A Matter Of Some Gravity

In the week that Britain requested, and was granted, a further extension of EU membership whilst attempts to construct a Parliamentary agreement on how to leave continued, the news that a black hole had been imaged for the first time made world headlines.

The first is the culmination of exhaustive efforts to manipulate the views of many disparate people; the second is the culmination of exhaustive efforts to manipulate data obtained from many disparate telescopes.

The black hole in M87	The black hole in London SW1

It would be cheap and easy to suggest that Brexit is the black hole of European politics, that hapless soon-to-be-ousted British PM Mrs May is sucking the life out of her colleagues in the same way that the gravity well of a black hole slows and bends light round it, that time stands still on the edge of the singularity at the heart of a black hole in much the same way that it grinds painfully slowly whenever Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg opens his mouth and that the picture of the utter blackness at the centre of the hole is not dissimilar to to the holes in the brains of those who have convinced themselves that

1. No deal is better than a bad deal
2. There are no good deals
3. Therefore no deal is desirable
4. Anyway it doesn't matter because it can be "managed"
5. We haven't the faintest idea what "managed" means or how it would work but hey, it sounds cool and it means we can dump the problem onto someone else because we certainly are not going to spend any time at all in doing any real work into finding a solution.

As I say, to go down this path  would be a slippage of the high standards of journalism that we have sought to maintain for some 15 years in these columns and we shall steadfastly refuse so to do.
[What about the high standard of editorial control? Ed]