Theresa may

Donald and Melania Trump will visit Britain in June for their first state visit, and the people of Airstrip One are preparing a right royal welcome. Last time, the plebs floated a giant orange baby in the sky, and marched in the streets of London. This time, they’re planning a traditional British welcome, including medieval rituals like the Trolling of the Guard, the Naked Protest at the State Banquet, and the Insulting of the Closest Ally. The constitutional status of the Insulting the Closest Ally ritual is murky, but the key part of the procedure is ostentatiously refusing to invite the American president to address the House of Commons. Many Americans carry a copy of the Constitution in their pockets, and whip it out whenever their rights are threatened.

As Americans will recall, escaping the arbitrary power of an empire can take years. Now imagine doing it with the French being actively obstructive, George Washington committed to paying the taxation and doing without the representation for a period to be determined by George III, and Washington, having lost the support of his closest advisors, now asking Lord North for help. This is pretty much where Theresa May’s government finds itself after this week’s double defeat in the House of Commons. These are only the latest in an apparently endless sequence of humiliations. There are more to come, but no one knows where they will come from, or when. Frankly, it’s humiliating to have to explain how we got here from the 2016 referendum. But here we are.

Late last night, there was a sense of optimism among British government ministers that Theresa May’s revised deal might have a chance of passing. But those hopes were crushed this morning by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s blunt legal advice. With Cox declaring that the legal risk was unchanged, the Democratic Unionist Party were never going to back the deal. That in turn meant the bulk of the Brexiteers in the European Research Group wouldn’t either. In the end, the withdrawal agreement went down by 149 votes — at the worst end of expectations. ‘I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight,’ May said upon defeat.

People do inexplicable things in January, like laying off drink for a month, taking out gym memberships they will never use, and making predictions about the year to come. As I shall not be ‘going dry’ this month or any other, and as I do not intend to alter a ‘fitness regime’ of afternoon naps in a sauna, the only remaining way to make a public fool of myself is to predict what will happen in 2019: 1. Look to the skies. I don’t know what a Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse is, but it’s coming to the US on the night of January 20. And the year will end with a transit of Mercury, and an annular eclipse over the Arabian Peninsula. I don’t know what that means, either, other than that the atmospherics aren't good. 2. The atmospherics are no better in the markets.

Did British prime minister Theresa May take a shot at Donald Trump in yesterday afternoon’s address to the UN General Assembly? It certainly sounds like it. Or was Trump a proxy target for another blond populist, Boris Johnson? It certainly looks like it. On Tuesday, Trump had rejected the ‘ideology of globalism’ and defended the nation state and its ‘doctrine of patriotism’.