Monday

I was rather nonplussed to learn that Prince William had been doing work experience with the intelligence services and, according to the GCHQ head of counter-terrorism, identified only as David, “comfortably held his own with highly skilled analysts and operators”.

Not just because our future king is clearly something of a genius if he can, in a matter of a few hours, master tasks for which some of the country’s brightest graduates take years of training, but also because I’d always imagined that one of the prerequisites for the intelligence services was an ability to blend into the background. Not something that comes easily to a man who seldom travels without several members of staff and is invariably greeted by large crowds wherever he goes. But just maybe MI5 and MI6 are on to something.

With William you would have an agent who was hiding in plain sight. Just imagine how time-consuming it must be trying to get your undercover operatives up close to high-profile targets. Years of tradecraft, only for the whole operation to fall apart when someone forgets a dead-letter drop. With William, you bypass all those problems. All he has to do is make one phone call and he gets a one to one with anyone in the world – from celebrities and oligarchs to dictators and presidents. And no one would think of searching him for weapons or bugs ahead of his audience, so he could literally get away with anything. Even murder. After all, if an undesirable world leader was to be found dead of “a heart attack”, no one would dare come out and openly accuse the prince of killing him. Watch this space.

Tuesday

One of the advantages of being fairly disorganised is that sometimes you pleasantly surprise yourself. Last week I wrote that Brexit had forced me to give up my ticket to see Spurs play Manchester City in the Champions League quarter-finals. This would have been true, had the game been played on Wednesday, as I had imagined, rather than Tuesday. So an hour before kick-off I did, after all, get to meet my friend Matthew at Seven Sisters station so we could walk up Tottenham High Road together. He immediately declared he had been feeling sick with anxiety about the game since waking up that morning. “Is this what it is like to be you every day?” he asked. I said that sounded about right. “What a nightmare. I’m so glad I’m not you,” he added, charmingly.

As it happened, I was actually feeling rather relaxed about the match, as I was expecting to lose comfortably and had already made plans to sell on my tickets for the return leg in Manchester next week. There’s nothing like the certainty of defeat to ease the tension. That all changed as the game got under way and Spurs began to do more than hold their own. By half-time I was a full-on wreck and when Son Heung-min scored a late winner, I was probably the only Tottenham fan in the entire stadium who thought, “Oh shit. That means I am going to have to make a 400-mile round trip next week that’s almost certain to end in disappointment.” My ability to spoil things sometimes even takes me by surprise. My therapist once described me as the second most self-destructive man she had ever met. I’m still wondering who the most self-destructive man is.

Wednesday

A morning Eurostar found me back in Brussels for the emergency European council Brexit summit. Where I soon got lost as the buildings that make up the European commission are so large they almost count as their own ecosystem. With a lot of help, I eventually navigated myself past the vast semi-circular red carpet where all the EU leaders do their arrival TV clips and found my way to the overheated side room that the British press had been allocated. Where we all waited – and waited – for people inside the room where the EU leaders were meeting to text details of what was going on to trusted media contacts.

The early signs were that Theresa May’s presentation had been better received than the one she had given two weeks earlier, but she had rather struggled when asked just what she hoped to achieve with a longer extension. A question you’d have thought she might have seen coming and prepared a more convincing reply than, “I don’t know”. There again, I’m no one to talk, as at one of the few work interviews I managed to get during the lost decade of my 20s, when asked why I wanted the job, I replied, “I don’t really”.

Amazingly I didn’t get the job. It then turned out that Emmanuel Macron, who has one eye on the French far right parties in the forthcoming European elections, had chosen to play hardball. This was Brexit as absurdist performance art, with May asking for a 30 June deadline that she didn’t want and Macron offering her a 30 June deadline that he didn’t want to give as France would suffer from a no-deal scenario. Inevitably the EU 27 finally settled on a compromise of Halloween. A fitting outcome for a zombie prime minister, but one that actually suited no one.

Thursday

It’s been reported that David Cameron has had to scale back on some of the pre-publicity for his memoirs that are scheduled for October, due to the entirely foreseeable delay to the UK leaving the EU on 29 March as had originally been planned.

The official line is that he and his minders feel it would not be appropriate for him to do anything that might complicate the prime minister’s job as she tries to come up with a Brexit deal that can win a majority in parliament. The cynic in me can’t help feeling that, just at this moment, Dave might also not be too keen on reminding everyone that he was one of the principal architects of the shambles that has divided a nation.

It’s not just that the referendum was only ever a means to settle an internal squabble in the Tory party: it’s also that Cameron was so negligently lazy in the way he allowed the debate to be framed. With a little more care, the biggest issues gripping the country these past three years would have been the roll-out of universal credit and HS2. I also wonder if Dave’s “My Struggle” autobiography will actually appear in October, as the odds are quite high on the UK seeking yet another extension on publication day.

If I was Dave, I’d want the dust to have settled on Brexit and for memories to have dimmed before I risked reigniting the wrath of the nation. The chapters on how loathsome and untrustworthy Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are had better be long on detail or his publishers will have trouble recouping the £800,000 advance.

Friday

In his 3am press conference at the end of the Brussels summit, Donald Tusk, the president of the EU council, had urged the UK not to waste the extra time it had been given. The following day, parliament chose to go on recess for 10 days. Not the best look, perhaps, but a decision with which I had sympathy. Not least because I am completely knackered and could do with the best part of a week off. Though I haven’t got a clue what to do with myself. I’m not at my best on holiday. Too much time for too many unwanted feelings.

MPs are tired too, having had no breaks and many long nights since Christmas, and most give the impression they are running on empty, both in mind and body. During the prime minister’s statement about the October Brexit extension on Thursday afternoon, everyone acted and spoke like zombies as if it was all they could do to go through the motions. The chances of anyone coming up with a workable Brexit solution in that state are minimal.

Trust in politicians is near an all-time low, but there’s actually a case to be made that parliament has been doing its job rather well. Yes, the government is hopeless; how stupid and tin-eared do you have to be to bring back the same deal three times? Yes, some MPs are venal, more concerned with their own careers than any public good. But there is a strong core of decent men and women, who have stuck their necks out to act in the national interest. After the UK voted to leave the EU, they have tried to ensure the government takes us out in a way that is least damaging to the country. That’s a public service and explains why we are where we are. Don’t forget that David Cameron’s immediate response to having created the mess was to run for the shed and trouser £800K.

Digested week: The extension to the extension to the extension.

‘We might as well order the pizzas in now.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images



