Trump gone, a vaccine discovered, now we’ve got to deal with Brexit and independence. Opinion: Neil Mackay

Of course, those extremists and conspiracy theorists aren’t singing hosannahs or getting their campanology on – they’re far from happy. Your average white nationalist is deeply upset that their orange avatar on Pennsylvania Avenue turned out to be a massive loser, and the hard left – a band so miserable they’d find a downside to the birth of their own child – immediately began painting Joe Biden as some democratic version of Ivan the Terrible.

Over in QAnon-land, the vaccine, which offers us a glimmer of hope, is, of course, a high grade plot by the Illuminati to pump microchips into our veins and addict us all to 5G broadband so the Queen, Tom Hanks, and their Satanic minions can continue drinking the blood of children.

Nobody likes to stomp on the chance of a reasonably happy Christmas more than a good old fashioned political zealot or the owner of the latest in tin-foil headwear. In fact, they’re both the same really – folk you’d jump out of a ten storey window to avoid.

Of course, there’s some legitimate shadows hanging over the recent good news. Trump, as expected, isn’t just throwing a gigantasaurus-sized tantrum and embarrassing himself and everyone else in the world, he’s also trying desperately to ramp up his crazy militia-loving base with nonsensical drivel about rigged elections and dodgy ballots – which his supporters want both counted and not counted simultaneously.

Will he trigger civil unrest? Hopefully not, it looks like political power, even after the last four years, really does drain away like dirty water from a bathtub.

It was right to worry and fret over democracy during the Trump presidency – he really was, and remains, a threat to the rule of law. But good old democracy has shown itself to be the trusty punchbag we always hoped it’d be. You can kick it in the head, it seems, and democracy just keeps getting up again. For my money, that’s among the best news of the last few days – that our system of government in the Western world really is robust enough to withstand even the predations of the Idiot-in-Chief.

What’s more worrying is the final weeks of the Trump presidency. He’ll attempt to smash what remains of the democratic crockery before he’s dragged kicking and screaming (I hope) from the Oval Office. He’s currently sacking the hard-working staff needed to keep America running. The Pentagon has suffered “near total decapitation of civilian leadership in the last 24 hours”.

Instead of leaving a ‘good luck, Joe’ note in his desk on departure, you can imagine Trump defecating in the drawer, or writing ‘F**k you, Biden’ on the wall with his favourite sharpie.

Then we come to the virus. The agony of this vaccine turning out to be a false hope isn’t something any one of us wishes to contemplate. Unfortunately, we have to trust our incompetent politicians to pull off the roll out of any immunisation programme efficiently. Of course, the incompetency is to varying degrees north and south of the border. Here, it’s the incompetency of the self-assured middle manager, down south it’s the incompetency of a drunk baby who’s just fallen out of their pram.

But let’s be optimistic – let’s believe Trump will leave office without toppling the Statue of Liberty, and let’s believe the vaccine will work and sooner rather than later our political class will manage to get us all a jag.

It really does feel good, doesn’t it. That hope. And what makes it even better is that most of the world shares the optimism with us.

The only problem, though, is that this joy unbridled may not last very long for us here at home in our divided islands … because, who’s that peeping their scary faces in through the window? Why, it’s Brexit and independence, of course. The ghosts at the feast.

While Biden and the vaccine may have temporarily raised optimism levels here, once Christmas is over we’ve got our super-free-fall-no-parachute Brexit on December 31 (Happy New Year!), and then May’s Scottish elections which will inevitably trigger a constitutional crisis with demands for a second referendum from a UK government which has all the tact and grace of a two tonne bull in DM boots.

The vaccine and the defeat of Trump may mean that the fever of despair which gripped the world is starting to break, but at home, we’re still very sick.

Pain will go on here for some time. Sorry to rain – or rather monsoon – on the parade. In fact, some of the positives of the last few days will be negatives for us. For me, it’s great that the Democrats won – and Biden, rightly, views Brexit as a threat to peace in Ireland. But that could threaten any future trade agreement. Europhiles, like me, may think ‘good, get it right up ye, Boris’ but in truth bad trade deals mean all of us suffer, businesses go under, families get poorer. Nobody wants that.

Although I’m a Yes voter, the thought of replaying that hate-fest from 2014 fills me with dread. Like many, I’m weary of division, and angry at a political class which foists conflict upon us – a convenient blind for their failures, and a means to extend their lucrative careers in political office.

Most of all, though – once these political upheavals and the horror of a global pandemic finally end – what will have substantially changed? We’ve spent this last dreadful year pondering a better tomorrow, but we all know that once Trump has gone and the virus is beaten nothing will really be different. The political class will ensure we return to the old normal, at home as well as abroad – and it was the old normal which brought us to this sorry pass in the first place.

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