There’s rage at civil servants who cried over Brexit. But virtually all of us have wept over Tory antics since 2016

‘Simon McDonald, former top civil servant at the Foreign Office, described civil servants’ tearful reaction to the Brexit referendum result.’ Photograph: José Jácome/EPA

The campaign to leave Europe always had a kind of Dambusters machismo frustration about it. Sure, Steve Baker MP may have gone a bit soft since he self-identified as the “Brexit hard man” back in 2019; but surely nobody who suffered through those heady days could have doubted that he, together with fellow flag-fanatic Mark Francois, Geoffrey “codpiece” Cox, and Boris Johnson, were ready to indeed fight or fuck their way out of the European Union.

The impotence, ugliness and rampant pointlessness of the entire Brexit psychodrama – which may not be over in our lifetimes – was already undeniable. But here we are cogitating over the latest damning chapters added to the record by Laura Kuenssberg’s devastating BBC documentary State of Chaos, which featured revealing interviews with the senior civil servants at the heart of the storm.