Whatever the result of the EU referendum when you read this, I, like the rest of the British public, will be lying in a darkened room attempting to recover from the whole plebiscite pantomime. Because, and excuse my broken French, the whole thing is a fecking joke. Actually, that’s Irish, but who cares? We’re all Europeans… or not, as the case may be. You know better than me, as I’m writing this column during the final days of propaganda carpet-bombing before the vote on 23 June. I feel like a war correspondent. As in most wars, the bombs are causing great pain and making very little difference to the outcome. In fact, I’m convinced that a large proportion of the population are basing their vote on how friendly the waiters were the last time they went to Spain – and that’s the ones who have given it some serious thought.
Any reasonable discussion of the issue has been kyboshed by the fact that the whole debate is being used to lay the ground for a Conservative Party leadership challenge. Why couldn’t they have picked another issue over which to launch their poxy proxy war?
