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Some thoughts on the "vaccine wars" and Brexit. I have followed politics across Europe and the US since the 1960s. You learn quickly to differentiate between the "thunder of the now" - short-term sound and fury - and what matters in the long-term.
You also come to know that everyone screws-up at some time, sometimes royally. That bad choices are made about leaders. That there are, and always will be, plenty of bad leaders. That's life. The EU is screwing up over vaccines because of poor leadership. That can be put right.
Vaccine problems will be solved because they can be solved. Within months, they will be hard to see in the rear-view mirror. They will be far behind us. The manufacturing capacity is available. It just needs to be organised. And it will be.
But Brexit problems will not go away. They are here to stay. Issues over vaccine availability are not going to make structural border barriers over fish and pork and the rest suddenly disappear. When the vaccine tide goes out, the nakedness of Brexit will again become clear.
The reality is this. The UK has left the EU. It will not be rejoining anytime soon. Despite what Brexiteers would like, the EU is not going to implode or disappear. It will continue to evolve as the idealistic, but deeply flawed, economic and political construct that it is.
Brexiteers might wish that the UK was in the Pacific but, unfortunately for them, it is in the Atlantic, 50K from the European mainland. While Brexiteers continue to obsess about the EU and wish it ill, 99% of Europeans think little about the UK, just shrug at its mention.
By year-end, we will all have been vaccinated. We will learn to live with Covid 19 as we do with the flu. The EU will still be the hegemonic economic power in this part of the world. Riven with internal political and economic difficulties. Just like the US. But it will survive.
As for the UK? Who knows? Where will the dynamics of Brexit drive it? To Scottish independence? To a cutting loose of Northern Ireland, that troublesome child? To a loss of exports to the EU and a slow economic puncture?
When the sound and fury of the vaccine wars die down, long-term realities will reassert themselves. The EU will regroup and move on. And, in the words of Fleetwood Mac, the UK will "go its own way", for good or bad.
Only one thing is certain. Every week the Daily Telegraph will carry at least three articles predicting the imminent implosion of the EU. Some things will never change.
