Today is Article 50 Day

Theresa May signed the official notification of Article 50 last night and it will be handed in at 12.30pm today, just as this post goes live.

 And so, finally, and about nine months after it should have occurred, the UK has notified the EU that we are heading for the exit.

To be honest I don't want to quibble too much. It is not the fault of this government and civil service that all previous governments refused to allow the civil service to create a contingency plan for what we now call Brexit. It was as if Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron really thought that if there was no plan then Brexit was impossible. It wasn't and it isn't, but the lack of contingency planning has created this nine month hiatus which has only now come to an end.

Looking ahead there will be a period of willy-waving in London and Brussels as both sides set out their negotiating positions. Eventually, after many ups and downs, some deal will be cobbled together that will satisfy nobody much, but which we can all sort of live with.

We are lucky in that our enemies also happen to be types that the bulk of the British people despise. The Federast reaction is increasingly being seen as a comeback opportunity for the likes of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, George Osborne and the ever opportunistic Liberal Democrats. Their rank and file, inasmuch as it exists to any great extent, is made up of the local government non-job holders from the ever diminishing circle of Guardian readers. We do not need to engage with those scrotes: we can just simply ignore them.

By April 2019 it will all be over. Without a deal, our membership of the European Union will end on the 29th April 2019. Hopefully, much earlier than that, common sense will have prevailed and both sides will have cobbled  something together that the next generation can then argue about.

Either way, we are leaving the European Union, which is all that matters for now.