101 YEARS OLD AND STILL SOLVING THE UNSOLVABLE...

SORRY to be bringing back the Brexit business this snowy morning, but I think I may have made a decisive breakthrough. The trouble with all this negotiation business is that both sides have two main objectives: to get what they want and to deny the other side whatever it is they are aiming for. That’s why we won’t tell the EU what we want and why they turn down anything we suggest to them.

The solution, however, is simple: all we have to do is find one British export that is so vital that they cannot do without it. Something the Europeans cannot do without, yet have lacked the expertise to produce themselves.

Then we can threaten to impose any tariff we like on it and the EU will be terrified into conceding our demands in other areas if we refrain.

The answer came to me in a blinding flash of inspiration. The solution to all our problems is the English language itself.

Take the French, for example. With their Académie Francaise allegedly trying to keep their own language pure, they must be the most strongly opposed to the use of English words, yet they have miserably failed to prevent or even slow down their introduction. Quite apart from le sport, they have, among the numerous English imports into their vocabulary, le week-end and le whisky, which both begin with a letter not normally even included in their alphabet.

The precise details of the tariff on English words will have to be worked out, of course, but to start the ball rolling, I would propose levying an import duty of 1p a word on the use of anglicisms in the languages of the EU.

This will, I am delighted to say, have greatest effect on the EU bureaucracy itself where every communication has to be translated into 24 languages, each of which will contain several English words. The main revenue, however, will come from EU citizens themselves.

Even if the average European utters only ten English words on working days, plus extra sport, weekends, whisky, swear words and pop lyrics on Saturdays and Sundays, pushing the average up to 11 a day, that adds up to 77 taxable words per person per week.

That’s 77p per person, and since there will be around 450 million people in the EU when the UK has left, the total revenue will be 77x450 million pence every week, which works out at total revenue of £346.5 million a week, which you will notice is remarkably close to the figure of £350 million a week which Boris Johnson calculated during the referendum campaign.

Perhaps I am doing Mrs May and Mr Davis an injustice to suggest that they have not thought of this themselves.

They may, of course, be holding back this simple language tariff as a Weapon of Mass Negotiation Strategy, ready to be deployed at 45 minutes’ notice if agreement cannot be reached by conventional dispute resolution, but it seems to me that even the knowledge that we are holding our WMNS in reserve could exert a powerful influence in ending the argument in a manner fair to all, especially us.