I’m consumed by rage and a wish to lash out at the self-satisfied smuggeries

WHEN the rain turns tropical and the sky hangs broodingly low and grey, there is nothing finer than returning to bed mid-afternoon with a good book, an e-cig and a shut-down phone.

I don’t know why I silence the fixed line. Nobody calls and, anyway, I never answer. Even the cold callers have given up. I silence the mobile too on such a day.

So yesterday, a heap of pillows behind my head, I did that leg-stretching, toe-pointing slide-down of bliss while hearing the rain bullet the roof as I followed the wind swirling through the trees from my window.

There is an added joy on days like this simply because, living in the south of France, I know there won’t be too many before that sly old sun starts creeping around again.

And the mimosa, the bougainvillea, the violets and all the other southern plants whose names I forget will push through the dead ground and thrust and weave their way to the light.

It won’t be too long before the ivy and the Virginia creeper throw out the healthy leaves to rapidly cover the bare walls I hate when the crumbling crepi is revealed; returning LM to its pastiche of a far more impressive country house.

Languid day after day will follow, peaking in the new, unforgiving heatwaves that the destruction of our planet is bringing and driving all back inside to the cool of the bedchamber.

I was idly, smiling to myself, thinking all this as I gazed out at my land – my land – when it hit me like a blow centre stomach that in a few short weeks I will look out onto uncertainty and the unknown.

The view will still be the same but my angle on it will be tilted, smudged.

For the first time I would truly, if the worst comes to pass, be a foreigner with no more rights to be part of the greatest collection of nations ever assembled in modern times. No – ever.

The unbelievable self-immolation of the United Kingdom by its English overlords is actually going to happen.

Until I saw the defeated, sad, almost accepting face of Donald Tusk as he damned to hell those carrying out this without a defined plan, I was sure, certain, the cavalry would come to the rescue.

But of course in this war there is no gallant opposition riding over the hill, star circled flags waving. For the opposition is led by a snaggle-toothed general in an anorak who “leads” with words provided by his Marxist cabal.

A shuffling, whiny-voiced, blinkered empty vessel only ever filled and energised by socialist gains and failures in faraway lands. A backroom plotter of photocopied handouts and posters to push through letterboxes and post on lampposts.

A man who in the end has not the courage of his so-called convictions to admit his adversary is doing all he hoped.

And his adversary… Theresa May. She talks of God a lot – her shield of righteousness in bringing the will of the people to fruition.

Each Sunday she kneels in her church. I wonder what she says to her God?

How she justifies the Tory policies that have destroyed communities; left the vulnerable to die waiting for their benefits; flung out the Windrush generation and soon the rest; presided over the homeless who seem now to be an acceptable part of the landscape. How dare she employ Him in pursuit of her selfish gains that seek only to keep her job and her party together! How bloody dare she and trash the genuine Christians who have no time for her cruelty!

As you see, I am no longer arguing the intellectual case against Brexit. All has been said by minds finer than mine.

Actually I find myself utterly consumed by rage with a wish to lash out at the self-satisfied smuggeries of Davis, Rees-Mogg, Williamson, Fox, Hoey, Leadsom and the two worst of all: Gove and Johnson.

Gerbil-chops Gove, scuttling and hiding in the backrooms ready to pounce, and Johnson, his mouth curved in a secret smile of contemptuous superiority, fill me with a desire to smack them and never stop.

This is what they’ve reduced me to: a cold hatred. I listen to their weasel, lying words and want to scream at those poor souls in the industrial wastelands who voted for this.

Can’t you hear them? They don’t give a damn about you. They never did. It’s a game. You were conned rotten.

And your national broadcaster, the BBC, has also conned you rotten. So have many of your newspapers. I say that with the heaviest of hearts, having worked for both. I am ashamed of many.

So this is where I find myself. Hoping for sense to reassert itself. Hoping for those men and women who went into public service for the right reasons to remember why and act for the good of the country, not the party and not their personal ambitions.

Scotland, I exclude you. You will do the right thing.

Meanwhile – hoping, hoping, hoping… and hating.