Not bizarre enough yet

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Some Tory MPs, including failed leadership candidate Dominic Raab, have been arguing in recent days that it will be “the EU’s fault” if the UK walks away without a deal at the end of October.  It sounds a bit like the playground argument that ‘some big boys made me do it, Miss’, a level of argument wholly appropriate to the farce of the Tory Donkey Derby. 

But in principle, he does have a point – if someone is refusing to accept a reasonable argument, then they are at least partly responsible for what happens as a consequence.  My problem, though, is understanding exactly which bit of ‘we demand that you bend the rules of the single market to suit us, give us rights not enjoyed by member states to negotiate separate deals, and open up an uncontrolled back door into the single market in Ireland’ he considers to be reasonable.

Meanwhile the man who made the bizarre claim that he makes and paints model buses out of old wine crates (in what looks like an attempt to find out just how gullible his target electorate – the Tory membership - is) has displayed his mathematical ‘prowess’ by stating that setting a firm and immovable target for leaving, whether there is a deal or not, somehow makes the odds of leaving without a deal a million to one against.  This is tantamount to claiming that the odds of an EU27 which has consistently said that the withdrawal deal cannot be negotiated agreeing to cave in and make changes after all are 999,999 to 1 on. 

One possible explanation is that he’s actually realised just what a task he has in front of him and is now trying to lose; it would be a better explanation of some of his recent statements than that he’s making a serious attempt to win.  It might also suggest that he’s not quite as irrational as he appears.  The problem with this approach, however, is that he is seriously underestimating the gullibility of that target electorate.  He’ll have to come up with something much more bizarre than he’s managed to date if he really wants to lose.