The ‘Stop Brexit’ circus must be run out of town

THAT didn ’t last long , did it? after a brief respite the Stop Brexit circus is back in town, bonkers as ever . MPs are returning to Westminster two weeks older , but none the wiser.

one might have hoped Mother theresa’s walking holiday would have allowed her to clear her head, to accept the futility of her situation and do the decent thing.

the Easter recess should have afforded a time for sober reflection, away from the madhouse, an opportunity for politicians to see themselves as the rest of us see them. We should be so lucky . Instead, the circular firing squad has reassembled and hostilities have been resumed.

Mrs May appears to possess not an iota of self-awareness. Rather than preparing a dignified resignation statement, she has apparently spent the past few days contemplating a Cabinet reshuffle.

In what parallel universe does she believe rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic is a sensible solution, while the captain who deliberately navigated the ship into an iceberg remains on the bridge?

She’s already promised to resign, not once but twice. Her authority is shot to pieces. She has been humiliated at home and abroad. Her dismal, defeatist withdrawal ‘deal’ is dead as a dodo.

Her MPs treat her with undisguised contempt. Her own party activists want her gone, yesterday.

Which bit of ‘ It ’s over’ doesn ’ t she understand? Yet, according to a headline in the Financial times: ‘May takes lead in bid to rescue Brexit talks.’ You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Isn’t that what she is supposed to have been doing for the past three years? Unfortunately, she was never remotely up to the job and subcontracted the task to her fanatically pro -EU civil servants, with utterly predictable results. When will she finally get the message? once-loyal Conservative constituency associations have gone on strike and are refusing, while she is still leader , to take part in upcoming local elections, let alone the European elections.

Can you really believe we are going to participate in elections for the European Parliament, three years after 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU?

Frankly, I can’t even begin to get my head around the idea. It ’s insane, evidence of abject failure and dereliction of duty on the part not just of the P rime Minister, but the entire political class. Sixty per cent of Conservative P arty members say they intend to vote for Nigel Farage’s Brexit P arty if the Euro elections go ahead.

Not only that, but those same members would make F arage second favourite only to Boris Johnson to succeed May as leader and PM. that is, of course, if Farage was a tory. Which he is, at heart. Not a theresa May t ory, obviously. or a Ken Clarke tory.

But Farage was a Conservative before he resigned to join Ukip over Johnny Major’s refusal to hold a referendum on the Maastricht treaty in 1992.

It was the tory high command’s slavish devotion to all things European which forced him out and motivated him to campaign tirelessly for our departure from the EU. When he succeeded spectacularly in winning a Leave vote in 2016, there was an opportunity to bring him back into the fold. Ukip was over.

Farage may not have wanted to rejoin the Conservative Party. He’d had his fill of politics after years of selfless campaigning and was entitled to seek his fortune elsewhere.

But at the time, in the wake of the referendum, I suggested May should invite him to join a broad, cross-party, pro-Brexit coalition to negotiate our departure, along with Labour Brexiteers such as Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart.

Farage, like Boris, has an appeal beyond traditional Conservatism. He reaches out to patriotic Labour voters, too, five million of whom voted Leave.

Naturally, my advice was rejected, because May never intended to honour the clear instruction of the British people for a clean break.

those pro -Brexit tories she did include, such as David Davis and Boris Johnson, she first drove to distraction and then drove out. But ask yourself this: who would you rather have speaking for Britain in Brussels — Farage or May?

Contrast his magnificent public putdown of the EU’s Herman V an Rompuy — ‘You have the charisma of a damp rag’, etc — with May’s pitiful, supine, grovelling , on-all-fours crawling to Barnier and Drunker. She approached the talks with all the dignity of a beggar sitting outside Westminster tube station, yet still seems bewildered as to why they treated her with such overt disdain.

In the process, she has repelled millions of traditional tory voters, brought her own party to the brink of electoral extinction, and put Britain’s fate in the hands of nonentities such as Pixie Balls - Cooper and that pipsqueak poison dwarf Jean-Claude Bercow.

She has also managed the almost impossible feat of making o.J. Corbyn, an obscure, unreconstructed, terrorist-loving Seventies Marxist throwback, electable.

Unbelievably, she has been reduced to begging Corbyn for support to get her risible ‘ deal’ through the Commons, even if that means diluting it still further.

I doubt Corbyn will oblige. If he does, Labour’s price would be permanent membership of a customs union (i.e. No Brexit) or the second referendum favoured by Nonce Finder General t om Watson, Corbyn’s deputy.

But we’ve twice voted to leave the EU, in the referendum and subsequent General Election, and the politicians have reneged on their promises by moving heaven and earth to stop Brexit ever happening.

So why should we believe they would take any notice of another referendum — which would be rigged in favour of Remain, anyway — if the result was the same again?

It’s not too late to salvage some - thing from this clustershambles, but only if May is defenestrated without further delay.

It’s reported that the chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee will tell her this week that it’s time to go. But she’s already said she’s leaving. Just not when. that ’s if she ever had any intention of standing down, except on her own terms, which I doubt.

It’s impossible to believe a word she says any more. She’s lied to the British people, she’s lied to her party, she’s lied to Parliament.

My guess is that despite any assurance she gives, she will — like Gordon Brown — have to be dragged screaming and kicking out of No 10. By then, whoever takes over, it might be too late to prevent the catastrophe of Corbyn winning the next election.

If that happens, it won ’ t be Farage’s fault.

He’s not the villain here. I had a pint or three with him recently and, believe me, he never wanted a return to frontline politics.

But having given half his life to fighting for Britain ’s withdrawal from the EU , he couldn ’t stand back and watch as his Brexit dream was betrayed by May and the political class at Westminster. FREED of some of the Ukip ‘ fruitcakes’, F arage’s Brexit Party could be a far more potent political threat, to both the t ories and Labour. I know one or two of the candidates and they are proper people, serious players.

they are prepared to make sacrifices of their existing careers to rescue Brexit. they’re just like Peter Finch in the film Network: mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.

I still hope the t ories find a way, even at this late stage, to jettison May immediately and choose a leader committed to Brexit, so that our participation in these ludicrous EU elections isn ’t necessary. But I’m not holding my breath.

the polls already indicate the Faragistas surging ahead. Let ’s hope they annihilate both main parties, teaching the t ories and Labour a lesson they deserve to have drummed repeatedly into their thick skulls.

Who knows, we may be about to see the realignment of British politics we hoped might come about in 2016.

Yes, theresa May is ultimately responsible and must pay for her betrayal. But the entire, squalid political class, with a few honourable exceptions, must shoulder the blame, too.

It is time the tawdry Stop Brexit circus packed its tents and was run out of town for good.

What part of ‘It’s Over’ doesn’t Mother Theresa understand?