Brendan O’Neill

Eurocrats still don’t get it. They still don’t get Brexit. They still don’t understand that us Brits didn’t vote for some kind of trial separation from the EU. No, we voted for a full and everlasting divorce. There’s no going back. We’re out (or will be soon) and we’re staying out. The latest EU bigwig to advertise his ignorance about Brexit is Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s ‘Brexit negotiator’ (that’s Eurospeak for Brexit wrecker). On the Today programme he said he agreed with Labour MEP Seb Dance, who said the UK is merely on ‘sabbatical’ from the EU. We’ll be back, said Dance. ‘I think that will happen, yes, [but] it’s difficult to say when’, said Verhofstadt.

Boris Johnson likes to call black people 'piccaninnies’. Everyone’s saying it. Even Stormzy said it this week in his endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. It is ‘criminally dangerous’ to give the keys of Downing Street back to a man who refers to ‘black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”’, the grime superstar said. Whether Stormzy also thinks it is criminally dangerous to elect as PM a man who counts as 'friends' an organisation that literally wants to destroy the Jewish homeland is not clear. But hey, Jews don’t matter very much. We’ve all learned that over the past few years. But does Boris really call black people 'piccaninnies'? Has he ever?

Is anyone else watching Hillary Clinton’s whirlwind trip to the UK and thinking to themselves: ‘Thank God she didn’t become president?’ All her worst traits have been on display. Her arrogance. Her penchant for lecturing foreign countries (in this case ours). Her harebrained conspiracy theories. Her belief that loads of people are racists — or ‘deplorables’, as she once put it. Can’t we organise a protest or something? I’ll make the placards. ‘GO HOME, HILLARY.’ She’s here with her daughter Chelsea — the dictionary should replace its definition of the word nepotism with just a photograph of Chelsea Clinton — to promote their book, The Book of Gutsy Women.

Jean-Claude Juncker has got some front. Today, to the glee of Boris-bashers and hardcore Remainers, he has accused Boris of having told lies during the EU referendum campaign. Is he serious? This is a man who has publicly defended and even advocated lying. This is a man who has insisted that untruths are an essential part of political life. Sometimes ‘you have to lie’, Juncker once said. For him now to accuse Boris of being a liar is an act of staggering hypocrisy and technocratic cant. As part of his slow-motion vacation of the role of president of the European Commission, Juncker has given an interview to Der Spiegel. In it, he takes some swipes at Boris.

Anyone else enjoying the falling apart of the People’s Vote campaign? It’s one of the funniest news stories I’ve read in months. It’s like a soap opera. EastEnders with posh people. And I’m not only chortling over it because I’m a Brexiteer who’s loving the Schadenfreude of seeing the kind of people who don’t respect my vote descend into bitching, backstabbing and Twitter turf wars. No, even more mirthful than that is the issue around which PV is pulling itself apart: the question of whether it should present itself as an openly pro-Remain group or as a neutral outfit that just wants another EU vote because it really, really likes democracy. I’m cracking up.

For three-and-a-half years Brexiteers have been told that we didn’t know what we were voting for. I think that might be truer of hardcore Remainer MPs like David Lammy. Today Mr Lammy is bemoaning the fact that the French President has more say over the length of a Brexit extension than our own Prime Minister does. Yes, David, we know — and it’s because people like you voted for precisely this scenario! Does Mr Lammy even understand what he’s voting for? It seems not. He’s forgotten that he and the other 326 MPs who voted though the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act — commonly known as the Benn Act — are responsible for this outrageous state of affairs.

A second referendum would be a political abomination. And it’s about time more of us said so. We need to get real about what a second referendum would mean. If we have another referendum in which Remain is an option on the ballot paper, it will be one of the few times in the history of British democracy that the British people voted for something and it didn’t happen. It will be the first time we made a clear, mass democratic choice and the political class turned around to us and said: ‘Sorry, you can’t have that. You have to vote again.’ The precedent this would set would be dreadful. It would rip up the democratic contract itself.

Sadiq Khan has got some front. He is complaining about the government’s voter ID plans, claiming it will lead to ‘voter suppression’. And yet he is engaged in the most explicit and awful act of voter suppression in the living memory of this country — the elitist effort to suppress the votes of the 17.4m people who backed Brexit. Sometimes you wonder if the Remain-leaning elites can even hear themselves. These people have spent almost three years agitating against the largest democratic vote in UK history. Some of them want the vote to be revoked entirely (the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’) while others, like Sadiq, want a second referendum to override the first.

It’s tempting to laugh at Extinction Rebellion. I do it myself frequently. Those yoga sessions on Westminster Bridge. The amateur dramatics of wandering around in naff crimson-red outfits to symbolise ‘the common blood we share with all species’. That lame rave-style dancing they do as some bloke in an overlong beard plays the drums while his parents in the Home Counties wonder when he’s going to come to his senses and join his dad’s law firm. It’s all so ridiculous. They fancy themselves as revolutionaries but really this is just Hampstead and Homerton, the posh and the hip, descending on Westminster for a few days to wail about how howwible modern society is. It’s primal therapy for crusties.