interest, she pandered to the insatiable right on her own side, she insisted on making Brexit about immigration, and she drew so many red lines that they tripped her up.

She accuses others of playing politics, while gambling the whole house on being able to sell a deal everyone agreed was a dud. A smarter and less intransigent politician would have seen where this was all headed, but Theresa just kept on, insisting that only she could be right.

While this has become more than a party play, it is still at heart a Tory psycho-drama: a torrid tale of infighting and backbiting. There might be Labour people who dislike Europe – Jeremy Corbyn, for one – but the Conservative Party has true ownership of this shabby tragedy.

As for Corbyn, there is a probably a technical reason for tabling a no confidence motion after May’s defeat. But stripped of the tatty varnish of politics, and looked at with plain old human eyes, it just looks like kicking a woman when she is down: a low but easy blow.

Now I have no sympathy for Mrs Maybe at all, but Corbyn didn’t hop into that ring until his opponent was flat-out on the canvas.

As we drift aimless and bickering to whatever fate awaits, perhaps it is time to confront the inadequacy of certainty. What this mess does is illustrate the dangers of being certain that you are right – and the double-dangers of being certain about something that by its nature is uncertain.

Whether you are for or against, it has never been possible to say with certainty what Brexit is: and the snake oil salesmen of the far right have been the worst offenders in over-selling their fevered dreams to the rest of us.

Assorted sensible MPs, including Labour’s Yvette Cooper, began calling for cross-party cooperation on Brexit a while ago. And that certainly looks more appealing than carrying on with Mrs Maybe’s blindfolded ramble. Is there any hope for a non-party solution to this unholy political mess?