Monday

As a child growing up with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions I became obsessed with space travel and dreamed of getting a job with Nasa. Not as an astronaut because I was far too scared for that, but maybe as someone who helped them to get into their suits and bolted the capsule door shut on the launch pad. 50 years later, I could be in with a shout as Nasa is offering people £14,000 to spend 60 days in bed as part of a study in bodily deterioration; a job I could literally do with my eyes shut. Sure, there are certain indignities to be endured – you’re not allowed to get out of bed even to go to the toilet – but I’ve suffered far worse in hospital and £7K a month is not to be sniffed at. And, on the plus side, there’s the chance to catch up with a lot of reading and a few boxed sets while still being able to do the day job on my laptop from home by following our politicians on Parliament TV. It might even be good for my mental health. These days Brexit is a horror show best watched from the safety of bed. The government should come with its own government health warning.

Tuesday

As part of its post-Brexit planning, the Foreign Office has just wasted £12m on a seven-bedroom luxury flat in New York for the civil servant who will be in charge of negotiating future trade deals with the US. The hope appears to be that US businessmen and women will be so dazzled by the opulence that they will sign up to almost anything at some point in the distant future – assuming, of course, we eventually agree a future trading relationship with the EU in the next 10 years. In any case, the rationale appears intrinsically flawed. A country of genuine stature, with quality goods and services to sell, doesn’t need to glitz itself up with diamond-studded watches, flash cars and a Manhattan penthouse. It just rents some average office space and borrows the UK consulate in New York for the odd formal occasion. That we are going full Flashman rather betrays a lack of self-confidence. Apart from anything else, Americans can read newspapers. They already know we are a global laughing stock over our handling of Brexit and are a wee bit on the desperate side when it comes to making new trade deals. Far from being impressed by a soulless £12m apartment – just think of all those unoccupied flats in One Hyde Park – Americans will merely think we are there for the taking.

Wednesday

Even by the current looking-glass standards of general chaos in Westminster, today was something special. One that ended, as so often, with us knowing even less about the Brexit chaos. We had a prime minister who has so little battery power she can’t even manage her own resignation properly and a parliament that had voted to allow itself to take control of Commons business from the government only to vote against every item of that business. We also had the ERG at war with itself over who were the Provos and who were the Real ERG. Some MPs tried to mark the occasion with a Mexican wave while the world’s TV cameras looked on in amazement. But my own highlight was watching the decline and fall of Boris Johnson. Brexit has always been a process of self-promotion rather than national sovereignty for Boris and the huge smirk on his face as he left the 1922 Committee meeting at which Theresa May had offered to step down was unmistakable. Now that he had switched sides again, the prize he had let slip in 2016 was within reach again. Then, barely three hours later, the DUP declared it would still not back May’s deal and Boris was hopelessly exposed as a man without honour or judgment. The Eurosceptics will not forgive or forget that he deserted them, and all other Tories have him marked down as untrustworthy. Forget the odds, his chances of becoming prime minister are now minimal. A moment of great enjoyment for connoisseurs of schadenfreude, and karma.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Duchess of Cornwall: ‘I’d keep your head down if I were you or it’ll end up in Boris Johnson’s bed.’ Photograph: Tim Rooke/Rex

Thursday

Mostly I rage about things these days: about Brexit primarily, but also about getting old – about my knees being knackered and falling apart, and friends dead or dying. But there are compensations. I may miss my children rather too much now that they have both left home, but at least I don’t have to worry about them doing badly at school or turning into people I don’t much like. Despite the best efforts of me and my wife, they have both grown into articulate, generous and emotionally intelligent adults who have achieved far more than I ever did at their age. But then I did set them a very low bar. They are both examples of benign neglect. It’s been reported this week that some parents have taken to using a tutoring service for themselves so that they could understand what their children were learning and could help them with their homework. That would never have occurred to me. After all, one of the points of school was that my children were supposed to learn stuff from teachers that I didn’t. And in any case, neither Anna or Robbie would ever let my wife and I go near their homework as they assumed we were far too thick to help them. As it happened, they were right.

Friday

Brexit day hasn’t quite turned out the way everyone imagined when Theresa May triggered article 50 two years ago. Rather than having left, we are in a Dadaesque limboe. Nigel Farage’s triumphant 283-mile (he personally has completed about three) march will end in a drunken wake outside parliament. One to avoid. Some time in the future there will be an enquiry into just how comprehensively our politicians mucked up – if not in real life, then certainly in the satirical novel I’m writing about Theresa May and Brexit. Many of the key misjudgments are well known to us all, but one of my favourites is how Brexiters managed to get the EU so badly wrong. David Davis led the charge with his insistence that his army training, and time spent up close up with the enemy in Brussels, had taught him that EU negotiators never agreed anything until the final minute of the 11th hour. So confident was he of this strategy that he did almost nothing during his time as Brexit secretary. Not for the first time, Davis was proved hopelessly wrong. The EU laid out and agreed its final withdrawal deal months ago. Far from blinking in the face of steel-nerved UK negotiators, it has held firm and consistent and it is we who have been left scrabbling around well into injury time of injury time for some kind of deal. Call it hubris.

Digested week, digested: Bollocks to everything.