Requiem

Cropped image from the Daily Express

Just a final visual comment for today, a requiem for Britain’s enforced exit from the EU. This involves the fascist Daily Express, one of the many rabidly rightwing tabloids who’ve stoked up anti-EU feelings for many years with malicious and mendacious headlines and op-eds.

Here the populist rag proudly bleats about the ‘totemic’ blue passport, which you can see in the mock-up is in fact a royal blue shade. This is actually a lot lighter than the pre-EU passports which ranged from a dark navy blue to — as near as dammit — black.

Sceptics of the fantatical Brexiter line have cynically noted that the new passport will actually be manufactured in France. So much for a newly ‘independent’ UK, freed from the perfidious ‘unelected bureaucrats’ of Europe. (Don’t get me started.)

But a particular detail of the image, which the paper has credited to the Press Association, was quickly spotted by the eagle-eyed.

This was the replacement of the Order of the Garter motto HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE (‘Shame be on him who thinks badly of it [the wearing of the garter]’) by another phrase: YOUR MOTHER WAS A HAMSTER.

I’d forgotten that this was an insult spouted by the French knight at King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail — and especially apt as the new passports are made by England’s traditional enemy.

You have to laugh, or else you’d cry. At the sheer idiocy, the gullibility, the wilful ignorance of a sizeable proportion of a voting public. Shame on them. And on the tossers who’ve conned their way into power.