The good, the bad and the ugly: how to divorce with decorum

By Matthew Sweet

Across an abyss of time that turns out to be less than four years ago, Theresa May stood up in the House of Commons as prime minister to lecture MPs on a point borrowed from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language is not passive: it can shape the events it is used to describe. “I prefer not to use the term of divorce from the European Union,” she said, “because very often when people get divorced they don’t have a very good relationship afterwards.”

Those guys took her tip. Jacob Rees-Mogg started talking about surrender, slave states and King John’s agreement to recognise French suzerainty over the continental lands of the Angevin Empire. David Davis referred to appeasement before the second world war. Boris Johnson, much of whose career has involved riding a metaphor towards an oncoming deadline, didn’t need to be told. He was already urging the EU not to “administer punishment beatings…in the manner of some world-war-two movie”.