Brexit casts a long shadow that hangs over our budget

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

I can measure my indolent college years by one afternoon programme on Channel 4. It was Countdown and I was addicted to it. I wasn’t alone. Many of my friends used to look at it too when we did not have the strictures of job, mortgages or responsibility. For me it was morning TV.

All it was essentially was anagrams and relatively easy maths puzzles, to be solved in the 30 seconds allowed by the countdown clock. My speciality was the nine-word conundrum at the end of each segment.

I started work in the Connacht Tribune and daytime TV became a stranger to me and Countdown went into demise in my life.

A decade later, Channel 4 came up with another hit show; one that involved zero skill, relying instead on the tension around players’ greed – will she or won’t she open the next box.

It was Deal or No Deal, the Channel 4 game show hosted by Noel Edmonds.

A contestant stood in the middle in front of 22 boxes. Each was guarded by another prospective contestant. When you opened the box, it revealed a scale of values, ranging from 1p up to £250,000. So every box you opened, you lost the chance of winning the total revealed in it. Contestants hoped they could get to the end without the really low value boxes being still there.

The outcome was random, it was a pure game of chance.

I was reminded of all that – and of course it was triggered by the recurrence of the ‘No Deal’ phrase – when I looked at the interview Boris Johnson did on Monday night with the BBC political editor Laura Kuennsberg.

When it came to the Irish border, Johnson maintained he could find an alternative to the backstop. ‘How?’ challenged Kuennsberg.

It could be done, he replied, with ‘abundant, abundant technical fixes’.

In other words he was going to find a unicorn. When it was put to him by her that all of those had been explored and nothing had come of them, he said: “Well, they do actually, you have in very large measure they do, you have trusted trader schemes, all sorts of schemes that you could put into place.”

He also claimed that ‘creative ambiguity’ around the £39 billion sterling divorce payment would allow a revised deal.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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