Eleven days to go and one would have thought that our “best-and-brightest” journalists in the MSM would turn their minds and keyboards to Brexit and the EU, either to tell us how terrible it’ll be or – somewhat unlikely – how great it will be to have escaped.

Forget it – the Big Ben thingie has sunk below the horizon but the Megxit thing is back, hurrah! Is all well then in regard to Brexit? Oh no it’s not! It seems it’s more profitable to speculate about Royalty than about the rearguard actions being fought by the EU.

Our government must be aware that Brussels is not just scraping the bottom of the barrel, it’s actually gone through that bottom and is digging deeper. There would be no reason otherwise for this:

“Ministers have discreetly restarted no-deal planning meetings in case Brussels stonewalls in negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal, Whitehall sources said yesterday.” (link)

This is true – I’ve signed in to receive emails about Brexit preparations from the government and they have trickled in since the beginning of the year. It’s only three or two a day compared with the 20 or 30 during the dying days of the May government, but yes, they’re working on it.

It is of course conceivable that the reporters of the other big papers had their hands full talking to ‘sources’ in regard to the Royals and thus missed talking to their Whitehall ‘sources’ about a possible ‘crash out’ … There’s more:

“The Cabinet’s EU Exit Committee, chaired by Michael Gove, met last week to begin discussing preparations for the talks breaking down ahead of the end of the UK’s transition out of Brussels regulations at the end of December. Boris Johnson has ruled out any extension of the transition period beyond the end of the year. His deadline is soon to be enshrined in law by his EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill. One minister present at the committee meeting on Thursday said the gathering was held to consider what happens should Brussels “fail to grasp we really are going at the end of the year.” (link)

Moreover, isn’t this indicative that at least some in the government and Whitehall are no longer prepared to take Brussels’ pronunciations as cast in stone:

“Ministers fear the bloc could be digging in to try to stall the talks for as long as possible to maximise the pressure on the Prime Minister. At the weekend, Chancellor Sajid Javid warned businesses that the UK will make a decisive break from the bloc. “There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule-taker, we will not be in the Single Market, we will not be in the Customs Union and we will do this by the end of the year,” he said.” (link)

Perhaps this warning by Johnson, reported in RemainCentral today, is bearing fruit already:

“Boris Johnson will tell cabinet ministers to shape up or face the sack within weeks as part of a looming cabinet reshuffle. Senior ministers will be told to focus on working hard and delivering policies that the prime minister believes will help to “level up” the country. Top jobs will go to those who deliver on Mr Johnson’s agenda rather than those who have successful media profiles.” (link, paywalled)

It is also possible that the cabinet reshuffle next month is concentrating minds. Perhaps it is also concentrating the minds of Whitehall mandarins. Sadly, our MSM writers have made a huge thing out of some ‘blue sky thinking’ and have reported as fact what so far is just a thought, that the HoL might be relocated to York. Here’s what Mr Cleverly, Tory Party chairman, actually said:

“Mr Cleverly told Sky News: “When the PM stood up the day after the election and said this is going to be the people’s government he meant it. That meant connecting people with government and politics.” Relocation to York was “one of a range of things that we are looking into”, he said. “This is about demonstrating that we are going to do things differently. Trust me we’re going to be radical.” (link, paywalled)

According to RemainCentral, this is actually going to happen. They’ve even pondered where that ‘new’, Northern HoL could be built. What Mr Cleverly actually said is irrelevant.

Well, if you have run out of Royal stories, stuff about “nobility” will also sell. Thus the Corbyn ‘list’ of those he wants to see ‘ennobled’ hit the news this weekend:

“Labour has become engulfed in a new antisemitism row after reports that Jeremy Corbyn had nominated his former chief of staff for a peerage. Mr Corbyn wants to elevate Karie Murphy, as well as John Bercow, the former Speaker, and Tom Watson, former Labour deputy leader, to the House of Lords. The row over the decision to ennoble Ms Murphy centres on the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s investigation into whether or not Labour discriminated against Jews.” (link, paywalled)

It’s obvious that this Corbyn ‘list’ is meant to bring the HoL into even more disrepute, if that were possible. However, it’s a nice little thing to enliven the Labour leadership campaign, for example:

“Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to elevate former speaker John Bercow to the House of Lords has been dealt a blow by his favoured successor Rebecca Long-Bailey. The Labour leadership candidate indicated she did not support the decision, with a spokesperson saying she was instead in favour of “abolishing” the second chamber and replacing it with a “democratically elected Senate outside of London”. (paywalled link)

How … relevant! These ongoing attempts by the Remain MSM, to make us take our eyes off the EU ball, are interesting. Did, for example, all the Megxit stuff mean that the poor things simply didn’t have space to report on demos in Germany of all places? Here’s the one report in a British paper:

“Berlin and Dublin were ground to a halt in the past 48 hours amid growing outrage at EU regulations. Furious agricultural workers and farmers shut down roads across both Germany and Ireland in fear that environmental regulations are hurting their jobs. Thousands of farmers took part in the protest in Germany, as several hundred tractors blockaded main roads in Bavaria, Baden Württemberg and Bremen, as well as the German capital.” (link) 

You’ve got to ask your browser of choice to look for news reports on these protests – see here, for example. Gilets Jaunes, Farmers’ protests: not news, my dears, not news at all! Unsurprisingly, this report by our friends at facts4eu, detailing the way Brussels is scamming the EU taxpayers while presenting themselves as totally Green, was disregarded. I bet that our home-grown greenies will take to the streets as soon as the weather is becoming more clement, to try and make us remain, at the last minute, because: ‘Climate Catastrophe’!

It’s this thinking in slogans which has been so successfully used by Remain, especially when the slogans come from Brussels. See for example this report on the rights of EU citizens here in the UK as opposed to our expats in the EU. The figures, from the EU, about who benefits from the sacred “Free Movement” are stunning. I can only agree wholeheartedly with this comment:

“As ever, it seems that the UK has sat back and taken criticism from EU ideologues such as Mr Verhoftstadt – with Remainer commentators, the BBC, and Sky happily reporting on this. The reality is rather different, as we have demonstrated above using official figures from the EU and from the British Government. It really is about time the UK Government started to rebut the EU’s nonsense robustly, and once again we call on the Government to improve its outward communications on Brexit dramatically.” (link)

Amen to that! Also, astonishingly but typically, Remain has refrained for a very long time to even look at economic figures. Here’s what Roger Bootle wrote in the DT:

“Most EU leaders and officials think that the EU enterprise is a great success. So if the departure of a major member threatens to force it to change this can only be a bad thing. Hence the insistence of EU negotiators that the UK will only be able to secure full “access” to EU markets if it adheres to EU regulations. The reality is that over recent decades the EU has been a zone of comparative economic failure. It has under-performed most major developed countries and its share of world GDP has been falling relentlessly.” (paywalled link)

Roger Bootle’s analysis and explanations are so important that we’ll look at his article in detail in our “From behind the paywall” column later today (here it is).

Meanwhile, we cannot afford to become complacent. Our MSM may believe we plebs will be happy to read about royals and nobility but we’ll not stop digging and will

KBO!