ALAS, POOR THERESA MAY

The Brexit debacle is ghastly. The humiliation of the British P.M. is painful to watch. The United Kingdom is meeting another of its darkest hours.

There are no winners in this Three Act tragedy (there is no other word). The E.U. might lose the Magna Carta added value which the British add to all the endeavors they are party to, albeit wholeheartedly or not. The United Kingdom might suffer from no longer having to match its traditional continental anti-thesis. Both sides could end up diminished. This tale of unnecessity was imposed by arrogance, continued by folly and ended through incompetence. On this battlefield only losers lie.

Whatever further tricks might lie ahead, both the British P.M. and the president of the European Commission (not the EU negociator Michel Barnier) had better read the play in which they acted and take their leave. They were not up to the lines they were supposed to say.

This "drama" cannot be reduced to a regional shared discourtesy. It has wide consequences in this new Trump era wherein siblings are now separated as Cain and Abel. The large jesters upstairs divide the downstairs ones, only paying them attention for their own menial, mercurial whims. The United Kingdom will be more of an island and the EU will appear more provincial.

Theresa May had been handed a bad set of cards. She was also an uneven player, prone to moves that were more quirky than Machiavellian. Her infamous Trump ouverture or her call for early elections (which afterwards made her a hostage of Northern Ireland) boomeranged. Now she can hardly been seen as the trusted steward of the Brexit Requiem which has exhausted the most patient mourners. Her Labor counterpart does not fare much better and maybe he should apply for a role in another Death of Stalin movie. Of course the cleaning up of this fiasco might have few claimers. But if brevity is the soul of wit it could as well be the recipe for bringing a bad play to an inglorious end, and for returning to the drawing board. After all, since Westminster still wants a "deal" of sorts, it might be advisable to have a back-up made out of brains rather than nays, but this supposes a different government than the "red herring sort" Theresa May leads.