This Week's Brexit Winners and Losers

Mark Francois is part of the Brexiteer bitter-enders crew, once hyper-obscure cranks whose individual opinions have been magnified as their number has dwindled. Previously just a circle with eyes drawn on, in recent weeks the world has come to know all the opinions that Francois used to keep to himself and his golf club cronies.

And what opinions they are.

Going on the BBC’s World Tonight radio show, Francois announced that the indicative votes procedure had been part of a plot by Chancellor Hammond. "I know Philip Hammond very well – I was his number 2 at Defence," he insisted, then told Phil to stick it up his junta: "I was in the army. I wasn’t trained to lose," "This is a coup against the British people," "If you're listening, Phil [Hammond] – up yours!"

As the votes came in for Parliament to finally block off No Deal, Francois abandoned the army metaphors and the Pistols-on-Grundy routine, and turned padre: "Forgive them, father, they know not what they do."

Good week.

For months, something called the “Boles Amendment” has followed us around the Brexit endgame, up till the point when everyone was heartily sick of it – even though, just hours after it was finally defeated on Monday, no one could remember what it was about.

But the man who brought it, Nick Boles MP, still found its demise so exasperating that he resigned from the Conservatives, in a dramatic off-the-cuff speech that ended with him in tears. "Oh no, Nick, don’t go, come on…" one Tory colleague can be heard to bleat. But it is already too late… yer boy’s flounced.

Now a party of one, he’s off the leash and yapping, and his latest tweeted tongue-lashing was aimed at Robbie Gibb, the PM’s head of press, who is apparently "a hard Brexiteer trying to destroy her compromise". Rowrr.

Bad week.

Liz Truss is a Girl Scout Cookie raised to sentience. The enemy too dumb to realise they’ve been mortally wounded is to be feared, and Liz seems to sail through all troubles via the simple expedient of not noticing she’s sinking.

While she was Justice Secretary, Truss once said: "They’ve now got patrol dogs who are barking, which helps deter drones," and famously used her party conference speech to announce: "We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace."

This week, she was last seen launching a leadership contest literally no one asked for with an interview in the Times, one that can so far be boiled down to: "Yay! Capitalism!"

Good week.

“I’m never tasting surrender again." Last week, ERG kingpin Steve Baker was on Sky News describing himself as “The Hardman of Brexit”. This week, he was giving an extraordinary interview to the New Statesman where he summoned his inner Churchill. (Or maybe his inner Goebbels-in-the-Bunker?) He and 28 fellow Brexiteers, who refer to themselves as The Spartans, were the handful of Tories who voted against May’s Deal last week, assuring its demise.

But even Well’ard Baker has his limits. This week he was pictured weeping over Brexit on a BBC documentary produced by VICE Studios tracking Laura Kuenssberg. Just days later, Jacob Rees-Mogg was put up in his place on Sky News when May announced talks with Corbyn. Why? Because Steve was “too depressed” to speak.

Bad week.

The MP for Peterborough, most recently seen being sentenced to chokey after perverting the course of justice. Still not rocking an orange jumpsuit, Fi is awaiting her appeal. She has insisted on her innocence via a bizarre recorded appearance ripped from the final scenes of Fight Club. But while you’re appealing: hey, why not kick back in the House Of Commons and cast the deciding vote in one of the most important decisions in years? Yes – No Deal is now blocked-off – it’s (semi-) official. And we all have this convicted justice-pervert to thank.

Good week.

This one-time Lib Dem leadership contender is now flirting with resignation himself, because he’s sick, he says, of a party that opposes for opposition’s sake. So that means he won’t even be able to join the Independent Group – who have spent the crunch week routinely blocking every proposal that isn’t a second referendum. Normie’s a death-spiral within a death-spiral – how very now.

Bad week.

Super-wonk and former Brexit minister Raab is most famous for eating the same thing for lunch every day: a Pret Chicken Caesar Baguette (£5.45). When you’re going places, you don’t have time to investigate the many different ways one might secure 700 calories that are 40 percent mayonnaise.

Now, Raab has a second claim to notability. He likes books.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book. Reagan’s diaries. Two books on Nixon. A biography of King Hussein of Jordan. A Niall Ferguson. Welcome to the most right-wing reading list of all time that doesn’t contain The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. It’s unclear who Raab was trying to impress by propping stacks of books up behind him in a self-consciously showy way before his latest TV interview. Still, Dominic Raab reads books. Pass it on.

Good week.

Energy minister Claire is what happens to the Cabinet when you get through 41 resignations in 18 months. In addition to telling the Attorney General that he was “mansplaining” when he asked her not to call fellow party members “nutters” in the middle of a Cabinet meeting, Perry later decided she would refer to the Hard Brexiteer tendency as “righty-tighty”, before accidentally referring to Geoffrey Cox as “Robert”. At which point he might have had to mansplain his own name.

Bad week.

Really, what is the point of this footstool? Two Jobs Johnson is not even an ERG member, and in a week where his arch-enemy Michael Gove had a decisive impact on what happens next – in a week where even pinheaded weasel Steve Baker has been engaged in the enemy trenches, driving bayonets through Remainiac bellies – Boris seems to think a lugubrious weekly Telegraph column is the pace of debate. This week’s was a humdinger of piffle:

"This was the Friday when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves."

As it is, he is the Bagpuss leadership candidate who overslept and never woke up, looking gaunt and mumbling about “technological solutions to the Backstop”, to no one.

Bad week.

@gavhaynes