Sherelle JACOBS

For all their pious carping, recent events have exposed anti-brexit MPS as calculating and craven

Just when we thought we were heading for another wretched round of ear-straining speculation about whether the mood music in Brussels is changing, the smell of the political air in Britain has been decisively transformed. The dull tang of caution has given way to acid selfresolve, as No 10 seeks to show the EU that it is capable of pushing through a no-deal Brexit. But, perhaps more interestingly, the rot is really starting to set in among the hypocritical and cowardly Remainers.

Boris Johnson’s move to finally call the bluff of Remainer MPS by asking the Queen to suspend parliament is a game changer. And the whirlwind of outrage has been quite a spectacle to behold. While Ruth Davidson is set to resign as Scottish Tory leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Swinson and Anna Soubry have demanded to meet the Queen.

John Bercow – the man who has reduced the role of Speaker to a paradigm of law-bending goonery

worthy of Putin’s Russia – has claimed that shutting down Parliament is “an offence against the democratic process” and accused the PM of committing a “constitutional outrage”.

So has former Chancellor Philip Hammond. The one-time Goth, with his almost pathological aversion to sunny optimism, called the events “profoundly undemocratic”, even though he has spent the last three years spewing black resentment in the face of British self-determination.

Meanwhile, Dominic Grieve, the MP who voted for Article 50 and then immediately launched a campaign to oppose Brexit, told the BBC in the metro-merican drawl that has become ironically fashionable among Europhile Tory backbenchers that the situation was “pretty outrageous”. He added, with a Hollywood gangster flourish, that the PM “will come to regret it”.

But the prize for the most amusing reaction went to David Lammy, who cannot help but sound militantly bigoted no matter how thickly he marinates his hateful hubris in the mellifluous cadences of Martin Luther King. For the poundland preacher of Britain to blast Boris Johnson for acting like a “poundshop dictator” yesterday could not be more fitting.

Try as they might, the Remainers can no longer even mildly pull off the charade that they are respectable constitutionalists who merely seek to uphold parliamentary procedure. In recent months, they have more closely resembled tax-dodging lawyers, searching for grubby legal loopholes to cheat the country out of Brexit.

Do they think we have forgotten how MPS talked openly of a parliamentary coup to replace Boris Johnson with an anti-no deal leader? Or how John Bercow set fire to the parliamentary rulebook, Erskine May, in January, by allowing members to pass an amendment that gave Theresa May a three-day deadline to come up with a Plan B to replace her failed deal? Or how MPS stretched parliamentary rules to the very limit to pass a law, ordering the executive to seek a Brexit delay? Or how Labour forced the Government to publish the Withdrawal Agreement’s legal advice – which, irrespective of the quality of the deal, flew in the face of convention?

The seething ululations of the Remainers seem even more absurd when one considers that events are unfolding in the sordid Westminster parallel universe, where nothing is as it seems and everyone is a liar. The Remainers may try to depict themselves as noble democratic warriors, committed to a final showdown with the Government, but in truth earlier this week they gave in.

Arguably, Mr Johnson moved to prorogue Parliament because they showed weakness on Tuesday, exposing themselves as unwilling to back a no-confidence vote, even though it is the only realistic way to stop no deal; Mr Johnson seized on this chance to force the hand of the bluffing Remainers and focus minds in unbending Brussels.

There is, alas, a disgraceful logic to the dissipating Remainer boldness. In Westminster, the only thing worse than a battle lost is a battle won. And while Jeremy Corbyn secretly favours an election after a clean break with the EU so his party can then cynically lambast an “extremist” Tory Brexit, Jo Swinson is concerned that backing either the Labour leader or a Tory MP in an anti-brexit emergency government would alienate swing voters who have switched to her party from both Right and Left.

If they call a no-confidence motion it won’t be over principle, but to save face. Perhaps one cannot expect any better from two of the worst opposition leaders in British history. The Jo Swinsons and Jeremy Corbyns are to our terminal political system what nail bars and chicken shops are to our dying high streets – the last shoddy dregs clinging on for survival.

There are two happy twists in this dismal saga. First, thanks to the Remainers, it is now more likely than ever that we will enjoy a clean break from the EU – as, in contrast with the Remainers, Brussels’ bluff cannot be called. Soon our PM will have no choice but to do a no-deal Brexit. And second, as MPS who have defied the referendum know full well, a swampdraining general election is imminent.