Julia Hartley Dooda’s Brexit Meltdown

While talks between Britain and the EU make little progress, with departure from the European Club even being thrown into doubt, realisation is taking hold among the more vehement Brexit supporters that this jolly adventure might not be all it was cracked up to be. They, though, cannot be at fault for the foul-up, or for encouraging it from the sidelines, so someone else must get it in the neck for not being responsible.

Yes, we know who you are, thanks

This customarily perverted logic has led to many out there on the right deciding that the only person in the Government trying to stop the economy imploding, as Sterling heads south and more companies start to move jobs out of the country, should be the one to carry the can. So it is that Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is being framed as the scapegoat for the intellectual shortcomings of the Press and Pundit Establishment.

And nowhere can this idiocy be seen to better effect than in the visible meltdown of self-promotion artist Julia Hartley Brewer, who has gone off the end of the pier in no style at all, approvingly quoting the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog - who are trying to take the heat of Bozza - claiming “Hammond's article does more to undermine No10's negotiating position than Boris' article”.

That, sadly, is crap (Michael White’s riposte, “Guido wouldn’t know a ‘negotiating position’ from a pork sausage”, is much more to the point). Still, on goes Ms Hartley Dooda, now approvingly quoting the Daily Mail via the Fawkes massive: “Daily Mail on 'dismal, defeatist, relentlessly negative, inordinately self-satisfied lugubrious appeaser Mr Hammond’”. “Appeaser”. The paper that lionised the Third Reich.

But Ms Hartley Dooda was darned sure that Spreadsheet Phil was The One Wot Done It. So, grasping at yet another straw, she quoted right-wing rant site CapX - not that she only gets her “news” from places that serve it up as she imagines the world to be, you understand - and announced triumphantly “This. This. This. The Treasury is in full-blown stubborn remoaner mode”. I once ate at Est Est Est, too. But she wasn’t finished. Yet.

Meltdown point was fast approaching: the combination of grim reality and paranoia was about to cause the dam to burst. First came the rumble and the cracking of masonry, as she ranted “Whether you're a Leaver or Remainer, how can anyone think Hammond can remain as Chancellor when he undermines British interests daily?”.

And then it happened. “Philip Hammond shouldn't just be sacked, he should be tried for treason”. With that, Julia Hartley Dooda had not only sold the pass, but revealed that her previously tenuous grip on reality had been prised from her fingers. Hammond is one of the few people in Government trying his best not to sell Britain down the river - if she wants to go after someone who really is undermining British interests, there are plenty of more deserving candidates, not least of which is Herself Personally Now.

When declining to behave like a cross between a headless chicken and a demented lemming is considered treasonous, we really are through the looking glass.