without striking a deal with the Lib Dems. Since he shows no appetite for that, a general election would
seem inevitable.
Once that were called, it would be deja vu all over again: unless Corbyn formed an electoral non-aggression
pact with Jo Swinson, a Tory leader neutralising Nigel Farage with all the no-deal sunlit uplands fantasy talk
would go off a hot favourite against a fractured opposition.
You could waste a lot of psychic energy bemoaning Corbyn’s blindness, wilful or otherwise, to the extreme
danger, and inability to break his addiction to tribal politics accordingly. Some of us already have. And you
could waste a lot more screaming to the wind about the complacent insanity of not having a written
constitution, and so enabling a country’s future to rest on guesswork, opportunism and impenetrably arcane
convention. Some of us have done that too.
But with the likelihood of no deal being rammed through so usefully clarified by Master Cummings,
perhaps the focus should be on this: Whatever happens from here, on this day we are staring down the
barrel of a developing world-style power grab. We are on the cusp of an exceedingly English coup executed
against the will of the people, parliament and two of the four constituent countries of what won’t remain the
United Kingdom for long. If it succeeds, as it very well might, on what imaginable basis could anyone
regard this as any kind of functioning democracy at all?