The Brexit Catch-22 Driving U.K. Politics Crazy
The race to replace Theresa May as British prime minister has been mired in the same seemingly intractable Brexit riddle that destroyed her premiership—and there’s no obvious way out.
In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the anarchic anti-hero Captain John Yossarian marvels at the beauty of the trap he finds himself in. To escape the war he is being forced to fight, he must prove he is crazy. But asking not to fight proves he is not crazy. Therefore he has to fight.
The trap is inescapable. “Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle,” Heller wrote. “‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.”
The to replace Theresa May as Conservative Party leader and, by extension, British prime minister—Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt—now find themselves in a trap
