That thing, it’s just got done again. You know, the thing that was done before with accompanying trumpet farts from the blustering charlatan who flogged it to us. That’s the one.

Yes, we are muttering about Brexit again.

You may recall that Boris Johnson got a deal that was “oven-ready”. Only for everyone to discover that he never put that pie into the oven, and anyway it was larded with so many lies it was a health hazard and quite impossible to swallow.

Now it has fallen to Rishi Sunak to sort out the mess left by his chaotically unreliable predecessor ­– a man who sabotages everything in the hope of gaining personal advantage from the mess he leaves behind.

Witness the way Johnson is rumoured to have supported Liz Truss as his replacement in the belief that she would be so terrible, he’d be invited back.

Now it’s Sunak’s turn to untangle everything. At the Coca-Cola plant in Co Antrim, the prime minister became jittery with glee as he told workers about his new deal, twitching and grinning and gesticulating like mad. Never mind Coca-Cola, he appeared to have overdone the Red Bulls.

Sunak gushed that the new Windsor deal with the EU would make the province the most exciting economic zone on the planet as it would have unique, privileged access to the UK market and the European single market.

“Nobody else has that,” he said, bouncily. “No one. Only you guys, only here.”

Mr Sunak said that under the new deal, the province would be “in the unbelievably, special position, unique position, in the entire world, European continent, in having privileged access, not just to the UK home market, which is enormous, fifth biggest in the world, but also the European Union single market”.

This produced much ridicule from people who pointed out the whole of the UK had that advantage previously. If it was so great for Northern Ireland, what about the rest of us?

That’s the absurdity of Brexit. Sunak supports Brexit yet he was in effect praising the advantages of not having got Brexit done. If Northern Ireland can have a special Brexit-before-Brexit-happened deal, where does that leave the rest of us?

Up shit creek, fighting over rotten tomatoes.

The Brextremists are not happy about the new deal, but then again they are not as vociferously disgruntled as usual, so perhaps this argument will die out in the end, although you never can tell with Brexit or the permanently displeased DUP.

Lord Frost, that former whisky salesman elevated to the Lords by Johnson, swears by Brexit, and says the new deal is a “bitter pill to swallow”. Well, swallow away, matey – the rest of us have been dining on bitter pills for a while now. Perhaps a mouthful of malt will help that pill go down.

Sunak is to be praised for at least trying to sort out the mess left by Johnson. Of course, Sunak was himself party to Johnson’s terrible deal – and now he is trying to repair the bridges his predecessor wilfully broke. Perhaps now Britain can have a sensible relationship with the EU, rather than an intentionally belligerent one.

Here is a footnote to last week’s thoughts about Roald Dahl’s books being edited for a new generation of young readers.

My belief was that this was a boring business decision rather than cultural vandalism: the books were being edited to keep them relevant to new readers . And, as was pointed out to me afterwards, to make Dahl more palatable to the parents who read his books to their children. Basically, those changes were designed to make more money for the publishers.

The story about the edits was broken by the Daily Telegraph. Much fuss ensued, including Camilla, the Queen Consort, chipping in with her displeasure about the alterations to language now deemed by the publishers to be offensive.

Then Puffin announced it would be publishing the “offensive” unaltered texts anyway – alongside the new versions.

At which point a weary bystander might be tempted to wonder if it wasn’t all a set-up. Had Puffin intended to do this all along but gave the nod to the Telegraph in the hope of stirring things up?

I don’t know the answer to that one, but my inner cynic thinks he might.