Five uncomfortable facts from the weekend

1. Boris Johnson isn’t half as funny or smart as he’d like people to think. On a programme about the British Foreign Office when he was still Foreign Secretary, he had to be drip-fed information about the place he was visiting, and when he tried filming a couple of minutes for his twitter-feed, he repeatedly got mixed up. As for his DUP conference performance, it was frankly embarrassing. Tousling his hair doesn’t make his jokes about Wright bus funny. I’m a former Foreign Secretary, get me out of here.
2. Arlene Foster is uncomfortably aware of the public view of her party. That’s why she told the conference the party was deeply, deeply sorry for the mistakes made. Mistakes? Having watched the RHI inquiry, what happened and what didn’t happen over those crucial RHI months looked a lot more like deliberate, self-serving decision-making than some innocent blunder. Arlene is a good public speaker; the problem is, the words coming out of her mouth sound, as often as not, half-baked.
3. Events have a way of happening when you’re least ready. In the very moment that I was watching Arlene welcome the presence of the ‘Gibraltar delegation’ at the DUP conference, I got an internet alert from The Guardian: ‘May gives way over Gibraltar after Spain’s veto threat’. Oops.
4. When the awful squares up to the painful, the awful usually wins. If Theresa May’s bill gets through the House of Commons, Britain and all of us will be faced with painful  economic future. If Theresa May’s bill doesn’t get through the House of Commons, the economic and political consequences are likely  to be unspeakably awful.
5. Admitting you got it wrong is a painful potion to swallow. Arlene got it wrong (or should that be ‘got caught’?) and had to tell the world her party was deeply, deeply sorry. If the UK were to follow Arlene’s lead and admit that they got it wrong, hold a second referendum and call the whole Brexit thing off, they would be an international laughing-stock. If they don’t hold a second referendum and call the whole thing off, they’re going to stumble into a very scary, uncertain economic and political place, and be an international object of pity.

No wonder British commentators are talking about this as the biggest threat to Britain since the Second World War. After a couple of years scavenging for scraps in the economic wilderness, there’ll be those who’ll wonder if things mightn’t have been better had Mr Hitler  won.