QUOTE : Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face. Ask yourself now what it actually means. Consider the events of the following months and years and ask yourself whether she could have been doing anything other than using it to discourage thinking, to avoid facts and to postpone reality. You don’t need to be William of Ockham to conclude that this is the only – never mind the simplest – explanation for her choice of words. The truly nasty element of the whole enterprise is the way it treats the Brexit-supporting British public as idiots. Throw them a fatuous soundbite, the thinking goes, and they’ll be so busy chomping away on it that they won’t notice we haven’t got the first idea what Brexit is going to mean.