Weak links and doublethinks

Typical Gruan journalism from M d'Ancona today. First the weak link to smuggle Brexit into big stories of drug-taking among Tory leadership contenders:

Hard Brexit is the drug the Tories need to wean themselves off

On Sunday, [Gove] ...admitted that what he did was indeed “criminal”. The other candidates have all now had to go through the same ritual, admitting what drugs they have taken in the past, insisting (where relevant) that they absolutely regret doing so, while hinting that their rivals did a lot more and belong behind bars rather than in No 10.

There is an issue for discussion:

True enough, the issue of drug abuse and class-related double standards is a real one: why do middle-class people who have used cocaine walk free, while our prisons groan with inmates from underprivileged backgrounds convicted of drug offences?

But that might be too uncomfortable for Graun readers?

Personally, I am more concerned right now about the middle-class people who so blithely support hard, class-A Brexit at their dinner parties, [who are they?] without thinking of the terrible damage this would do to ordinary lives; to those whose assets cannot be conveniently shifted out of the UK; to the most vulnerable members of society who depend upon the very prosperity that would be wrecked by a no-deal outcome.

Familiar estimates of UK weakness versus EU strength follow:

What stretches credulity is that there is, and has always been, a low-hanging fruit of a deal just waiting to be plucked by a new leader....I’m guessing, too, that Boris Johnson’s threat to withhold the £39bn exit payment to the EU – a sum the UK is legally bound to cough up [maybe] – wouldn’t get the fresh talks off to the best conceivable start....The notion that our 27 EU partners will suddenly embrace and yield to a tough pro-Brexit prime minister – Dieu merci! Gott sei Dank! Grazie Dio! – seems to me a really special example of magical thinking.

Magical thinkers with pragmatic intents:

Foremost in their minds, it seems, is not the national interest [unlike virtuous Graun journalists] but narrow party-political calculation [to keep the Tories in power] 

Even more curiously :

God knows, I have had some harsh things to say about Corbyn. But electing a prime minister you can then kick out is one thing. Leaving our most important trading alliance – the largest single market in the world – without a deal, permanently, is quite another.

But being able to kick out a leader is precisely why so many of us want to leave the EU. You can't kick out the EC!