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.