REMEMBER those days when we looked across to the United States and shook our heads in bafflement and sadness as a reality show host pouted and preened across the stage as the newest president?

How with each ignorant, chest-thumping speech our mouths opened in horror and disbelief?

How we didn’t know then how insane it could truly get as his narcissistic "me, me, me" self-glorification took centre stage on the world’s screens and redneck followers, direct from the wild west, brandished guns on the very steps of city halls.

Where were the good guys to speak out; where were the cavalry to ride to the rescue? Silenced, fired, never more to be heard.

Initially, we repeatedly asked our friends in the States: "Why is no-one doing anything?" The anguished but futile responses turned to powerless almost sullen silences and loss of hope.

And throughout all "our" own problems with Brexit then coronavirus there was still that sense of moral and educational superiority. We would never descend that low – oh, no.

Barring the odd rogue, there was a core belief in the decency and integrity of the UK’s lawmakers. A feeling that lies and evasions would quickly be routed by nobler colleagues.

Were we truly naïve – under a spell of our own innate goodness, survivor of the creatures we always strove to be, no matter the murky by-ways we frequently stumbled down?

Was the truth always there, hidden until the relentless exposure of new media, itself also often a distorted mirror, where truth had its own meaning depending on the intention?

Well, in the antics of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and ideology at all costs, the ruthlessly ambitious, we can no longer deny it.

Watching Cummings, Johnson and the dark prince Michael Gove stare into the camera and, defiantly and earnestly, lie to the suckers stuck with this cabal of knaves has shrivelled something deep in my soul.

No matter some disturbing and increasing evidence to the contrary, over the past few years, I have clung to the notion of honour and decency as to what keeps us from the slide to hell.

There have been moments when I’ve wavered but never such profound loss of hope.

And never such sustained corrosive anger, the pain of which today mitigates that which I’m presently physically suffering.

Too dramatic, too florid? No doubt for some of you, but others, I know, feel it equally deeply.

In the lies and the inanities told this week to save an unelected adviser with a strange past, the British Government has united the country in disgust and loathing.

Barely disguising the trailing loose ends of their fiction, these arrogant lickspittles have exposed their utter contempt for not only the fools who believed the initial lies they were spun, but the rest dragged with them on the road to hell.

Now openly playing the electorate for fools and the uneducated of a once, occasionally, honourable history, they have trampled, and are trampling, the people under their boots on their private march to personal glory.

We’ve seen it all before and right does usually triumph in the end but at what cost? This time we need to wake before the price is too high.

In many ways it already is with the inept management of the pandemic.

Only we and politicians who rediscover their backbones can save us now.

In Continental Europe eyes no longer turn to the shame of America. No, they look upon the UK now with that same mingling of pity and incomprehension. With bewilderment and fear of political infection.

So, wagons are circled and paper after paper asks, ‘What the hell is happening?’

Pity is still just about there for the inhabitants but there is none for the politicians and Johnson is given the same lip curl of disdain as Trump as they grow daily chillingly similar.

God it is hard to hold on to hope that change will come soon but we must never give up striving. We cannot wallow in the seemingly hopeless. These people cannot win.

And now, Lord I’m tired. Tired of my one-fingered typing, fearful to turn to the news but praying there are resignations or, less likely, firings to come.

And yes, Scotland, no more playing nice and waiting for the permission of those who have shown over and over their indifference to your polite requests.

Take your many mandates and run with them. Forge your own destiny out of the shithole they’ve mired you in. Look yourself straight in the mirror while you still can. Get off your knees.

There’s a huge warm welcome awaiting you over here. There is respect, affection and admiration for your leaders – and hopes for you to break free of the liars and comic opera.

Europe knows your worth. You are not appreciated in a no-longer United Kingdom.

And unionists, don’t bother to spew your hatred below the line on the website. Your time is over and it is your own who have done for you.

Onward and upwards – you have nothing to lose but the liars and charlatans keeping you in thrall.

We’re all waiting.

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