One Day Someone Will Actually Please Polly Toynbee

We must be careful here for the meaning is not quite someone will one day pleasure Polly Toynbee. She has children so we must assume that happened at some point. Rather, someone will manage to take a political action – one not previously insisted upon by Polly that is – which will please her, provide her with pleasure.

That day isn’t today, obviously:

Stop all those clocks in Downing Street, counting down to the Halloween Brexit. Stop Operation Yellowhammer: cancel emergency medicine stockpiling, ferries, warehouses and freezers. Stop this morning’s Operation Brock, diverting HGVs on the M20. Melt down those shamelessly triumphal commemorative 50p coins, and halt the £100m splashed on “Get ready for Brexit” information. Gross maladministration must surely be the National Audit Office verdict, when the day comes to tally the cost, along with those hundreds of thousands of wasted civil-servant hours on the Brexits that never were.

Imagine the scorn, the vituperation, if Brexit had happened and yet no preparations had been made for it.

After all, do think on what the law actually was. Firstly, that we were to leave on 29 March. No, that wasn’t an aspiration, something being insisted upon by Theresa May or anything, that was the expressed will of Parliament. After all, they had actually passed a law stating that that was to be the date.

More recently, in fact up until just last week, the law was that Britain would be leaving on October 31. Because Parliament had said so too. So, what’s the government of the day supposed to do? Prepare for what Parliament tells it or not?

And think what Polly would have said if the Tories – spit! – hadn’t prepared.

But then as every advice column ever points out it can be difficult to pleasure some women.