Our only hope is a second vote – and a truly rotten PM

At work recently we had a vote and decided to invest a considerable sum of money in a new venture that within a week we could see was not going to work. We all sat around wailing and gnashing our teeth until someone had a brilliant idea. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s have another vote.’ So we did and, as a result, financial ruin was averted. Phew.

Today lots of people – me included – are suggesting there should be a second vote on this whole Europe business, but we’re told by people in suits that this is not possible. And when we ask why, they say, ‘Because you just can’t.’

Why not? Where in the constitution does it say we must abide by the result of a plebiscite, no matter how moronic that result might be? It doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say anything, in fact, because we don’t really have a constitution in Britain. So we can do what happens to be sensible at any given moment. And what is sensible now surely is to hold a vote when everyone is equipped with the most powerful tool in the box: hindsight.

Of course this would infuriate millions of idiotic north of England coffin-dodgers who are prepared to bankrupt the country simply because they don’t want to live next door to a ‘darkie’. Many will write angry letters full of capital letters and underlining to their local newspapers. And there will be lots of discontent in various bingo halls, but who cares? They’ll all be dead soon anyway.

It’s also true to say that a second vote would make us look ridiculous on the world stage. But better to look silly for a short time than to live for ever in a dimly lit, poverty-stricken, festering nest of warts, mud and minority-bashing incidents on the bus home every evening.

The last time Europe was truly united the Romans were in charge, but then one day everyone decided they didn’t like the wine and the roads and the baths and the smart uniforms any more and for the next five hundred years Britain endured the Dark Ages when everyone died at the age of twenty-seven, in hideous agony, having achieved absolutely nothing at all.

Then there was the Reformation, when a bunch of people decided they wanted to go it alone without Mr Pope. The thirty-year war that resulted killed up to 40 per cent of Germany’s population.

It’ll be the same thing all over again if we leave the EU. The Germans will grow tired of supporting the Greeks on their own and become Hitlerish again. The French will go on strike. Hadrian’s Wall will have to be rebuilt and manned with armed guards. England will be plunged into a recession so deep that we will be forced to eat one another and then Vladimir Putin will arrive in a tank and there will be a war.

Yes, 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU, believing that they’d immediately get their job back from that bastard Latvian at No. 24 and that new and exciting trade deals would be done and that the NHS would get £350 million a week.

But now they have realized that, actually, all the money we save by not being in the EU will have to be spent policing the camps around London’s St Pancras station that will need to be built to house the million Syrians who’ve been ushered on to a train in Paris. And that the fishing quotas won’t change. And that going abroad on holiday will be too time-consuming at the airport and too expensive. And as a result many are ringing Jeremy Vine to say that, if they were given their time again, they’d vote to remain.

This is the problem. We could soon be in the situation where 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the population is lying in the street, covered in weeping sores, begging for a second referendum, and we won’t be able to have one because a man in a suit says, ‘You just can’t.’

It’s such a stupid state of affairs that even my hair is angry. I toss and turn at night, beating the pillow with impotent rage as I think how little humanity would have achieved if it had never been given the opportunity to change its mind. And how my kids are going to live miserable lives because our generation was too stubborn and too frightened of looking silly to say, ‘Let’s try that again.’

There is, as I see it, only one glimmer of hope. One chance that the day can be saved. And, tragically, it is called Tom Watson.

He is, as I write, still the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. He is also very possibly the worst human being on the planet. I hate him on a cellular level. I dislike him so much that on long car journeys I often amuse myself by thinking up new and interesting ways of peeling off all his skin.

The hatred began when he started to persecute friends of mine in the world of newspapers and it was curdled with added venom when he initially refused to apologize after accusing an innocent man of being a rapist and kiddie fiddler. He is a terrible man but, given the tumult surrounding the Labour leadership, he does stand a chance of being the party leader by the time the country is faced with its next general election. Of course, Watson has suggested that he won’t run for his party’s leadership – but then that’s what Michael Gove said.

And if Watson does become leader, all he needs to fix this Brexit mess is to say in his manifesto, ‘If I am elected, I will hold another referendum on Britain’s EU membership.’

He’d win by a landslide. Even I would vote for him. And then in the referendum that followed, the young would actually get off their arses and go to the polling booth, millions would change their mind, we’d be back in the bosom of the EU, the uncertainty would end, the financial tap would be turned back on, the recession would be avoided, Scotland would hang around, there would be no famine and Putin’s tanks would remain in their bunkers.

The only downside, of course, is that we’d end up with a horrible, horrible man as prime minister. But that, in my book, is a price worth paying.

3 July 2016