Mental derangement by Brexit

David Lammy isn’t the sharpest knife in the draw. He’s also what my old professor would have called an unlucky wight – a blundering ninny with the gift of making himself look foolish. So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy should be one of those most publicly afflicted by an increasingly common condition – mental derangement by Brexit.

Boris Johnson writes with an amused tolererance in this morning’s Telegraph about Lammy’s uncontrolled outburst terming Johnson a ‘Nazi’. In Britain this is not an offence. However, living in a country in which calling someone a National Socialist without justification in print or on screen is a criminal offence, it is instructive to contemplate that MP or not, if Lammy had said what he said here, he would find the handcuffs around his plump wrists.

And this in turn leads me to offer Remainers a crumb of comfort. Whilst the UK remains tied to the EU, calling me a Nazi in the comments will make a correspondent liable to detention and extradition using the European Arrest Warrant – if the offence includes an element of racism or xenophobia, which Lammy’s jejune mud slinging appeared to have – and an appearance before a Napoleonic court of a sort unknown to British law. Brexit, my mentally deranged friends, will paradoxically free you from this risk.

And that is really exactly as it should be.