Diary – 10 January 2019

As a hack who lived and breathed the financial crisis, you might think that at the start of 2008 and 2009 I would have been more anxious about what lay ahead than I am today. Wrong. In my understanding of the mechanistic link between a bust banking system and the wallop to our prosperity, I could at least broadcast about what needed to be done to clean up the mess. A problem understood is a mendable problem. I am more unsettled today than at any time in 35 years as a journalist because of a political paralysis that makes the destiny of this nation so uncertain. The Prime Minister’s Brexit plan, which would have us pay £39 billion for a largely unknown future relationship with the EU, is set to be defeated. But then what? A chaotic no-deal exit from the EU, which could see factories going on to three-day weeks and cancer sufferers running out of life-saving drugs? A referendum which would be viewed by alienated unemployed and low-income Brexit supporters as a betrayal of their chance to be heard? Even if we knew where we were heading, all destinations are fraught with economic and social costs.