Get ready for Friday the 13th: Nightmare on Downing Street

Friday December 13 looks like it will be the day on which the nation wakes up and has to explain to itself and its children exactly how it came to vote for either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn to be its prime minister

So we’re not getting Halloween Brexit, but it looks like we might get Friday the 13th: Nightmare on Downing Street. And for the first time, it will come in the form of a Choose Your Own Utterly Terrible Adventure story.

As things stand, Friday December 13 will be the morning the nation wakes up and for the rest of its life will find itself having to explain both to itself and to its children exactly how it was it came to vote for either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, theoretically for five whole years.

That’s right: Johnson or Corbyn for Christmas. I mean I know we’ve been naughty but still. That bad?

At time of writing, it is hard to tell which will be worse. Boris Johnson’s Christmas Election itself, which currently looks like it really will happen on December 12, or the six full weeks of terrifying political Christmas gags which are already in full swing. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when all hope is dying and everyone’s lying, denying and smears! It’s the most….you get the point.

Which is, of course, not to say that it’s actually going to happen. Such are the unexpected delights of life in Britain: The Taking Back Control Years, we don’t seem actually to be able to have a general election without the European Union’s say so.

Well, more accurately, we can’t have an election without Jeremy Corbyn’s say so, and his say so far has been to say he’ll only say yes when he finds out how long the latest ditch-death-defying Article 50 extension is. That’s meant to happen on Friday, when the EU will just arbitrarily decide how long to extend our membership of the European Union for, after having to interpret the three contradictory letters our toddler prime minister sent them.

If they offer an extension until the end of January, thereby, kind of but not really taking no Deal Brexit off the table, Corbyn might have to go ahead and say yes to the election. But then again, he might not.

Currently, Labour’s honest reasons for not having the election they really really want to have have a half life of up to 24 hours. By this time next week, new reasons will have to be issued on a quarter-hourly basis.

What Johnson imagines he might get out of it is anyone’s guess but the latest Classic Dom plan appears to be to give Corbyn an ultimatum he absolutely should refuse but probably won’t.

“If you don’t vote through the Brexit deal you don’t want, I won’t give you the election you don’t want, either.”

For some time now, Johnson and his top aides have taken legislating for a general election to be a You Bet! style challenge akin to driving a BMX through the back windows a moving limo.

In other words, it has to be landed either right after Brexit, before it’s become overwhelmingly clear that it was a terrible idea.

Or, right after the failure to deliver Brexit, whereupon Johnson and Cummings can deliver the election they long for, namely a “people versus parliament” campaign, because, frankly, there just isn’t enough hatred and anger out there already, and we could all use a little more.

What timing, in its way, that this plan should present itself so clearly on the same day an academic study is published showing that more than half of voters think that violence against MPs is an acceptable price to pay for Brexit (or indeed Remain).

Both of these are equally bad outcomes so it is hard to know which we should be wishing for. But one things for certain, Cummings and co stand ready to open the sluice gates of lies and hate. Brexit has already ruined millions of Christmas lunches up and down the country, in its three and a half year reign of misery. On this trajectory, Christmas 2019 will be whole orders of magnitude worse. Turkeys, as the the old saying goes, tend not to vote for Christmas. But at least they don’t have to live through it.