Gavin Williamson. Good grief.

A week to convince us all that the loonies really have taken over the asylum - if ever we needed proof. We've had the idiocies of Chris 'Failing'  Grayling, the Transport Secretary who decided to commission a ferry service from a company which had zero experience in ferries. You might think that this represented peak stupid from the Tories, and that’s a hard thing to achieve considering the competition. But no. We have Chris, and we have Andrea Leadsom, whose sole contribution to politics has been to allow us all to ponder the philosophical question of whether it’s sexist to point out that a deeply stupid woman is, in fact, stupid. We have the Northern Ireland Secretary, Karen Bradley, who didn’t realise that sectarianism is a thing in Northern Ireland. We have Dominic Raab and his belated realisation that Britain is an island. And then along comes Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, making his bid for the most stupid Tory on the planet.

Gavin, who always wanted to be Defence Secretary because when he was a boy he demonstrated his military prowess by pulling the wings off flies for fun, has announced that all is well in Brexitland. Leaving the EU, he boasted, will “enhance the UK’s lethality”. And this is true. After Brexit the UK will be a lot more lethal if you’re dependent on benefits, you’re disabled or you have a chronic health condition. Conservatives have always been considerably more successful at killing off British citizens than they have been at terminating terrorists. Although if you’re a Tory then you do consider poor people to be enemies of the state, so by that token they’re a huge success.

Gavin’s macho pose would be somewhat more convincing if he didn’t bear a startling resemblance to Frank Spencer of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (Oooer, Betty, that dates me). Like Frank, Gavin is best known for his hapless incompetence, his self belief and his high pitched squeaky voice. All we need to complete the comparison is for the Defence Secretary to turn up for his next big announcement about how Great Britain, and by extension Gavin, is on roller skates and being towed by a Routemaster bus.  The roller skating behind a bus would at least have the merit of being worth watching, which is a quality that Gavin has always sadly lacked.

His posturing would be more convincing if the Conservatives hadn’t run down the armed services in the same way that they’ve run down all other public services. Or if the defence budget wasn’t £7 billion short of where it needs to be in order to fulfil the Ministry of Defence’s 10 year equipment plan. Although perhaps when Gavin spoke about unleashing swarms of drones he was referring to Conservative MPs. They are also, on all the available evidence, unthinking and robotic.

“We should be the nation that people turn to when the world needs leadership,” said Gavin. With a straight face. This UK. The one that’s currently shooting itself in the foot and the face and is the laughing stock of Europe – and the only reason it’s not the laughing stock of the entire world is because of Donald Trump. Sure, people around the globe will look to the UK for leadership when they want to know how to turn a successful democracy into a low rent tax haven with bad weather and food. They’ll look to the UK for lessons in maintaining the veneer of democracy while stripping it of meaningful content. But most of all, they’ll look to the UK when they want to understand how it is that people of the calibre of Gavin can get to the highest levels of government. If nothing else, he’s an inspirational role model for delusional idiots. This is, let us not forget, the Defence Secretary whose strategy for dealing with Russia consisted of telling Putin to go away.

Now he wants to send an aircraft carrier that won’t be operational for another two years, and which doesn’t have any planes. off to the South China Sea where it has no business being, so it can be a sitting target for the Chinese. And this at a time when it’s vital for the UK to make trade deals so that it retains some semblance of a functioning economy after Brexit. The only positive thing that you can say about Gavin’s leadership of the Ministry of Defence is that the man is a weapon.

Gavin’s embarrassing jingoism is, however, precisely what Brexit is all about for the Brexiteers. It’s about harking back to the days when Britannia ruled the waves and could waive the rules with impugnity. It’s the fantasy of little boys who lost themselves in Commando comics and dreamt about getting one over the Bosch. We have a Defence Secretary who has wet dreams about gunboat diplomacy. We have a Trade Secretary who said he’d bestride the world making favourable trade deals, but who’s only ever managed to trade on his favours in the Conservative party. We have a Prime Minister who says she’s listening but who only ever listens to herself.

Brexit was always an exercise in fantasy and wishful thinking. It’s a dream of a Britain that never was. The dreams of the Brexiteers are dangerous. They’re going to sleepwalk us off a cliff and into a nightmare where the British state will prove its lethality by depriving the poor, the weak, the disabled and the marginalised of the means of a dignified living. It will prove its lethality by stripping the NHS to the bones and privatising what’s left. It will prove its lethality by getting rid of employment rights and consumer protections.
Is it too late for Britain to wake up from its Brexit nightmare?