IF ever you yearned to know what it would be like to be governed by Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army, this is the week in which your “don’t panic” dreams came true. On Monday Theresa May jetted off to Europe for a hurriedly arranged dinner with EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier in a desperate attempt to kick some energy into Brexit talks that are showing all the liveliness of a sloth that’s smoked a prison’s worth of Spice.

Actually that’s an unfair comparison. The overwhelming majority of people in prison are going to get out one day, and so are indeed going somewhere. You can’t say that about the Brexit talks. Brexit means life imprisonment with Liam Fox and Michael Gove.

Hence the panicked meeting which isn’t a panicked meeting at all. Since Liam, Boris, and David have proven themselves to be less competent than a five-year-old writing a manual explaining how to operate the Large Hadron Collider, Theresa figured it was time for her to step in. This is because she’s more competent than her cabinet Brexit team, in that she’s like a six-year-old trying to write a manual explaining how to operate the Large Hadron Collider.

However, the government isn’t at all panicked by the looming cliff-edge of Brexit and the utter lack of progress in negotiations.

Oh no. Not at all. This emergency meeting isn’t panic talks, insisted a palpitating Downing Street with a gallon of sweat visible on its brow. We’re not panicking, they repeated, after a brief pause for a spot of hyperventilation.

This dinner has been arranged for quite some time. It’s just that Jean-Claude Juncker didn’t know about it until just before Theresa started to peruse the menu. That’s why he neglected to mention it a couple of days ago when he announced his up-coming engagements.

To be kind, there are a number of possibilities here. Possibly Jean-Claude has a diary secretary who is even more incompetent at their job than the British Government is at negotiating Brexit, or Jean-Claude thought meeting with Theresa May was going to be less important and less productive than a meeting with his dog’s groomer, or the British Government has been telling us big fat porky pies again. My money is on the last option there because the British Government has previous for that sort of thing. Although it has to be said that the second is quite plausible too. The British Government has previous for that sort of thing as well.

As everyone except the British Government was expecting, there were no substantial gains as a result of the dinner, at least if we overlook the gain to the delivery guy from the pizza shop who was spared the need to traipse to Downing Street because Theresa had already eaten. There were no new or realistic offers on the table from Theresa, so the diners had to confine themselves to chatting about the food.

The EU and the UK managed to release a statement after the talks saying that future talks needed to progress more speedily, which is a statement of the obvious up there with saying that if you want to get from London to Glasgow in time for dinner, then you need to travel at a faster speed than zero miles per hour. We can now look forward to a whole series of faster and speedier statements of the obvious from future talks between the UK and the EU. The November talks will be followed by a press release stating that both the EU and the UK agree that the nights are fair drawing in, while the December talks will see a statement that Santa won’t deliver a good Brexit to naughty boys and girls.

While the Brexit talks go nowhere, there are still British nationalists in Scotland who defend the British Government’s refusal to let on about what the real consequences of Brexit are going to be, and refusal to reveal the analysis of the effects of Brexit that reputedly shows Scotland and the north-east of England will be the worst-affected parts of the UK. You can bet your last euro cent that if there were UK Government analyses which showed that Brexit was going to bring about a boom in job creation, strengthen the pound, and boost the economy then the British Government would hire that choir guy from the telly and there would be one of those interminable programmes on the BBC with Great British in the title in which the good news would be sung out to the nation by a massed choir of Conservative candidates.

According to the frothier online British apologists, our Westminster Government is quite right to keep us in the dark because it wouldn’t do to reveal our negotiating hand to the EU. This assumes that the EU isn’t capable of doing its own research into the economic benefits of EU membership, and that the EU thinks the British Government isn’t commissioning the choir guy off the telly because no-one can think of a sufficient number of rhymes for “We’re so screwed.”

This goes to show that there are some people who not only genuinely prefer to be treated like idiots, but who are also idiotic enough to argue in public that being treated like an idiot is a good thing, and who want us to believe that the EU is even more idiotic than they are.

Scotland is being ruled by a incompetent and sclerotic Conservative party whose only achievement is that Ruth Davidson is going to appear on Bake Off. The Scottish Tories claimed they’d be a strong voice for Scotland within the Union, but all that’s happened is that Ruth Davidson has used the party’s Scottish element as a vehicle for her own self-promotion. The party’s Scottish MPs have done precisely nothing to defend Scotland from the ill effects of a Brexit we didn’t vote for. Scotland is being edged closer and closer to a Brexit precipice, but that isn’t as interesting to Ruth as the prospect of exchanging double entendres with Noel Fielding.

We don’t have politics in the UK anymore, we have reality TV with a soggy bottom and it’s never going to rise. Can we get independence soon please? Some of us want to be grown-ups.