Charon's Ferry

When I was travelling across deserts in places like Arizona, Utah and Colorado I was told to watch out for the scorpions. Now, I’d expected them to be quite large things, appropriate to my birth-sign, but actually, most of the scorpions were small, weedy and transparent looking. That’s not to say they couldn’t pack a sting if they were surprised and needed to throw some self-defence moves. Many scorpions are nocturnal and hide in crevices, caves and under rocks during the daytime. A pair of boots makes a snug hidey-hole.

With this in mind, I realised my mistake with the analogy to cornered rats in a recent post. Surprised scorpion is a more likely analogy. Boris can scuttle into a tunnel and then surprise everyone with a sting operation.

I suppose that is what he is doing now. He’s sent out slathering Gove to break down the electorate into digestible pieces, whilst he waves his arms about threateningly.

Then he’ll use the crushing claws of a mendacious deal like a peace fund or a slab of infrastructure as an attempt to appease the Irish politicians. He’s not averse to using a few morally dubious negotiating chips too. All will be revealed over the next few days.

It's all a con, of course, Theresa May’s paper makes a reappearance, with the expensive consultant helpers translating it into French and then back into English to make it look different: "Ceci n'est pas un accord de retrait.”

Don't give anyone time to read it or analyse it, just reveal it at the last possible moment with a tilted one-page summary.

Then it will be casino time. As Downing Street puts it: “Britain is out of all EU laws. We will be able to change our laws in a huge number of areas from product standards to fishing rules and farming subsidies where we are currently bound by EU rules.”

Yes, we were all aching to do just that.

It’s like a scorpion looking out of a tunnel but not noticing the heavy tyre marks and threatening equipment all around. This time the Farrago has noticed the smaller print. That the deal ties UK to EU regulations, despite Boris’s puffery. Boris and the ERG Tories have their eye on deregulation, where foreign companies can join the buccaneering sprint of the freshly repositioned UK and benefit from a loosening of certain inconvenient restrictions. It can be made to sound glamorous to the voters too so that they dont notice that they are racing to the bottom.

So it's dangerous days ahead as the Get It Done brigade wax lyrical about their relief that Boris has Got It Over The Line. Don’t confuse with facts. This is a matter of national pride. Cummings knew that a simple respray was all that was possible in the limited renegotiation time.

If Boris is a conventional scorpion, then maybe Cummings is more like a whip variety. Whip spiders and scorpions will lash out unexpectedly to stun and grab their prey. They don’t even have stings in their tails, but I suppose Mr Cummings has the armed police force on speed dial to handle any little irregularities.

A well-known variant of the whip scorpion is the Charon. Named, if I remember correctly from Boy’s World comics, after that oarsman who ferried souls to Hades. It would explain Cummings’ wry smile.