Reality blow. A clash with reality. Capitulation in the face of reality. These were the most widely read phrases after the chain of resignations of three British ministers, including the media critic Boris Johnson, in response to the draft agreement that Theresa May plans to present to the EU in a few weeks’ time. But Johnson’s decision is anecdotal. It is nothing more than a repetition in a farcical tone of his pre-referendum tactic: resigning by gesturing a major disagreement in the hope of becoming prime minister on the wings of the tabloids and the Eurosceptic segments of the population and his party. As casino gamblers and broker-dealers know, this is called the “martingala strategy”, which consists of betting everything on double or nothing in the hope of making up for the loss. I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t usually work.
In his farewell, almost certainly his last moment of media glitter, the former foreign minister, the Englishman who dared to publicly quote Kipling – that friend of the lower races – in a temple in Myanmar – that former colony – the privileged heritage politician who visited the areas devastated by Hurricane Irma as one who goes on paid holidays in the misery of others, as the Sex Pistols would say, that pre-legitimate skull, which Valle-Inclán would say, left behind as a testament: “The Brexit dream is dying.” Touch of a bull’s-eye. End of the fantasy because the real importance of the departure of Johnson and the minister for the Brexit David Davis – the brit-glam version of Ramon Tremosa, and if you don’t believe it, compare this with this – is that it is a sign that the British government is finally beginning to define itself. Anyway, it didn’t take long. Only 15 months since he activated article 50. A sigh. And so we have gone from Waiting to Godot at the End of the Game. All very Beckettian. Beckett, by the way, was Irish.
