The silly season is upon us.

July and August are very much the silly season politically and it seems that this is a term which the politerati are taking more literally than they usually do. There are boxes of frogs which seem calm, rational and sensible by comparison.

Labour and the Tories (who got us into this mess) are not bothering overly much about the looming Brexit deadline and the increasing possibility of crashing out without a deal, or a so-called “blind Brexit” in which the UK leaves without the terms of its exit being finalised. This last option is rather like jumping off a cliff in the hope that there’s a nice big inflatable airbag waiting for you at the bottom, and not some jagged rocks. But this isn’t the big political topic right now. Instead Labour and the Tories are competing with one another about which of them is more bigoted.

Labour can’t be arsed opposing Brexit. It can’t be bothered presenting a cohesive and coherent policy to counter the most dysfunctional, inept, and vindictively selfish Conservative government in living memory. Thatcher’s government was every bit as vindictively selfish, but at least it was efficient about it. You’d think that Labour would have an easy time against Theresa May’s bunch of talentless clowns, but no, Labour would far rather tear itself apart over accusations of anti-semitism. However the tragedy for the rest of us is that even if Labour wasn’t falling over itself to shoot itself in the foot, it would still not be capable of mounting an effective defence against the Tories’ reckless Brexit because Jeremy Corbyn is as keen on leaving the EU as Liam Fox is.

Meanwhile the Tories aren’t even pretending any more that they’re no longer the nasty party. No amount of cheesy photo ops can disguise the fact that the Tories fundamentally exist in order to enable nasty bigots to extract as much cash as possible from any given situation. It’s only now that they are facing the music in the media for at least some of their many faceted bigotry, because in his column for the Telegraph, the most embarrassing Foreign Secretary in the history of a country which once went to war over its right to export opium to China, used patronising and insulting language to denounce the face veils worn by a minority of Muslim women. Johnson said that the veils look ridiculous, and to be fair he is something of an expert in looking ridiculous.

The party is now desperately trying to close down the accusations that it’s Islamophobic with an investigation into Johnson’s comments which is only being carried out so that Tory politicians can claim that they can’t comment on the matter because it’s the subject of an internal party investigation. They’re hoping that everyone will forget about the matter over the summer, then in a few months time they’ll produce a report saying that the remarks were rude and unnecessary, but which falls a long way short of forcing Boris Johnson to resign from the party. He's a joke but, let's no forget, he's just one in a whole pack of jokers.