Most people will be familiar with the phrase “Beware the Ides of March”.
Our well-educated yet obstinate PM Theresa May certainly will be.
In Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, a soothsayer twice warns Caesar to be wary of the Ides, the 15th of March.
Advice the Roman imperator stupidly chose to ignore and he ended up lying in a pool of his own blood, after his trusted friends, Cassius and Brutus, along with 60 other two-faced senators, hacked him to death.
Well for Theresa May, more than 2,000 years later, the Ides may have passed without her being viciously offed but she was still set upon by members of her own party.
And she must have spent most of this infamous day licking her wounds after being knifed in the back – and front – by so many of her cabinet members and MPs.
Et tu, Rudd, Clark, Gauke, Leadsom, Mordaunt, Truss and Grayling?
And let’s not forget the most craven turncoat assassin of them all, her very own Brexit Secretary, Stephen Barclay, who incredibly voted against his own Government’s motion asking for a short delay on Brexit, despite saying at the dispatch box that it was in the “national interest” to do so.
May must surely know that she is now as doomed as Caesar, even if she does eventually scrape home and get her awful Brexit deal through.
As for Labour? Well, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford summed up Jeremy Corbyn’s pathetic approach when he said “a shiver ran along the Labour front bench and couldn’t find a spine to run up”.
At least SNP MPs have been clear and consistent in their opposition to Brexit. Something, whether for Leave or Remain, neither the Tories nor Labour could ever claim to have been over the past two years.
Parties that promised to respect the wishes of the people and the outcome of the referendum vote and have done anything but. Preferring instead to fudge, delay and frustrate the democratic decision of the electorate.
It has been two years in which we were continually promised by May and her rabble of duplicitous Tories that Brexit means Brexit, and that no-deal was better than a bad deal, that the UK was ready for Brexit and assured we “would definitely leave on March 29, 2019”.
Now, just days before that fateful day, we find out it was all just spin, bluster and lies.
That the UK might never be able to leave, especially now that doomed May in an attempt to get her deal through has been forced to beg Brussels for a Brextension. A process that could in effect be neverending.
There is no doubt that the Ides of March in 44BC proved to a very bad day at the office for Caesar, and so it will again prove to be for Theresa May in 2019.
I can only hope that when she does fall that Westminster’s political elite tumble over the edge of the abyss with her.
Their attitude and behaviour towards Brexit has been as disgraceful as it has been shameful. The lot of them have shown nothing but contempt for the democratic process.
Finally, just to throw a wee bit more caution to the wind, remember that the fall of Caesar almost brought about, after decades of civil war, the collapse of the Roman Republic.
Is history about to repeat itself, I wonder?
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