I dared to suggest to a friend the other day that this whole Brexit fiasco might be part of some Cunning Plan.

What if, I said, what if you wanted to give the appearance of trying to fulfil the outcome of the referendum whilst at the same time undermining it at every turn? So that in the end, the clock would run down, the options would disappear one by one, and all that would remain would be, um, remain?

What would that look like?

If you were so cunning and so machiavellian that you could drive nails into the coffin of Brexit one by one by appearing to be so incompetent and hapless that everybody thought you were just useless: what would that look like?

Please, Br’er Fox, don’t fling me into that briar patch!

So this is my happy place: it really would have to look like this, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t just cancel Brexit and say the referendum was corrupted by lies and dirty money and bad actors, and anyway people didn’t even know what they were voting for. You couldn’t do that. You’d have to pretend to be going along with it until, whoops, we appear to have totally fucked this up. Let’s revoke, let’s remain, let’s have another vote without Cambridge Analytica, without Russian troll farms, without lies on buses, without dirty billionaire money, without Tony Blair putting people off.