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How are we this weekend?

Did you wake up on Saturday morning thinking, ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe all this sovereignty I’m feeling’?

Did you leap out of bed yelling, ‘Yes! This is what it feels like to be free of nearly 50 years of the terror and oppression of the EU’?

Are you inhaling great lungfuls of Proper British Air for the first time in half a century?

Did you walk into the garden and salute your massive Union Jack with more fervour than ever before?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, congratulations. Your name is Nigel Farage.

Farage was there, of course, right until the bitter end, embarrassing Britain like no one else can.

(Image: AFP via Getty Images)

Even after our counterparts in the EU parliament had been gracious enough to sing Auld Lang Syne to wish us on our way, Farage had to insert his mad, terrible, frog face into things by jumping up and telling everyone, “HAHA – I won. We’re off!” All while waving his stupid little flag around.

It was like the thickest kid in the class on his last day in school telling all the smarter kids (who he has always known are smarter than him and has hated for years because of that) who are staying on, “See you later, losers,” while striding off triumphantly towards a life on the dole.

And let’s just look at some of the other celebrations going on.

One pub in Brimington, near Chesterfield, was advertising a fine old Brexit party on Friday night featuring “Brittish Food” like “Roasties and sausages” and “Brittish music” by the likes of “THE BEETLES” and “KYLIE”.

(Image: UGC)

Ignoring the fact that these great patriots cannot even spell “British” or “Beatles”, we are also forced to remember that the roast potato was brought to the UK from South America, that “sausages” is derived from the French word “saucisse” and that Kylie Minogue is very obviously Australian.

But the Brexiteers have never been known for letting the truth get in the way of a good story. The pub was obviously very quickly ripped to pieces for its ignorance.

But this, it was quickly pointed out, was the whole problem – sneering, lah-di-dah Metropolitan Liberal Elitist Remoaners like myself laughing at ordinary people.

Lording it over them with our spelling, our history, our geography and our facts. Can’t we just accept that we lost and allow these ordinary, decent Brittish people their one night of celebration? Complete with awful spelling, punctuation and lies?

Well, frankly, no.

If you’ll insist on calling something carried by the tiniest of margins and influenced by Russia to a degree yet to be determined (and will remain undetermined until Boris Johnson releases the report) a victory, fine. But don’t expect me to get on board.

And so Farage’s big celebration duly rolled around on Friday night in London’s Parliament Square. Unfortunately, alcohol had been banned, fireworks were not allowed to mark the 11pm departure time, the crowdfunder to get Big Ben to bong failed and Johnson declined his invitation to speak at the event.

What headliners did this leave our plucky Brexiteers with? Ann Widdecombe, the physical and intellectual equivalent of a council rubbish tip someone has thrown a sheet over, Wetherspoons founder Tim Martin, literally the lunatic you’d move down five bar stools to avoid, and LBC shock-jock Julia Hartley-Brewer, who is Katie Hopkins in a Phase Eight dress.

The last time I was in Parliament Square was with my daughter, last year, on the Remain march, where we saw millions of cheerful, decent people protesting the national act of self-harm of Brexit.

The only Brexiteers we saw were a couple of dozen men, all gathered outside pubs drinking and shouting abuse at children.

On Friday, it was their turn to be centre stage – and what a spectacle it proved.

Farage crowed on about it being the “greatest day in history”, making Ian Woosnam at the Ryder Cup a few years ago sound positively sane.

(Image: Getty Images)

The TV cameras roved the crowd, getting sound bites as people happily wittered on about “finally getting their freedom back” and “being in control again after 50 years” and all the other rubbish that literally hadn’t crossed their mind until they started getting force-fed propaganda on Facebook four years ago.

Amid the crowd, I saw another disturbing figure – someone clad in a Stars and Stripes and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It figured…

With the kind of sick timing you’d expect of a perfectly written black comedy, Friday not only saw us leaving the EU, it also saw Trump pretty much managing to skate on impeachment, despite the fact that almost everyone in the US Senate agreed that he abused his power to extort a political favour in the Ukraine. It’s just that the Republicans don’t think that’s a big deal any more.

The last time the world saw such an ascendency of vicious strongmen and howling nationalism was in the 1930s, and we all know what that led to.

Then, after World War II, we got the EU and Nato, institutions devoted to ensuring that strongman leaders and fevered nationalism were hopefully things of the past.

And we had a pretty good run there for a while, with the whole liberal, democratic process.

And now it’s over for a while.

Now the darkness falls.