BREXIT @ 10: THE REFERENDUM THEY NEVER FORGAVE

Ten years on from that shimmering June morning in 2016 when the British people, in a fit of what the bien pensants still insist on calling collective madness, voted to leave the European Union, one is tempted to raise a glass of something suitably flat and warm—perhaps a pint of warm bitter, the national drink of a nation that has specialised in lukewarm compromises. Here we are in 2026, and the anniversary feels less like a celebration than a coroner’s report on a patient who briefly showed signs of life before relapsing into the familiar coma of managed decline. Brexit was not the disaster, dear reader; it was the last time the electorate was permitted a proper democratic victory. Everything since has been a masterclass in how to snatch defeat from the jaws of self-determination, administered by a procession of prime ministers whose collective inadequacy made even the average EU commissioner look like a titan of vision. 

Let us first dispense with the polite fictions. On 23 June 2016, 17.4 million souls—more than had ever bothered to turn out for a general election in living memory—looked at the supranational pudding and decided they had eaten enough. They did not do so because they hated foreigners, or because they had been mesmerised by a bus with a dubious slogan, or because they secretly yearned for the return of rationing and powdered egg. They did it because, in their bones, they sensed that sovereignty had become a polite euphemism for “please consult Brussels first.” 

It was, in its clumsy, sunburnt, English way, a genuine assertion of democratic will—the sort of thing political theorists used to write misty-eyed essays about before they discovered that actual voters were distressingly deplorable. Christopher Hitchens, had he lived to see it, might have observed that the British public had finally done what the commentariat always urged in theory but recoiled from in practice: they had exercised agency. And like a man who has ordered the steak and then been presented with the bill, the establishment spent the next decade trying to send it back to the kitchen. 

Teresa May, poor soul, inherited the china shop and immediately set about proving that a vicar’s daughter could negotiate with the EU like a maiden aunt haggling over a church fête. Her red lines were drawn in watercolour. She spoke of “Brexit means Brexit” with all the conviction of someone reading the small print on a dodgy insurance policy. The result was a Withdrawal Agreement that managed to leave Northern Ireland half-in, half-out, and the entire country wondering whether sovereignty was now measured in millimetres. 

May’s failure was not merely technical; it was spiritual. Here was a woman who had campaigned to remain (quietly) and then tried to deliver leave with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a prepared statement. One almost felt sorry for her, until one remembered that sympathy is the emotion reserved for those who do not hold high office while demonstrating why it should not be held by them. 

Then arrived Boris Johnson, the great blond hope, the man who could charm birds from trees and, apparently, majorities from hitherto safe Labour seats. For a brief, chaotic moment, it seemed as though Brexit might actually mean something. “Get Brexit Done” had the merit of brevity, if not intellectual depth. 

Johnson delivered the formal exit, waved the fish-and-chips flag, and promptly discovered that governing without the EU’s scaffolding required rather more than a few Latin tags and a talent for dishevelment. One might charitably say his administration was distracted by events—parties during lockdown, wallpaper scandals, and the eternal circus of his own appetites. Less charitably, one notes that the man who had once written columns about the absurdity of Brussels bureaucracy now seemed oddly comfortable with the machinery of globalist entanglement elsewhere. Trade deals were signed with fanfare, yet the lorry queues at Dover and the paperwork for exporters suggested that sovereignty, like charisma, has its limits when confronted with spreadsheets.

Liz Truss, bless her lettuce, lasted approximately as long as a snowflake in a sauna. Her crime was not so much ideological as existential: she attempted actual Conservative economics at speed, and the markets, those delicate flowers, reacted as if she had proposed sacrificing virgins to the bond gods. Her brevity was almost poetic. Britain briefly had a prime minister who seemed to believe in something, and the system promptly ejected her like a malfunctioning vending machine returning the wrong crisps.

Rishi Sunak, smooth as a technocrat’s conscience, arrived promising competence and stability. He gave us the appearance of adulthood—suit, haircut, spreadsheets—while continuing the stately drift towards whatever fashionable global consensus required the least confrontation with reality. Net Zero targets, endless migration pressures, and the quiet realisation that “global Britain” often meant Britain as a polite adjunct to everyone else’s priorities. He was, in many respects, the perfect post-Brexit manager: someone who could administer the estate without ever questioning why the estate no longer felt quite like home.

And then Keir Starmer—ah, the man who promised to make Brexit work while looking as though he would rather it had never happened. His tenure, cut short amid the usual revolts and disappointments, exemplified the Labour Party’s approach: treat the referendum result as a regrettable outbreak of plebeian opinion that must be sanitised, regulated, and aligned with the greater European project in all but name. Under Starmer, as under his predecessors, the great insight of 2016—that nations might still wish to control their borders, laws, and destinies—was quietly reclassified as a problem to be managed rather than a principle to be upheld.

What unites these administrations, from May’s dutiful misery through Johnson’s fireworks, Truss’s brevity, Sunak’s spreadsheets, and Starmer’s managerialism, is a common thread of inadequacy dressed up as sophistication. Each prime minister, confronted with the raw fact of democratic instruction, felt the gravitational pull of globalism not because they were evil masterminds of Davos, but because it was easier. 

Globalism, in its current form, offers the political class what they crave most: the ability to outsource difficult decisions to technocrats, markets, international forums, and the great swirling vortex of “rules-based international order.” It absolves them of the need to confront their own electorates, to make hard cultural choices, or to admit that running a country requires more than good intentions and a compelling LinkedIn profile. Brexit exposed their limitations; rather than rise to the occasion, they chose the comfortable exile of transnational pieties. 

Cameron himself had called the referendum out of party management, not conviction—a classic case of a man using democracy as a tactical tool only to discover it had ideas of its own. His successors merely continued the pattern, each more convinced than the last that the voters had been a momentary aberration. The economic numbers, those dreary companions of anniversaries, will be marshalled by both sides. Some will speak of GDP losses, trade frictions, and the usual regressions. 

Others will point to sovereignty regained, regulatory freedom exercised (if not always wisely), and the quiet satisfaction of no longer pretending that ever-closer union was destiny. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the spreadsheets and the soul. Nations are not balance sheets. The real cost of the last decade has not been measured in basis points but in the evaporation of trust—the sense that even when the people speak with unprecedented clarity, the system will find ways to muffle, dilute, reinterpret, and ultimately neuter their voice.

Ten years after Brexit, Britain finds itself in that most English of conditions: muddling through, slightly poorer on paper, considerably more confused about its identity, and still possessed of that strange, stubborn refusal to admit that the project was entirely misconceived. The electorate’s victory in 2016 was real. The failure since has been almost total. It is not the fault of the 17.4 million who voted Leave. It is the fault of those who were meant to implement their decision and instead treated it as a problem of public relations.

One can only hope that somewhere, in a quiet corner of the shires or a forgotten corner of Westminster, the lesson is still faintly audible: democracy is not a suggestion box for the clever classes. It is the sovereign speaking. The rest of us—politicians especially—should have the decency to listen, even when it inconveniences our dinner invitations in Brussels, Davos, or wherever the next global consensus is being lightly brokered over canapés. 

Happy anniversary Brexit, the cake, like so much else, tastes faintly of regret. But at least we baked it ourselves.

THE RESINGATION OF SIR KEIR STARMER: A STUDY IN MANAGED MEDIOCRITY

It is with the sort of restrained satisfaction one reserves for the removal of a stubbornly persistent stain that one greets the news of Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation. After two brief, blundering years in office—years that felt, to the suffering electorate, rather more like a prolonged hostage situation—he has at last decided to fall on his sword. Or, more accurately, to allow the sword to be gently pressed into his unresisting abdomen by colleagues who had grown tired of watching him fumble with it. The man who arrived promising renewal has departed as the most spectacular confirmation that New Labour’s final mutation was not a renaissance but a quiet surrender. 

Let us be precise about the scale of the under-achievement. Starmer inherited the largest Labour majority in a generation, a historic mandate handed to him not so much by popular enthusiasm as by the exhausted revulsion at fourteen years of the other lot. The country was placed in his hands like a delicate antique. He proceeded to use it as a coaster. Illegal immigration soared, taxes spiralled up, promises dissolved faster than a Temu bath bomb, and the cost-of-living crisis was met with the sort of sympathetic head-tilt one might offer a dying relative one has already written out of the will. Unemployment climbed to historic levels while the Prime Minister maintained the expression of a man who had just remembered he left the gas on. 

His government’s greatest innovations were largely repressive. Crackdowns on protests, particularly those concerning immigrants committing rape and murder, revealed a man uncomfortable with any dissent that might disturb the smoother functioning of the establishment consensus. He backed conflicts with the unblinking loyalty of a junior civil servant who has spotted which way the wind is blowing. Digital IDs rolled out with the quiet inevitability of parking restrictions. Young people were to be shielded from the perils of social media—presumably so they might better concentrate on the approved curriculum of managed disappointment. All the while, leasehold reform, that modest sop to the property-owning aspirations of the middle classes, was abandoned with the alacrity of a man spotting an awkward acquaintance across the room. 

The personal dimension is where the true comedy, if one may call it that, resides. Here was a figure who had spent years presenting himself as the decent, methodical lawyer who would restore competence to government. In practice, he resembled nothing so much as a senior partner in a provincial firm who had been elevated far beyond his natural ceiling and was now quietly terrified that someone might notice. The face—earnest, slightly pouchy, forever arranged in an expression of pained forbearance—suggested a man who had discovered the difference between being trusted with the petty cash and being trusted with the national finances. His speeches achieved the rare feat of sounding both scripted and extemporaneously dull. One imagined him practising them in the mirror, adjusting the tie, and still failing to convince his own reflection.

The electoral verdict was merciless and, in its way, rather beautiful. Labour haemorrhaged nearly 1,500 council seats in a single set of local elections. The net approval rating sank to minus sixty-six, a figure that places him in the exalted company of history’s more enthusiastically disliked prime ministers. Yet the real sting lay in where those votes went. Only a handful defected to Reform. The bulk migrated leftward, to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Starmer, the great triangulator, the man who had neutered the Corbynite left with the ruthless efficiency of a party apparatchik securing his own advancement, had succeeded only in alienating precisely the constituency he was meant to have pacified. He was never there to represent them. He was there to neutralise them. Mission accomplished, as the post in question so dryly observed. Sort of. 

One searches for mitigating qualities and finds the cupboard embarrassingly bare. There was no grand vision, no memorable phrase, no moment of genuine moral courage that might redeem the record. Instead, there was the careful cultivation of the appearance of seriousness while the substance leaked away. Peter Mandelson’s early elevation—Epstein’s man in Britain, as the sharper tongues had it—set the tone. This was not renewal; it was the restoration of the same old revolving door between power and the more discreet forms of influence. Starmer governed as if the primary duty of office was to avoid frightening the horses. The horses, unimpressed, bolted anyway. 

Nowhere did the pinched soul of the man reveal itself more completely than in his response to the Southport murders, that pitiless slaughter of three little girls—Bebe, Elsie, and Alice—stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift dance class by a known quantity the state had repeatedly declined to restrain. Here was a Prime Minister confronted with raw, unbearable horror, the sort that should have cracked even the most lacquered political carapace. Instead, Starmer offered the nation the spectacle of a man auditing his own decency in real time. While the country reeled, he pivoted with the alacrity of a cornered accountant: swift condemnation not primarily of the killer but of the “far-right” disorder that followed, as though the true outrage were not the butchered children but the inconvenient eruption of public anger. 

No visible flicker of paternal grief disturbed those lawyerly features; one half-expected him to bill the parents by the hour for his condolences. He spoke of “terrorism has changed”—loners, misfits, bedroom radicals—as if the atrocity were a fascinating policy brief rather than the blood-soaked consequence of institutional cowardice and open-borders dogma he had done nothing to challenge. The families received platitudes; the rioters received a violent disorder unit. In that moment, Sir Keir Starmer stood exposed not merely as incompetent but as something colder: a functionary so thoroughly marinated in the preservative fluids of establishment self-preservation that the screams of murdered infants registered only as a threat to narrative control. A smaller, meaner man is difficult to conceive; one who could gaze upon such innocence destroyed and calculate first how best to spin it deserves not the pity of history but its permanent contempt.

In the end, Sir Keir Starmer will be remembered not as a tragic figure but as something smaller and more contemptible: a technician who mistook caution for wisdom and obedience for leadership. He entered Downing Street with every advantage and left it having proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the centre cannot hold when it has nothing at its core but the polished vacancy of ambition. Britain, poorer, angrier, and rather more cynical, waves him off without affection. The establishment, one suspects, will find a suitable sinecure. There is always the Lords for those who have served it faithfully, however incompetently.

Good riddance to a man who was, in the final analysis, one of the most thoroughgoing disappointments in modern British political history. Not evil, perhaps—just irredeemably small. And in politics, smallness, when dressed up in the robes of high office, is its own special form of insult to the public. One awaits the next with suitably lowered expectations.

AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL …

One learned the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s prostate cancer diagnosis with the sort of resigned amusement that greets any minor reversal in the fortunes of a man who has spent decades reversing expensive German saloons into ditches for our entertainment. Here was the human equivalent of a V8 engine—loud, inefficient, gloriously unnecessary—being told by his own plumbing that it might, after all, have limits. The prostate, that most undignified of organs, had apparently decided to stage its own farmers’ protest. One pictures the offending gland, red-faced and tweed-clad, waving a placard that reads “No to Woke Waterworks.”

For years Clarkson has been the last unapologetic roar in a culture that prefers the polite electric hum of virtue. He has offended vegetarians, cyclists, Germans, the Welsh, the Scots, civil servants, Remainers, climate activists, and anyone who has ever uttered the phrase 'sustainable development goals' without laughing. Now his own body has joined the protestors. It is the ultimate Clarkson moment: even his internal organs have turned out to be reactionary.

The response from the usual quarters has been predictably exquisite. There were the ritual expressions of sympathy from people who have spent the previous decade wishing him dead in interestingly detailed ways on social media. One can almost hear the grinding of teeth behind the Hallmark-card condolences: “Thoughts with Jeremy and his family at this difficult time,” typed by hands that only yesterday were composing threads about how Clarkson’s very existence was a form of violence. Cancer, it seems, is the one thing capable of briefly silencing the baying of the online hounds—though not for long. Already one senses the hedged bets: yes, cancer is bad, but has he considered the carbon footprint of chemotherapy? Perhaps the NHS could treat him with thoughts and prayers generated by wind power.

This is where one must declare an interest, or at least an affection. I have always enjoyed Clarkson in the way one enjoys a particularly belligerent old pub bore who happens to be right about most things. He is not subtle. Subtlety is for people who write think-pieces about the semiotics of the flat white. Clarkson is the man who looks at an Alpine road and sees not an opportunity for quiet reflection on climate change but a chance to discover whether a Lamborghini can achieve flight. His genius—and it is a genius, however unfashionable—lies in understanding that most people secretly want to drive too fast, eat too much, and say the unsayable without first checking with Human Resources.

His farming programmes, those gentle masterpieces of curmudgeonry, revealed the man more truly than any of the motoring shows. Here was Clarkson discovering that agriculture is not a moral failing but an actual job performed by actual people who must contend with weather, bureaucracy, and the fact that half the population thinks food grows in Waitrose. One watched him struggle with sheep and subsidies and felt the warm glow of recognition: at last, a television personality prepared to admit that expertise might occasionally reside outside Islington.

The cancer diagnosis, like everything else in Clarkson’s life, will no doubt be turned to account. One awaits the inevitable Clarkson’s Cancer special with something approaching glee. There will be a track day at some unsuitable location involving chemotherapy patients in high-performance wheelchairs. There will be a monologue about how the NHS waiting list is longer than the M25 on a bank holiday. There will be an expensive bottle of something unsuitable drunk in defiance of medical advice, followed by a segment in which he attempts to race a prostate cancer awareness ribbon against a Bugatti. The man is incapable of solemnity, which is precisely why we need him.

Modern Britain has developed an almost erotic relationship with solemnity. We have solemnity about the climate, solemnity about identity, solemnity about pronouns, solemnity about everything except the things that actually matter. Into this festival of earnestness strode Clarkson, all six-foot-five of him, complaining that the coffee was cold and the car was German. He was never going to win awards from the Broadcasting Standards people. He was too busy winning the affection of people who still remember that entertainment should sometimes be entertaining.

There is a peculiar English pleasure in watching a man refuse to be improved. The therapeutic culture demands that we all become better versions of ourselves—more mindful, more sustainable, more in touch with our feelings. Clarkson’s response has always been to buy another Aston Martin and drive it through a river. Now the river has come to him, in the form of rogue cells with ideas above their station. One suspects he will treat the disease with the same mixture of irritation and dark humour he applies to everything else. “Not now, I’m trying to harvest beetroot,” he will mutter, before writing another column about how the NHS has all the organisational efficiency of a Top Gear production meeting.

The wider point, which the solemn ones will miss, is that Clarkson represents something increasingly rare: the right to be wrong in public. Not wrong in the sense of being mistaken about facts—though he has been that too, gloriously—but wrong in the sense of holding opinions that offend the prevailing consensus. In an age when deviation from the script can end careers, here was a man who treated the script as something to be used for kindling. That he did so while becoming enormously successful only compounded the offence. The chattering classes could forgive poverty; they could not forgive popularity achieved without their permission.

Cancer, of course, doesn’t care about any of this. It is the great equaliser, the ultimate reminder that biology has not read the Guardian. Even the mighty Clarkson, conqueror of caravans and critic of cycle lanes, must now contend with the frailty of meat. One hopes—fervently, if not solemnly—that he beats the bastard thing. Not because he is a saint (he isn’t) or because his views are correct on every point (they aren’t), but because a world without him would be marginally more boring, marginally more frightened of its own shadow.

In the meantime, one raises a glass—something full-blooded and inappropriate—to the man himself. May his prostate prove as stubborn as its owner. May his recovery be swift, his complaints loud, and his subsequent television output even more politically catastrophic than before. The forces of dullness have enough on their side already. They don’t need to claim this scalp too. Godspeed, you magnificent, impossible sod.