Ye olde Brexit
POSH IS HAVING A LAUGH
YOU may have noticed innuendos about Henry VIII’s chopper amidst all the Brexit coverage.
It’s because the Tories plan to use rules he made in 1539 to force through laws without MPs approval.
Lib Dem chief whip Tom Brake says “Theresa May and her ministers are resembling a medieval court.”
But if Mrs May is mimicking any monarch, then it’s actually Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I.
Because in 1570 the Virgin Queen was kicked out of Tudor Europe’s trading club after being excommunicated for heresy by Pope Pius V.
But that freed her to send merchants to the Muslim world (where Catholics couldn’t trade) on Tudor Brexit deals.
In 1578 she dispatched an ambassador to Turkey to schmooze the Sultan and land lucrative trade deals. Business in North Africa and the Middle East followed.
Reading up on all this I was amused to learn how Liz wooed the next Turkish Sultan in 1595.
She sent an emissary – a sort of Tudor Boris Johnson – to Constantinople bearing an impressive clockwork organ. WELL I never. Victoria Beckham has a sense of humour after all. The notoriously sour-faced Spice once claimed she never smiled in public because she has “a responsibility to the fashion community”. So when she rocked up in Los Angeles wearing this T-shirt, the pictures got pinged around the globe, just as she had hoped they She had planned to send a “clock in the form of a cock” but thought better of it (according to Jerry Brotton’s fascinating book, The Orient Isle.)
But the Sultan was so delighted with the 16th century Boris’s performance he invited him to stay and frolic in the harem with his concubines.
Our Foreign Secretary didn’t go down quite so well when he visited Turkey in September. It could have been that ditty he wrote, calling President Erdogan a w***** who has sex with goats.
Not quite Greensleeves, was it, Boris?
Last year Trade Minister Lord Price claimed Brexit could bring about “a second Elizabethan Golden Age” of trade, boosting yearly exports by £70billion before 2020.
Well, if Brexit ministers have been mugging up on their Tudor history they’ll have reminded Mrs May that when Elizabeth died she was succeeded by her cousin, James VI of Scotland.
He made peace with Spain and in 1604 restored trade with other countries on the European continent.
A canny Scot unravelling Brexit? Surely not? would. Pokerface Posh is actually laughing all the way to the bank – yet again – because the £95 top from her own collection is now selling like hot cakes.
Which has prompted me to approach Poundland with my own budget version: