If I am honest, eccentrics and pub bullshitters never used to bother me. Every pub in the county I live (Hampshire) has always had one, red faced, full of shit and putting the world to rights with preposterous tales about bringing back hanging, the French being cowards and how black people are lazy.

Hampshire is a bit of an odd backwater in many places and these people who talk a load of old nonsense are generally either ignored, joked about or tolerated. Or at least they were but now they have a platform, courtesy of the likes of Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and perennial gammon on the block, Tim Martin.

In a week where the BBC have been accused of planting actors on Newsnight, if you watched Thursday night’s Question Time, you could have been forgiven for thinking they were doing the same and that Tim Martin wasn’t really the owner of a huge pub chain, but a bit part actor from the back end of Norfolk sent in to to spout utter diatribe.

Tim Martin has done well for himself. The son of a former RAF serviceman and director of Guinness PLC in Malaysia, he was well educated in various parts of the world and achieved a degree in law at Nottingham University (he never practiced) before going into the brewery business with his first pub being in Muswell Hill.

The problem with Tim Martin is that rather than being a bit of an eccentric loon, he is deemed by half of the country as having more common sense than the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. Carney is suddenly one of those ‘so called experts who know nothing’ because he has diligently put forward a potential worst-case Hard Brexit scenario as a warning to those with an interest in the economy.

That’s what we have come to; somehow we have turned into miniature Trumpland where the truth no longer counts.

One example of Tim Martin’s attitude towards Europe is to ban booze from EU countries and only buy wine from outside the bloc. He does this as if though he will be introducing a brave new world of goods that have never been seen before by repressed Britons who have their choices curtailed by the dastardly union.

Maybe, like Eastern Europeans looking at western goods after the fall of communism, his customers will stare in wonderment at Jacobs Creek or Barefoot? The truth is, you can buy what you want from whoever you want as an EU member and all Martin is doing is cutting off his nose to spite his face by banning Prosecco and French and German wines.

It is pathetic behaviour, but he must have an agenda because 1 in 10 of his workers are from the EU. I am just not certain what it is? Deregulation of workers rights perhaps? Or maybe he is involved in disaster capitalism along with Rees Mogg and his mob? When picked apart, every statement he made on QT was bluster. Why on earth are the BBC giving credibility to people who clearly have no idea what they are talking about?

The problem is now that these pub bullshitters/opportunist businessmen (Banks, Martin, Dyson etc) have gained the narrative, the people who were talked into Brexit as some sort of NHS saving act of national pride, will not be swayed, even with cold hard economic facts rammed down their throats.

If you told them that they would be spending the rest of their days living off pig’s hoofs and cooking apples, they would still say that a 9% drop in the economy and a blue passport was worth it. Worth it  just to wipe the smiles off the faces of alleged elitists and shout ‘GET BORIS IN’ as loud as they can on Question Time.

If the purveyors of common decency are deluded enough to think that as an early Christmas gift, there will be a victorious second referendum where common sense prevailed and we made peace with the other 27 nations in the EU, they should forget it.

Tim Martin is not an actor of course, he is a real big time, pub bullshitter. He and swathes of morons in this country are not going to be distracted from their mission to fuck the UK up once and for all. Tim Martin will be okay of course, better off even, but those fools who drink in his pubs wont be.

The economic forecasts of last week proved for certain that there is no use telling Brexiteers we should have a second referendum with the facts laid down on the table. Brexiteers are the people who believe Daily Express weather forecasts and say “what happened to global warming?” on a frosty morning.

They will never deal in facts, they will always deal in bar stool bullshit and it is kind of fitting their new messiah is the king of the pub chains. Martin was once seen as a harmless eccentric but now he is the leading light on the post-Brexit golden dawn that, even with the best economic scenario, is not going to happen.

Mad isn’t it?