Donald Tusk is a victim of Brexit – no wonder he wants to consign Brexiteers to a ‘special place in hell’

Some seem to think that because their project has gone so embarrassingly badly, the European Council president is gloating in some way. He is not

The burning question appears to be, “Why would Donald Tusk use such undiplomatic language at such an important and sensitive moment?”

Why, the day before Theresa May comes to Brussels, and with time to find a Brexit deal now best measured in hours rather than days, would he stand on stage at a press conference, a matching tweet primed and ready to go, and say he has been “wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely”.

To which the burning answer is, “Who cares?”

Throughout the Brexit process, now well into its third year, the European Council president has been entirely consistent in a large number of ways. First of all, he has consistently maintained a unified position between 27 countries with competing interests and views on Brexit outcomes.

He has consistently maintained that there will be no winners from Brexit, only losers. That the UK and the EU will both lose. That there will be “no cakes on the table, only salt and vinegar”. And now, that reality stands ready to be delivered. Obviously, Brexiteers are angry with him, but that is only the latest abysmal stanza in their ongoing epic poem of absurdity.

Principally because the UK, led by politicians who you would not trust to negotiate a six-year-old into bed on Christmas Eve, has negotiated so badly, and the EU has negotiated well, large numbers of Brexiteers imagine the EU to have won the negotiations in some way. They have not. Everybody has lost.

Tusk speaks not as a victor, but as one of hundreds of millions across Europe and in the UK that has had the world-beating shambles of Brexit thrust upon them, by people who, with seven weeks to go, are still setting up “Alternative Arrangements Working Groups” on how to make it happen. Tusk is not gloating. He, like everyone else, will have to suffer the consequences of the single stupidest thing this country has ever done.

Then there is also the fact that he has consistently been undiplomatic. It was not so long ago that he warned the UK that “winter is coming”. It was his Instagram account on which appeared at the end of Theresa May’s humiliation in Salzburg, a picture of her at the lunch buffet table, with the words “no cherries”. A humiliation, indeed, for which he later had to apologise.

And, quite frankly, who cares? Ukip MEPs have sat in the European parliament for years now, with silly little plastic Union Jacks on their desks, more often than not wearing absurd costumes, and on one occasion, settling an internal party debate with an actual fistfight. Nigel Farage’s fans appear to love their idol’s plain speaking, his heavily worn tweed trappings of non-politicianhood (even though he first stood to be an MP at the age of 29). And yet, Tusk’s slightly salty words have sent them into apoplexy. There is a special place reserved for them, and the good news is it’s not in hell, you get to do colouring in all day and you might even get a mini fruit yoghurt in the afternoon.

The specific context of Tusk’s words should also not be forgotten. He was standing next to Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, talking about the threats posed by Brexit to the Good Friday Agreement, and the need for the backstop agreement to preserve it.

Tony Blair and John Major went to Belfast during the referendum campaign to set out the seriousness and insolubility of this problem in great detail. They were not listened to. For two-and-a-half years, the UK civil service and others have sought to come up with various ingenious ways to have no border at all between two countries, one of whom has refused to be in a customs union with the other. They have not come up with anything. Nothing exists like it anywhere on Earth. Currently, Steve Baker and various others are in the process of coming up with a solution that will work, in the space of 48 hours. It won’t happen. So the backstop is needed.

So for those who have brought the UK, and the European Union, to this point, who campaigned for it with no plan at all of how to sort it out, Tusk has every right to be angry and every right to express that anger too.

He has made two errors though. The first is that you really don’t need to wonder for very long about what the special place in hell “reserved” for those people looks like. It’s called the Oxford Union. There’s plenty of pictures on Google Images.

The second is that the special place in hell won’t be reserved just for them. We will all have to live in it.