Not self confidence....
If you managed to negotiate a trade deal with your biggest and nearest trading partner that was worse than the existing one, would you not be rather embarrassed about it?
If you put a border in between two parts of your own country would you not ask for an audience with Her Majesty, apologise and resign?
If you managed to win a massive election victory by lying about the above wouldn’t you want to move quickly on and concentrate on something else?
Apparently not, the answer it seems is to start another fight on exactly the same subject.
Knowing that you agreed the deal, knowing that you were told of the consequences of the deal, knowing that you funded the infrastructure necessary to implement the red tape the deal created, knowing that you lied about the need for any infrastructure or even red tape.
The self confidence and self delusion needed to do this is approaching psychotic levels. Except it isn’t really.
It is cynical, party political posturing by a group so desperate to hang on to power that they must keep riding the populist tiger, inventing ever more ludicrous arguments.
Arguments explaining: why they have been betrayed, why the foreigners have it in for the UK, why America should butt out, why international law isn’t important, why the treaty is being implemented vindictively, why no one told them it involved checks at borders.
The worst are full of passionate intensity, which justifies all this in their own eyes.
But not in anyone else’s.
In the end that will be what really matters, how others see the UK.
Increasingly they don’t like what they see, at all.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.