A smaller field

The race to be the new Tory leader goes on, and the field is now six runners.

Including the one who gets £5500 a week to write a column in the Torygraph. He is being backed by, checks notes, the Torygraph. Theone whose wife writes for the Daily Mail is being backed by, checks notes, the Daily Mail. There is the one who deliberately ran the NHS and it staffing down.

Johnson says he will, then won't take part in a televised hustings next week. For the most part he has said very little, and when he did speak, it was to lie about his record as Mayor of London, and not actually reveal and detail about what he would do about Brexit, other than to get on with it.

Which is what May has been saying.

In fact, at least three of the field's policies are, basically, the same as May's. Without actually saying what they would want to negotiate with the EU, or how the result would be any different, they don't say.

I watched a debate from BBC Ulster, in which a haulage manager tried to explain why the open border on the island of Ireland is so important, and how a hard border would not work. An English Brexiteer said, and I am not making this up, Ia am no expert but you're making it sound more complex than it is to frustrate Brexit. To hammer home the point that she is no expert, she repeated the phrase "I'm no expert" many times.

I could hear the other's eyes rolling.

But that is where we are, as I read today. The Brexiteers have tried to perform open heart surgery without ready Grey's Anatomy, with a rusty scalpel, and halfway through the operation, May has turned round to ask if anyone else knows how to stop all this bleeding. The patient is the UK, and we are bleeding to death, with no anaesthetic.

And they all think they're Christiaan Barnard.

I heard that Mr Barnier says he is thinking again about Max Fac or technological solutions the gibbon said.

After three years of this chaos, they still don't understand. Or want to.