I’m apparently now one of those screaming lefties who just can’t be happy for the owners of the Brexit bus. The rowdy victory chants and excitable voices of the elderly/credulous/racist have been building to a crescendo for a few months now. With the cliff in sight and the Prime Minister’s foot pressing pedal firmly to the metal, the extremist ideologues can no longer contain themselves.

So the hooting loons are now sounding off, gloating about how we can walk away without paying a penny, patriotic fingers up to Brussels. In a classic bit of incremental up-selling, we’ve gone from being ‘sensible’ (i.e. not maximally stupid) and preserving the best bits to burning the whole house down with our stuff still in it. Because it’s our house.

We were always assured this had nothing to do with race, just migration. Now they’re admitting we can’t do anything about migration, but there’s been an increase in xenophobic attacks on foreigners. Which to my mind sounds a lot more like “this has nothing to do with migration, we’re just racist”. And it was never going to be at any cost, although lately hardliners have been pushing for WTO defaults as a matter of principle. Which is literally the worst possible outcome and, incidentally, nowhere near as simple as it’s made to sound by its promoters.

But if you want one example to really underline exactly what kind of attitudes are informing the government’s Brexit strategy, look no further than Michael Howard. Always one of the hootiest of loons anyway, the frenzy around our nationalistic self-destruction has been too much for him to bear.

Perhaps life is lived at a higher intensity on his home planet, wherever that may be. Maybe years of onanistic Thatcher-worship have left him with self-inflicted tertiary syphilis, his brain a rotten, disintegrating mess. Who knows? It is not for me to speculate. But whatever the reason, he decided it time to threaten we declare war on Spain if we don’t get everything our way with Gibraltar. They might have voted 96% to stay in the EU, but Mr Howard is damned if we’re not taking them over the cliff with us.

Expect more of this over the course of the year. I’m ever-so-slightly optimistic with what will happen longer term than that. Broadly speaking; we’ll humiliate ourselves on the global stage and then humbly accept a less insane deal than the one UKIP & Co. are howling for. But in the short term, expect the honking to get louder and dumber, as the lunatic fringe whips itself into some sort of orgy of imperialist, flag-based gloating.

Because the reality is, only those mad enough to drive us off the cliff in the first place have any sort of plan for this outcome. Everyone else considered it an option too stupid to choose, so didn’t bother. This means we’ve got two camps guiding this: the mad and the clueless.

Still, at least there’s always the opposition, eh?