I don't know how it was reported elsewhere but the BBC might as well have been reporting a state funeral. They were all but playing solemn music as they reported on how comprehensively May's proposals were rejected.

The gap over Ulster is just too great, everything else can be finessed but Ireland requires a hard solution.

She did look kinda shell-shocked actually. After months of tough negotiations with Jacob Rees-Mogg to create a set of proposals that avoid destroying the Tory party, she seemed genuinely surprised that she wasn't being applauded to the rafters in Salzburg for her clever proposals. It's almost as if it never occured to her that the EU had a viewpoint that needed to be considered.

It's not long until the Tory party conference and, given this debacle, I'd be shocked if there weren't stand up fights in the auditorium, resignations and a, metaphorical or otherwise, stabbing or two backstage.

And there's already talk of a General Election being called.

The EU has never really understood that brexit was all about holding the Tory party together. So the EU never had a counter-party to negotiate with.

The finnicky details of leaving were never something leavers were concerned with. They were self-styled brexiteers, blue-sky big-picture people. Details were for little people and they were affronted to find that people expected them to actually get off their butts and drive negotiations forward. That was the point when the wheels came off cos they didn't have a plan, heck they didn't even have a clue. They didn't know what the EU did and didn't know how they did it. So, it's no surprise they didn't know how to organise leaving.

May tried to make Davis, Johnston and Fox, the three loudest most pomous windbags the focal point of the leave campaign. But, that was never gonna fly;-
Davis is a fool who, even in a Westminster populated by the vain and stupid is notable for being vain and stupid,

Liam Fox is a man who understands Ministerial Responsibility to involve going to sunny parts of the world, often with his special "friend" and adviser, and having expensive meals with foreigners. the idea that work might be involved baffles him.

As for Boris Johnston; this is a man who, if he was outside the tent, would piss in, but when he is inside the tent he only improves his aim. He wants to be Prime Minister; not because he has idea of how to run the country, but in the Trumpian wants-to-tell-everybody-what-to do tin-pot-dictator kind of way. Everything he does is designed to advance his cause and frustrae those who stand in his way. So he was never interested in brexit cos a succesful one would burnish May, not himself. A No-Deal brexit has always been the catastrophe he sought.

After they spent 18 MONTHS faffing about, we are where we are, which is that the UK is no nearer knowing how to leave the EU than it was before Article 50 was invoked. There is still no concensus of opinion, even within the brexiters, let alone the Tory party at large, about what a good brexit would look like.

Yes, you'd think these things are basic that any normal group of people would do before entering into one of the most complext legal and political negotiations in the country's history. But they're not normal, they're tories. For the last 40 years their entire credo of "governance" has been about the abdication of responsibility for anything.

We have had a summer of chaos on the railways from organisational meltdown for which a Board of inquiry has decided that the problem is that there was nobody in charge. Yet the Minister for Transport is going around TV studios saying that none of this has anything to do with him.

We have a Minister for Ulster who not only doesn't understand the difference between Unionists and Nationalists, she boasts about it on national radio. Because why should a mere Minister in CHARGE know anything about the situation they're managing.

Seriously, even Dilbert's pointy-headed manager is better than this lot.

So May's idiot plan based on customs rainbows and border unicorns and please please can we carry on trading with Europe like before but without all the bits we don't like has run into adult reality and been smashed to bits.

Quite frankly we are in unknown territory. As they said at the start of the TV puppet show "Stingray";-

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN THE NEXT HALF HOUR!!!!

keep to the Fen Causeway