Half-time at Westminster on Sunday

For the Daily Record blogsite

In the 48 hours since the shock result was announced the atmosphere around Westminster has changed again.

The media tents on college Green have gone from being an entertaining circus for the masses to administering the political equivalent of battlefield first aid.

This is where MPs and commentators now come to work out who has been shot and injured in the latest exchange of fire.

Across the road it feels as if no one is in charge in the empty parliament to which MPs return on Monday morning.

The Prime Minister is effectively gone, refusing to trigger or lead the Brexit talks.

The Brexit bandits have gone to ground, neither Boris Johnson or Michael Gove or their leadership ambitions are anywhere to be seen.

The chancellor George Osborne has been posted missing in action as confidence in the UK economy crumbles.

It doesn’t seem that the Brexit campaigners have a plan or that the government appears willing to have one either.

Meanwhile Labour’s senior officers have mounted a bloody coup against Jeremy Corbyn. He is currently barricading himself behind legal opinion stating he can still head a party he has proved to be incapable of leading.

In the vacuum Nicola Sturgeon has used a string of media appearances to warn the UK government not to stand in the way of a second independence referendum should she decide to stage one.

Simultaneously she has raised the possibility of the Holyrood parliament blocking UK exit from the EU by refusing a legislative consent motion (a Sewel motion) that would pass the law into Scottish statute.

In normal times we would say a move like that could trigger a constitutional crisis, but it is small beer in the constitutional bombsite of Britain we are stumbling through just now.

The situation is, at best, unclear, but you can see the blunt beginnings of a quid pro quo there in the smoke and dust.

The Scottish Tories would oppose a second independence referendum, Scottish Labour is oppposed too, but keeping options open. 

And if a second Scottish referendum is on the cards, then why can’t there be a second EU referendum too? 

The Lib Dems would go into an election campaign committing the UK to rejoin the EU. A general election might be held before any negotiations to leave are completed.

The majority of MPs in Westminster are pro-Remain and the old sage Michael Heseltine has suggested it would take general election to constitute a new House of Commons to sign off on Brexit. Or another referendum, he said. 

Tony Blair has said not to rule out a second referendum and Angela Merkel’s press secretary has raised it as a possibility.

So, no sign of the government on the bridge, no alternative from the Brexit campaign, the opposition sliding into civil war, and the Scottish First Minister threatening to hold the UK hostage.

Top that with the possibility of a general election or a second EU referendum, or both, on the horizon and you can see why it begins to feel as if events have slid out of everyone’s control today.

 Oh, have Ireland scored a goal against France?