Rousing the country to apathy

The Maybot on her travels.  The Guardian reports:

There are few things more guaranteed to induce a sense of national panic than the prime minister announcing she is doing a whistle-stop tour of the country to reassure everyone that leaving the EU wasn’t going to be quite as bad as they feared. To mark the year to go till Brexit day, Theresa May started out by spending a few minutes at a textile factory in Ayr. Shortly after she left, most of the workers were checking to see if the factory was about to close.

Quite why the prime minister puts herself and the nation through such ordeals is something of a mystery. She finds it hard enough to look one of her cabinet ministers in the eye and clearly feels even more uncomfortable meeting ordinary people. The feeling is mutual. Her smiles are more like gurns and her conversation is mostly notable for its silences. At her second stop of the day, she sucked the life out of a children’s daycare centre in Northumberland and everyone breathed a sigh of relief when she headed off.

Next on the itinerary was Bangor in Northern Ireland, where she had a private lunch with four farmers. One of them was dragged out to discuss on Sky News how it felt to have drawn the short straw. The poor man looked totally traumatised by the experience as he described how the prime minister had done absolutely nothing to convince them that she had a solution to the Irish border question. Partly because she didn’t have one, but also because she had barely said a word.