Satire is said to have died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, but it is alive a well so long as the Brexiteer ultras are around and my word it is funny.
The news that a company wants to invest $200m in Antrim to make tin cans for the food and drinks industry, because it will be in both the UK and the Single Market is very good news.
Or at least it is good news for most people, for the DUP and the Brexit ultras it is apparently bad news. (It gets better.)
At the same time as investment and jobs are arriving in NI (in DUP constituencies no less) they are declaring the Northern Ireland Protocol a threat to the province’s economy, and something that must be destroyed. (I know.)
Their media supporters are warning that the government is about to betray Brexit by standing by its international treaties, supporting international law and not starting a trade war which the UK would lose on day one. (A bit too weird for Monty Python.)
Lord Frost, yesterday’s hero, is now the villain of the piece. He and the PM must shoot themselves and the country in the foot again, to prove their loyalty to the cause. Otherwise they will soon be added to their hate list of traitors who have betrayed the purity of the cause. (Imagine the look on poor Lord Frost’s face.)
It isn’t so much that satire is dead, more this isn’t really funny at all. They are deadly serious. If you wrote a book like this it would never be published on the grounds it was beyond ridiculous and yet this is the world we live in.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.