How to be a prize twat

It has not gone unnoticed that James Delingpole has made a massive twat of himself on national television. It was going to happen sooner or later. That's what happens when you're bone idle. Two years ago a right wing libertarian could have gone on the telly and spouted bollocks about the WTO and get away with it, but now we're lingering on the precipice of an Armageddon Brexit, even our Westminster miscreants have (by osmosis) worked out one or two of the basics when Dellers has not.

The problem for our Dellers is that he assumed everyone else's understand had stayed as static as his own. The second problem being, by his own admission, he hadn't even bothered to brush up on the tribal scripture. "Car crash moments" he says "are an inevitable consequence of appearing in the public eye — especially if like me you’re one of those chancers who prefers to leave everything to the last minute in the hope you can wing it using a mixture of charm, impish humour, and nuggets of vaguely relevant info snatched on the hoof from the recesses of your memory".

As excuses go you can at least respect the honesty. He admits to being a crass, know-nothing bubble dweller bluffing his way through life. That's the choice he made when he decided to become a full time propagandist. When your main audience doesn't like information to conflict with scripture, there is actually zero commercial value in knowing what you're talking about - and as I've found, the more you do learn about the art of international trade the more estranged from the Breitbart crowd you become.

Where Dellers comes unstuck is when challenged on the WTO MFN principle should we leave without a deal which holds that, were we to drop tariffs to goods coming in from the EU we would have to extend that same preference to the whole world. He is then asked what incentive there would be for the USA to do a deal with us if they already had the trade preferences they wanted.

There are two possible answers to that question. You can point out that the WTO has no power of compulsion and we could simply operate in defiance of the WTO MFN principle and wait for the complaints to roll in. The WTO process takes time and a complaint has to go through the process. The UK could seek a series of waivers lodging the intention to secure an agreement on tariffs with the EU. The WTO system is as much politics as it is law. The success of that, however, is contingent on a number of factors. We would need to secure a formal indication from the EU - which would likely have a price tag on it. I think you can guess the number.

Alternatively he could have downplayed the significance of tariffs and pointed out how future deals could improve access to our markets in respect of non-tariff issues - but that would require a basic awareness that non-tariff barriers exist which is all a bit too complex for a Toryboy.

But Dellers wouldn't have done that. No, you see, according to Delingpole, his main crime here is a failure to revise for the exam. He remarks that "Indeed, I remember a small voice in my head warning me not to be complacent. “Read a piece by Patrick Minford so you’ve got your economics right. Remind yourself of the exact tariff rate WTO rules impose on goods. Oh and have another glance at the piece that Ross Clark did on No Deal Brexit in the Spectator a couple of weeks ago,” the small voice urged".

Had he done his revision from his prestige sources within the bubble he'd have been up on the latest tribal scripture, whereupon he'd have launched into a long spiel about how dropping all our trade defences unilaterally heralds a new dawn of fwee twade and how trashing our major manufacturing centres is actually a good thing. This is where his libertarian bluff would have kicked in and he could have waxed lyrical about the liberating power of markets and all that.

There's no actual chance the man is going to take an interest in the subject. Trade, you see, turns on detail. When you really dig into the subject it becomes abundantly clear that leaving the single market (from a trade perspective) is a damn fool thing to do. It's the many facilitating instruments of the single market that allows for seamless trade in services and removes the red tape that clogs up supply chains. We already have a number of FTAs via the EU so there is no known combination of deals that could ever offset the blow of leaving the single market.

Trade wise the best we could ever hope for was to keep what we have but return political authority over what we have. We could have taken the Efta route and then for the interim have operated a shadow customs union to allow us to roll over existing deals and then spent the next ten years configuring and optimising them. There'd be some gains and some losses but overall it but be a cost neutral exercise in the longer term and something of an improvement democratically since we'd have greater freedom to operate internationally.

Of course this then raises a number of very valid questions. Chiefly, the one of what's the point? It is at that point you get to pivot the whole debate away from ground remainers win on, and on to firmer territory. It comes back to the original purpose of Brexit which was to leave the political entity for all the familiar and well rehearsed reasons.

The problem for Brexiters is that they have allowed the leave movement to be hijacked by a band of ideologue Tories holding some deeply obsolete notions of how trade works. They've persuaded themselves that Brexit is the economic remedy we've all been waiting for and Britain's future as a buccaneering and nimble free trade emissary is only weeks away. Being that it falls flat on its face with even the most cursory cross examination, the Brexit tribe have gone into overdrive to shore up this flagging enterprise.

The problem for Dellers and his merry band of Breitbart grunters is that for them Brexit was always more of a culture war. They never put any thought into how it might be done if they got the opportunity to do it. They now find the cupboard is bare when searching for an economic rationale so they hitch their wagon to the Tory right who at least have an idea of what they want even if their plan is total bollocks. One suspects Dellers knows it stands on a foundation of intellectual sand but they've now chosen their hill to die on and will fight to the last man with the feeble weapons they have.

What they have on their side is a well oiled propaganda machine and an audience willing to believe practically anything they say and will fill in the gaps with their own bluster and bluff. That is the one function Delingpole serves.

Having legacy prestige from his time at the Telegraph and Speccie, he provides a veneer of respectability for a rag that would otherwise be buried as a hate rag only marginally less disgusting than some of the BNP circulars. The problem for the grunters, though, is that he's shit at it. He's just another self-serving bubble dwelling bluffer parasite with nothing of value to add. Why else would he be on the Andrew Neil show?