For the past few months it has become clear that certain members of the politico-media bubble have been undergoing a Brexit induced breakdown. The Remainiac bug is spreading – even some Remainers who were previously worth listening to have started to sound like tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorists. It falls upon Guido to stage a public intervention for their own good. Our list does not merely include ultra-Remainers who might be irritating but have kept their marbles. These are the 10 people who have been truly driven off the deep end by Brexit…

• AC Grayling – Where else to begin? Grayling has become Twitter’s nutty professor, every day pumping out increasingly unhinged anti-Brexit diatribes. Some highlights include labelling Brexiteers “vermin“, seeking a general strike to oppose Brexit, claiming “90% of informed opinion” is against Brexit, alleging other ultra-Remainers were being “silenced” by forces of the state, and arguing that the Tory government is “alt-right”. Grayling is alt-reality.
  
• Andrew Adonis – Every day he tweets about “stopping” or “halting” Brexit, which he calls “self-mutilation”. Some of his more vitriolic attacks are reserved for fellow Remainers who he reckons have sold out, he claims for example that Brexit is being driven by a “David Davis-Keir Starmer axis”. Peak Adonis was when he wrote to Lord Hall demanding the BBC sack Andrew Neil. Remarkably he still has a government job…
  
• Ben Bradshaw – Bradshaw has taken to tweeting out Louise Mensch blog posts citing “multiple sources with links to UK intelligence” who apparently say the referendum should be voided due to Russian intervention. Yesterday he tweeted that it was time for the Tories “to come clean about extent of Kremlin’s reach into heart of Government”. Friends don’t let friends retweet Louise Mensch. 
• Carole Cadwalladr – Cadwalladr appears to genuinely believe Brexit was a Russian plot, she has claimed the Leave campaign used psy-ops to hoodwink voters and doesn’t appear to realise she is being elaborately trolled by Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore who have christened her “Carole Codswallop”. Last night she suggested lifelong Eurosceptic Michael Gove only backed Vote Leave on the orders of the Legatum Institute, who she reckons are agents of Putin. It’s so ridiculous even Newsnight have taken the piss. The Observer’s continued indulging of her conspiracy theories seems almost exploitative. 
• Tim Walker – The waspish former diary columnist delights in dishing out snark, but thin-skinned Tim can’t take it when his conspiratorial babble is called out. The former Telegraph man turned freelancer and New European contributor reckons “Putin will continue to govern this country through stupid, weak, vain, greedy politicians so long as we, the people, are prepared to sit back and let him”. Cuckoo. 
• Jolyon Maugham – Twitter’s most attention-seeking QC once said he considers it an honour that he is known as “the biggest c**t at the English bar”. Brexit has turned him mad as well as bad. Just read how nasty Maugham was to the genial Danny Finkelstein about Article 50. And who can forget the time he decided to set up a new political party to fight Brexit. Always a telltale sign of a Brexdown. 
• Jeremy Cliffe – Talking of which, the Economist’s Berlin correspondent started The Radicals, seriously pledging to reverse Brexit, join the Euro, join the EU army and make Ken Clarke the next European Commission president. He quit the party after 12 hours following an all-staff internal email bollocking from his bosses. The Economist’s embarrassment was the happiest the FT newsroom has been all year. 
• Liam Byrne – Byrne is partly responsible for setting off the Russia conspiracy theorists (and the Mail on Sunday), demanding a “US-style judge-led inquiry” in response to a Louise Mensch blog. He’s tweeted out crank articles quoting intelligence “sources” saying the referendum will need to be re-run. He’s in danger of going the full Bradshaw. And Liam, we really need to talk about the beard. 
• Tom Brake – There has always been something of the night about Tom Brake, and the mood of parliament’s most humourless MP has not been helped by Brexit. When he’s not complaining to Bercow about Guido, Brake is making a fool of himself about Legatum. LibDem press officers play a game where they compete to put the most OTT lines into his press releases, knowing Brake will never tell them to tone it down. 
• Alastair Campbell – Okay so he always was a few billion short of a trade deal, but Bad Al is really not taking things well at the moment. He calls Leavers “Brextremists”, compared them to jihadists and even launched into a xenophobic rant against Gisela Stuart. He’s not gone in for the Putin stuff to be fair. Though that’s possibly more to do with his own Russia Today appearances. 

Guido wishes them well and looks forward to their post-Brexit recovery in April 2019…

12 hours after setting up The Radicals, the Economist’s Jeremy Cliffe has hilariously quit the party:

It is also clear from the — entirely unanticipated — scale of this unplanned experiment that taking this forward would not be compatible with my job as Berlin Bureau Chief for The Economist. But I do not want this remarkable network to go to waste. So having spoken to a number of supporters this morning I am arranging to hand it over to a committee in Britain that might, if it opts to do so, advance the Radicals to a next stage. Details of the committee will follow soon.

The shortest lived political movement in history?

You know how it is, it’s 10pm, you’re a self-important Economist journalist sitting on Twitter, and you decide to set up a new political party to stop Brexit. Berlin correspondent Jeremy Cliffe, a former intern to Chuka Umunna, says he has the plan to make Britain the world’s largest economy within 18 months: reverse Brexit, join the Euro, join the EU army and make Ken Clarke the next European Commission president. Other key manifesto pledges are to share Trident with Germany, raise inheritance tax and move Britain’s capital from London to Manchester. Don’t laugh, he’s actually serious… 

Remotely interested in a possible new anti-Brexit party with transformative social-liberal policies? Email “I’m in” to: radicalsuk@gmail.com

— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017

He says he’s humbled and reckons he has thousands of votes in the bag already:

Thanks to the many hundreds who have now emailed radicalsuk@gmail.com. Can’t say I expected this… But will see what we can make of this.

— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017

Taking stock: it seems I accidentally launched a new political movement this evening, the Radicals (@RadicalsUK).

— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 17, 2017

He’s gone full Chappers. You never go full Chappers.

Guido fears the sad decline of The Economist will continue under the new editor – the new Bagehot columnist is Jeremy Cliffe, currently the UK politics correspondent. Undeniably a bright boy, he is after all a former Harvard Fellow, graduating from Oxford where he studied modern languages specialising in the Marxist literature of Spain and Germany. A spell in Brussels interning for the Party of European Socialists led to him working for Chuka Umunna and briefly on the “David Miliband for Leader” campaign. Guido reported some controversy a couple of years ago when it was suggested that Andrew Rawnsley was plagiarising Cliffe’s writing – something Rawnsley angrily denied. Last week Cliffe wrote that the Conservative Party was “a party simply not grown-up enough to deserve/win a majority.” We shall see in a few weeks if this is a great insight or just the hope of Chuka’s former intern….

Jeremy Cliffe will, as is traditional, get to sign off his column as Bagehot. The real Walter Bagehot of course studied mathematics and moral philosophy, called to the Bar aged 26 he chose instead to work in banking and shipping. He then founded the National Review before becoming editor of The Economist for 17 years. During which time he famously wrote “The English Constitution” and “Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market” from which we derive the “Bagehot Dictum”. A dictum which two centuries later still guided central bankers to provide liquidity to solvent banks in the 2008 credit crisis. Bagehot’s accomplishments were enviable.

To be fair to Jeremy he tweets a lot and presents occasional BBC Radio 4 documentaries, the latest of which suggested we should take Russell Brand seriously. No further questions m’lud.