ILLUSTRATION BY KATHRYN ROSE BROWN
This May, an English prime minister, newly victorious in hostile English territory, wrote to the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—all of whom regard him as the enemy incarnate, except the DUP, which regards him as treachery incarnate—and asked them to play as a single “Team UK.” In this moment, we must surely scent the endgame for the polity that less than a century ago ruled a quarter of humanity. The UK took a bullet in the head on 12th December 2019 when Boris Johnson romped home: we haven’t noticed only because our body politic was blast-frozen by Covid-19 before it could hit the ground. Time holds our Union cold and dying. Come the thaw, it falls.