A month ago today the country went to the polls, to vote on whether or not we should leave the European Union. We decided to do so. Since then we’ve got a new prime minister, the Notting Hill set are executive toast and our economy seems as if it might be going down the tubes. It was a Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who opined that a week was a long time in politics. A month must seem like an eternity, especially if you’ve had Laura Kuenssberg’s job. But imagine if things had turned out differently. What might have happened if ‘Remain’ had prevailed?…
First of all, by now we’d have forgotten the whole thing had even happened; much ado about nothing and all that. Nigel Farage wouldn’t have forgotten, though. He wouldn’t have bowed out of politics. Instead he would have been grumbling like the old soak in the corner of the bar about how the result was rigged and why a 52% vote to stay in the EU was no sort of mandate at all.
David Cameron would have still been PM. George Osborne would still have been the C of E, mumbling about fixing the roof while the sun shines as he went about ruining the economy. Politicians of every hue would still have been able to blame everything that went wrong on “bloody Brussels”. And who would have remembered Andrea Leadsom, that weirdly earnest blonde woman from the TV debates? As it was she briefly lit up the political landscape, albeit like a doomed comet, burning brightly for something less than a week as a possible leader of the nation until she got in a dreadful muddle over motherhood and exploded in The Times.
Then there’s Michael Gove, the Boris back-stabber, who persuaded the dazzling blond to join him on the ‘Leave’ platform because he realised the public would not pay attention to an eccentric-looker like him, only for him to leave Johnson…er, on the platform, stuck like an everyday Southern Trains commuter – until, that is, Non-Mother Theresa almost nonsensically rescued him; whereas Gove had told BoJo to F-Off, Mrs May appointed him to the F OFF. (Boris and Michael are pictured on the home page during the days before they were the best of enemies.) Had we stayed in the EU, Gove would have remained as Minister of Justice, instead of which he has, almost like Sisyphus, forever to explain – from the back benches, at that! – to his wife, Sarah Vain…sorry, Sarah Vine, why they aren’t having supper with the Murdochs and running the country together. (BTW, am I the only person who thinks BoJo was shocked beyond belief that the vote went the way it did?)
Still, a bit of levity never goes amiss, not least given the month the world has had since that vote: Baghdad’s worst-ever bomb attack, policemen shooting unarmed black men in America and armed black men shooting policemen, the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice, the Turkish coup, murders in Munich yesterday. Let’s hope this doesn’t become etc…