Attention: All friends across Europe and the half of Britain dismayed by the madness of this government’s desire to impoverish all our lives in ways that go far beyond economics, I send you warm salutations and a heartfelt sorry. And to all those across our continent who – not already bored of this interminable farce – at this present moment must be shaking their heads in disbelief at the tragicomedy unfolding before their very eyes, I declare my undying apologies. I don’t know if sending out a message in a digital bottle will make any difference to the catastrophe we see emerging in this slo-mo act of national collective suicide. We’re suffocating out here on the perimeter under a cabinet of hands all of whom stroke their fat fingers against the trigger; a merry, posh-spoken band of English outlaws who press the barrel of their hostage gun not only against my temple but also against that of the millions of others on this island who want no part in this categorical error of proportions that will without doubt come to register in time on history’s seismograph. 1+1=3. Historical+Error=Brexit.

How can you begin to forgive us our trespasses? How can we begin to forgive ourselves for letting the country sink into this morass of festering sewage? How to undo this Gordian knot of tangled pride and stubbornness and delusion? How to eviscerate a political class of unenlightened, self-interested types who have for too long fed on the timidness and deference of a people whose claim to decency is undermined by the hostility and hubris implicit in a Brexit concept that has gone from bad to worse? Christ! They’re even talking of sending in the Royal Navy to apprehend French and Dutch fisherman who have, by common consent, for centuries fished these coastal waters? Even if such threats are hollow hyperbole, the mere mention of naval intervention – gunboats, can you believe? – is not just insulting to our European compatriots, it’s also downright dangerous. This debacle is now descending into collective madness, and all under the tutelage of a twit of a P.M. for whom this is all just a Bullingdon Club game of sophistry with tomfoolery thrown in – of who can win the debate while not essentially giving a shit about the debating point. In short, old Etonians are using the futures of sixty-seven million people here and countless millions on the continent as bystanders in their game of ‘who can sell a knuckle-headed notion like storming out of Europe, friendless, in a no-deal strop (aka Brexit)’ to a bunch of gullible fools’? If anyone can sell snake-oil to a populace that wasn’t even ill to begin with, Boris can. He’s an affable chap. He dreams of being Pliny the Elder when all around him Rome is being doused in petrol. He’s more chameleon than Pliny and he changes hue effortlessly to blend in wherever with whomever. To this ability he owes his success. Clever animals, chameleons. Trust in a chameleon to lead you out the forest and onto the hot sand. Yes, he’s a selfish oaf, but at least he’s our oaf. And he uses impressive words half the country cannot fathom the meaning of, which naturally gives him an even more elevated standing among lesser wordsmiths. He’s got gravitas while the rest of us have got gravy.

This was the referendum to end all referendums. Deeply flawed from the design stage, it was an in-out referendum. Winner takes all; loser either emigrates or slips benignly into stultifying acceptance. What an ingenious device of modern democracy to fill the public with lies, obfuscation and misinformation and expect them to take that rotten meat and cook it up into an informed decision. What should be a legally non-binding advisory upon which further rational decisions can be made by educated leaders of sound mind and limited ideology becomes an in-out ultimatum on a subject so beyond the ken of the vast majority that the only sensible thing to do is to delegate that complex question to those who would be pushed to even tell you how many states make up the EU far less what they’re called. The highest expression of populist idiocy and irresponsibility on the part of a defunct governing class is to give the plebeians the keys to the kingdom in the form of a referendum on a question most are not in an intellectual position to answer with anything more than base emotion. On monumental issues, a governing class do not serve democracy’s best interests by devolving responsibility onto impressionable souls. Where we stand near-broken now, those who served up Brexit on a plate to the hungry in the end served mainly themselves. Fact: on Referendum night what seems like decades ago, even though it was only four years, Google recorded a surge in UK-based searches on queries such as, what is the EU? How many countries form the EU? What are these countries? One can only presume such searches were frantically made en masse after votes had been cast in favour of getting out. Counter-intuitive (moronic?) as it seems, that’s what you do when you’ve no idea the whys and wherefores of your decision-making process: you ask the basic questions after you’ve magicked the answer from thin air with a swish of your wand. If only Sherlock Holmes had been around to show the country the true meaning of deductive reasoning. But he wasn’t and we now find ourselves sinking into irrelevance as a nation.

This tragedy, like all tragedies, has a basis, a beginning. The original sin was cast not by Johnson, but his old Eton pal, Dave ‘The Rave’ Cameron. This former P.M. now tainted forever by complacency in thinking that a people raised on a diet of right-wing tabloids would actually arrive at the same sage decision as your well-travelled self, David. Poor judgement mixed in with public school hubris. And you, Mr Cameron, would extend the courtesy of abrogating your decision-making powers to a populace so out of touch with the membership rules of a very important club that half don’t even know what it is they’re trying to get away from. And what can spending a year abroad in Germany tell you that the front page of the Sun or the Daily Mail cannot? Maybe it’s poetic justice that England leaves in disarray, as England never really had a clue what it was involved with to begin with. England, you were a punch-drunk boxer with heavily swollen eyes swaying in the ring corner while your trainers whispered sweet nothings in your ear. Those men hunched in your corner were reporters from The Sun, The Daily Star, The Mirror (pro-EU editors with anti-EU readership), The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and the Daily Express. Their pantomime villain was the EU commission. Cue Boris Johnson, Brussels correspondent for the right-wing Telegraph: the spinner of tall tales from the engine room of continental power. No, England never really understood what Europe was about, though it undoubtedly will now that it has stormed off into the wilderness. What the sleaze-merchants at the tabloids didn’t tell you was that when you joined up to the European Economic Community you were heralded as the dirty man of Europe. You were near bankrupt, in hoc to the unions, and facing wave after wave of violent disintegration from Glasgow to Glamorgan. Twenty years later, you were helping to draft EU law. The country was cleaner. People were given workplace protections. Statutory holidays. Hitherto battered ecosystems started to recover. As Europe got greener and fairer, we followed wisely. Things started to work again. What was a stagnating, crumbling hulk of a former empire was now beginning to modernise as it moved inward to the centre of power and influence in a renovated, peaceful, and prosperous Europe. But that wasn’t good enough for the Brexit buccaneers and free-trade mercantilists in the Tory illuminati who thought they were being held back by EU processes and whose personal interests could be better served by, as they saw it, becoming unchained from EU transparency. And what better way to do it, than by telling lie after lie about the European Union, by stoking nationalism, and by protracting a sentimental obsession with the Second World War wherein the European Parliament of today were cast as the stereotypical figures of 1940: the French duplicitous, collaborating cowards; the Germans evil masterminds; the Italians pompous and ridiculous; the Greeks and Spanish lazy; the Slavs in the pocket of the Kremlin; the Scandinavians too bloody Scandinavian. The list goes on. If the aim was to convince a sceptical population stuck half way out into the ocean on their semi-detached raft called Britannia that the Germans won the war after all and with their French collaborators are now running the show under the guise of the Commission, the Parliament in Strasbourg, and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, then Rees-Mogg, Gove, Johnson, et al did a sterling job. They bayed the mob and the mob swallowed it. Woe betide the mob. Nigel Farage doesn’t even feature because he’s an Estuary English-speaking nobody who will never assume the occult powers of a plum-in-the-mouth, true blue Brexiteer with a real $$$ stake in leaving. If anything, the vaudeville figure of Farage stands to lose from Brexit seeing that he no longer draws a MEP’s salary and cannot summon so much as an old man and his greyhound for his populist rallies.

What started out on the part of David Cameron as a concession to a tumescent Tory party to avoid a parliamentary civil war, turned into an offer to take a question lingering long on our pursed lips to the people. As soon as that platform went public, a campaign of disinformation could commence unhindered. What did the rump of England know anyway about affairs of state? Hell, most didn’t know where the European Court of Justice was, far less what its purpose was. All they knew and all they were happy to know was that these foreigners were presiding over our lives and that we, as Englishman, don’t take kindly to being told what we can and cannot do, unless of course our upper-classes (who are Norman French and Hanoverian German anyway) are the ones to do the dictating as they always have. No, we can’t really think for ourselves but better if that thinking is done for us by one of our own, albeit a rich, land-owning toff we never have dealings with, than by a Eurocrat talking a funny tongue. If most actually took the trouble to be better informed they would have realised that what is decided beyond these shores is a lot more impactful on our daily lives than we care to think. Example: who writes the software in your mobile phone that rewires your brain on a neural level? A foreigner. Who or what influences share/commodity prices? Who decides the value of your avocados? And which administration influences UK foreign policy? All emanate from abroad, Brexit or no Brexit. What’s more, if in your La-La Land of Milk & Honey you took all foreign influence away you’d end up another North Korea or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Worst still you’d end up with Tories governing your lives to suit their own greedy, acquisitive interests even more stridently than you do now where at least what comes down from Brussels, Strasbourg or Luxembourg has at least some mitigating effect on Tory misrule. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Johnson is lofted to the pinnacle of party power not by popular election but by the 90,000 fawning members that make up the Conservative Party. Not content with winning those old fuddy-duddies over, with his unelected mandate he takes the reins on the government in a bloodless coup d’etat, giving him airtime to tell more whopping lies when he is not shirking public duties. With that he proceeds to scale the Red Wall – meaning he wins previously un-winnable seats in the North and Midlands. All in, the jester takes the whole court hostage. From a blasé ‘Easiest Free Trade Deal in History’ to a trite ‘Get Brexit Done’ bit of sloganeering we have degenerated from the promise of a frictionless agreement to the point of teetering on a cliff edge without having the balls to fall off. Predictably, even the language of state has gone from somewhat cordial to bellicose. When in doubt, call in the Royal Navy. Talk about making an enemy of yourself when there were never any grounds to. Not a single flimsy reason.

How has it come to this? What gives this rogue government and the destructive forces that put them there the right to tear my life away from a position of favour, unfettered travel, and an identity closely tied to progressive European politics to this sorry state of affairs? I was born Scottish and you made me British. I was born European and you took that away from me, too. Thanks England, for poisoning half a century of close relations and mutual benefits with the best club anyone could hope to be a member of in a world of clubs and powerful blocs.

Desculpes, désolé, mi dispiace, es tut mir leid. I’m sorry Europe, but these revolutionaries in London do not speak for me with their half-baked plans. My advice to you is to shine your bright light into our fading corner. Don’t give up on us before we give up on ourselves.