There is no gift the British have ever given as generously to the world as comedy, and they continue to do so. A month and a half on from the referendum is about the right time for the rest of the world to stop laughing at us. It’s August after all. Most of our former European friends have gone off to enjoy their better weather, better food and all round better quality of life, in the pleasant company of their less dysfunctional families.
Probably, no one is paying us any attention – which is a pity because the Brexit sitcom is still pumping out some of its very best material. The row over David Cameron’s resignation honours is more subtle than the explosive farce of earlier episodes but if anything it’s more ingenious.
There are still many people out there who don’t quite see the logic in a rich country going on about how rich it is as a reason to turn its back on the very thing that has enriched it. If they were paying attention now when, as a direct result, that same country is engulfed in a protracted row about who does or doesn’t get to call themselves a Commander or an Officer of its fictional empire, it might make a bit more sense.
Still, this is nothing the Labour Party can’t sort out. Owen Smith has been wisely pointing out that, as it stands, the party is becoming irrelevant to the real concerns of its voters, which is why he has bravely pledged to put a five-year freeze on outgoing prime ministers giving meaningless titles to their former staff as a small perk of the job. In these rarefied times, these are the issues that matter.
After David Cameron took a massive gamble with his career and his country’s future and lost, he took his family off to the empty Kensington mansion of a well-meaning multimillionaire pal, while his own Kensington mansion was vacated. This is a luxury not easily available to a small number of quite poorly-paid advisors, speechwriters and civil servants who had no choice but to double down with him. In such circumstances, you might think a few meaningless letters after the name, a ceremonial job ordering no one about in a closed down empire, might not be such a terrible gift for a state to give to a newly unemployed person with some serious explaining to do to the spouse.
Still, it’s this that has caused self-help guru Steve Hilton to phone in from California (evidently with a few more books to shift), to warn us all about this “serious type of very British corruption”. A more serious type of very British corruption might be driving about the country telling barefaced lies for several months as winding up as Foreign Secretary, but that boat’s sailed now.
(It’s a pity Hilton didn’t sell enough books first time round. If, two months ago, we’d listened to Angela Merkel patiently explaining that you can’t have access to the single market and not accept free movement of people, instead of prioritising the views of a shoeless IT exec on a stab-in-the-back book tour, we might not be in this mess.)
You can see why it matters. For the meantime, the fantasy empire is all we’ve got to play with.
Before 23 June, one of the many pro-EU arguments made by Hilary Benn, in a speech that was all but ignored during a Labour campaign deliberately sabotaged by its own leader, was that in a post-Empire age, diplomacy and negotiation are the new routes through which a nation asserts its influence, magnifies its greatness. The European Union and its single market was the British Empire, and the French Empire, and the German and the Slovakian. And it was all governed peacefully too.
Of course, it is only a matter of time before Liam Fox has colonised us a shiny new one. It will not be long before Britain again has an empire it can be proud of. Away from the corrupt, bureaucratic European Union, and safe in the loving embrace of his human rights abusing friends in Azerbaijan and Sri Lanka. That one might even have meaningful titles. Adam Werritty could even be Crown Prince. And even if he can’t, he can certainly run up his own business cards.