Dynamic duo still rapt by endless loop that is Brexit

It shouldn’t be possible. But it’s true. Somehow, Brexit is simultaneously the most exciting political event of our times – and the most boring.

It is, isn’t it? Brexit is so bold, so radical, so adventurous, so revolutionary – and so dull. So little happens. Parliament debates Brexit all the time – in fact, it debates little else – and yet virtually nothing new is ever said. Day after day it’s the same. The same tired faces, the same tired speeches, the same tired putdowns – and the same tired journalists.

I sit up in the gallery, chin slumped on fist, and watch specks of dust drifting gently down on to the roof of the Speaker’s chair.

Below me, the debate drones on, low and unvarying, and somehow distant, like the hum of a vacuum cleaner in a hotel corridor.

But perhaps I’m going too far. Not everyone is bored with Brexit. Almost, but not quite. There are exceptions: a handful of hardy souls who, even after two long years of disappointment and frustration, still seem every bit as excited about Brexit as they did on the morning of June 24, 2016.

I present Mr John Redwood and Sir Bill Cash.

Yesterday, the Commons held a debate about legislating for the withdrawal agreement. Few MPS bothered to turn up, but Mr Redwood and Sir Bill did. I doubt they’d have missed it for a party on Silvio Berlusconi’s yacht with Scarlett Johansson.

They seemed genuinely engrossed. Gripped, even. Mr Redwood looked like a small boy from 1957 ripping open a Scalextric on Christmas morning. At one point, he told the House that Labour’s Matthew Pennycook, a shadow Brexit minister, had just said something “very interesting”. And do you know, I think he actually meant it. For the life of me, I can’t remember what the “very interesting” thing was, because obviously it wasn’t very interesting at all, but that isn’t the point. The point is that Mr Redwood was interested. And that’s what interested me.

In fact: it didn’t just interest me. It dazzled me. How, I wondered, in silent awe, does Mr Redwood manage it? How does he manage to sit there, on an uncomfortable bench, for hours on end, day after day, week after week, month after month, listening to this interminable repetitive bilge – while still appearing utterly rapt? He has my sincere admiration, and my burning envy.

And as for Sir Bill – how does he do it? How does he manage to keep turning out these speeches about the most suffocatingly arid minutiae of the Brexit process – the “scrutiny systems” and “joint committees” and “parliamentary locks” – without nodding off, mid-sentence, into a deep and blissful slumber? No one would hold it against him if he did. They probably wouldn’t even notice. Yet still, somehow, he soldiers heroically on.

God bless these remarkable men. What they have is a rare and special gift.

Would that the rest of us poor souls could share it.