Maybe it was too much time in front of the TV watching the royal wedding. Or maybe it was just too long in the sun. Whatever it was, our politicians appeared to have returned from their weekends even less able to think straight than normal. Even the four pot plants, who can normally be relied upon to be the sole repository of sanity, were beginning to wilt.
Theresa May had woken up desperate to talk about something other than how her government was failing to deal with Brexit. So she had hopped on a train to Macclesfield to stand in front of Jodrell Bank – beam me up, Scotty! – where she could give a regulation off-the-peg speech about how British science was going to save the world. In particular, artificial intelligence.
The irony may have been lost on the prime minister but it wasn’t lost on any of the handful of people who had made the mistake of coming to listen to her. AI may well be the future, but May is its worst possible advocate.
Ever since it became clear to the entire country that the prime minister was a series of faultily programmed algorithms who was unable to manage even basic commands, public confidence in AI has plummeted. As has AI’s confidence in itself. Robots everywhere have been begging the Maybot to keep quiet. She gives them a bad name.
In any case, most people would rather the NHS had the extra 10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses it needed than a few more pieces of hi-tech equipment that would sit around idle with no one to operate them. But the Maybot has never been very good at the human touch, so she decided to stick with what she didn’t know.
As if to demonstrate how badly she was malfunctioning, the prime minister then went even further off message by talking up all the benefits of global scientific cooperation. Which made you wonder why on earth her government was so actively pursuing a hard Brexit that would limit partnerships with EU members and waste money by duplicating ventures such as the Galileo satellite system. Either the prime minister is playing a sophisticated long game to demonstrate the futility of Brexit or self-destruction is her default setting. Someone should reboot her by pressing her control-alt-delete keys so we can all know for certain which it is.
Next it was Michael Gove’s turn to suffer from an irony bypass, at a Policy Exchange event in central London. In his latest attempt to reshape the world to how he would like it to be, the environment secretary gave us a new take on immigration. Brexit had made us a more tolerant nation, he declared. By making it so clear to hundreds of thousands of immigrants that we didn’t want them, we were extending the warmest of welcomes to the tens of thousands we did want to allow in to make us a bit richer.
Too many people were playing identity politics with Brexit, the Gover went on. Especially the SNP. This was the same Michael Gove who had happily stood in front of a poster claiming 80 million Turks would “flood” the UK if we stayed in the EU. The same Michael Gove who had never looked happier than when playing dogwhistle politics. His ability to forgive himself is only matched by his ability to forget.
Sensing there was a general mood for collective stupidity and amnesia, the DUP leader, Arlene Foster, chose to up the ante. Ignoring a poll suggesting there had been a substantial further swing in Northern Ireland since the referendum towards remaining in the EU, she insisted there was no one left in the country who was opposed to Brexit. People were just creating imaginary problems by banging on about a hard border. “Unionists are the most liberal and multicultural of people,” she announced. Sometimes there are no words.
To round off the day, the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, forgot he had been accused of calling Andrea Leadsom “a stupid woman” and merely offered a non-apology for using the word stupid about someone whose name he couldn’t remember. For her part, Leadsom allowed herself to forget she had been doing her best to stop the opposition embarrassing the government and wept that no one had done more to maintain parliamentary standards. Honour satisfied on both sides. Not a single MP raised an eyebrow. The absurd is the new normal.