The Brex Factor: Mail stands up for Gove, the Corden blue comic

If his lucrative dog-whistle business should ever go wrong, Leave.EU backer Banks really should consider a career as a psychic. Just after 9am on October 30 he was crowing on Twitter that the ‘Russian stuff out of the US against Trump… is about to unravel!’

A few hours later Donald Trump’s former campaign manager was facing charges of conspiring against the United States while two more former Trump aides were also being charged in connection with the ‘Russian stuff’. Just call him Mystic Arron!

9 Chris Heaton-Harris

Derided for his McCarthyite letter to university vice-chairs, The Conservative whip and keen Brexiteer should also face derision for the appalling jokes he likes to tell on Twitter. Samples include ‘My mate wanted me to read this really long article on Japanese swords. I wasn’t that interested, so he Samurais it for me’ and ‘My mate just lost a big court battle against a large fabric conditioner brand. He fought Lenor and Lenor won.’

8 Mark Garnier

Who could have imagined that former Remainer Garnier’s hilarious Commons mea culpa – in which he claimed ‘Doom-mongers like me who were part of the Project Fear campaign have been proved wrong… and that is incredibly good news for Britain’ – would actually turn out to be one of the least embarrassing things he’s ever said? We look forward to future Garnier speeches with lines like ‘Brexit is sweeter than a pair of sugar tits’ and ‘like the vibrators I made my PA buy, there’s a real buzz about Brexit’.

7 Paul Dacre

The Daily Mail editor’s war on Remoaner universities is in tatters after The New European readers flooded the special inbox university@dailymail.co.uk with complaints like ‘my lecturer once said ‘ciao’ at the end of a lecture, disgusting’. But why is Dacre suddenly so concerned about radicalism on campus? In 2002 he told British Journalism Review ‘If you don’t have a left-wing period when you go to university, you should be shot. I was left-wing and I don’t regret it one bit’.

6 David Davis The Brexit secretary has ‘mentally checked out’, a government minister told the Telegraph, adding to speculation that he is planning to resign in March 2019 once the lunatics have taken back control of the asylum. One possible sign that this is accurate came when David told the Brexit committee that ‘Czechoslovakia doesn’t currently have a government’. This was entirely accurate, as Czechoslovakia has not existed since 1993.

5 Boris Johnson

BoJo the clown’s ‘jokes’ were the subject of a quiet shivving by new foreign affairs committee chairman Tom Tugendhat in The House magazine.

‘I just think that it’s very, very hard to make humour work in international environments, which is why very few serious politicians try it,’ said the man tipped as a future Tory leader.

‘It is really, really hard to do cross-cultural humour… what we need is a very, very cold and considered approach to our foreign strategy.’ He concluded with this rousing vote of confidence: ‘It’s up to the Prime Minister to decide who she chooses as her chief diplomat, not me.’

According to gossip newsletter Popbitch, a more route one approach was taken by one of Boris’ ministerial colleagues at a recent function.

Asked for his opinion of Theresa May, the high-ranking Tory gave a long-winded and considered answer about the PM’s various failings.

Popbitch wrote: ‘So they asked him for his opinion on Boris Johnson instead. Which was, simply: ‘C**”.

4 Digby Jones

The Brexit-loving former CBI chairman turned member of the House of Lords showed remarkable candour while explaining why he claimed over £14,000 in allowances from the second chamber last year despite never speaking in a debate or asking a single written question.

He told the Sunday Politics: ‘You have to put your name down in advance and you have to be there for the whole debate.’ The poor lamb! Jones, who picks up £300 a time for every day he visits the Lords, added that he still provided value for money as when he turned up ‘I will entertain at lunch time or show people round the House, everything from schoolchildren to inward investors’.

3 Martin Callanan

‘He brings with him proven ability in political leadership,’ claimed David Davis as he welcomed new boy Lord Callanan to the Brexit department. Alas for DD, video has since emerged showing the former Tory MEP demonstrating that ability in 2012 by calling for the scrapping of EU rules making pregnant women safer in the workplace, and also demanding that the right to paid holiday should end.

Up in Gateshead, where Callanan was once a councillor, they also remember his ‘proven ability’.

In 1997 he called a local art project ‘a waste of money’ and called it ‘the latest in a long series of cock-ups’. That waste of money was Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North.

2 Bow tie Brexit Boy

Clad in a fetching pink shirt/bow tie combo, this youngster delighted the Question Time crowd when his attempt to question the BBC’s impartiality during the referendum went badly awry.

‘You got someone very intelligent to speak on behalf of Remain and you managed to get someone less intelligent to speak on behalf of Leave,’ he moaned, as the audience stifled giggles. Funny how it just seems to happen again and again, isn’t it?

1 Michael Gove

His James Corden-reject gag about Harvey Weinstein drew howls of protest from just about everywhere.

Except, of course, from the Daily Mail, employers of Sarah Vine, aka Mrs Gove. Instead, the paper’s Dominic Sandbrook compared Gove to Shakespeare, Dickens, PG. Wodehouse, Monty Python, Dad’s Army and George Orwell, while lumping the ‘humourless, po-faced Lefties’ who criticised him with the ‘miserable buttoned-up busybodies’ who ‘lopped off the head of Charles I’!