BREX FACTOR: My degeneration – why old rockers love Brexit

‘Every time I do this, another African child dies,’ he intoned. To which a man in the front row is said to have shouted, ‘stop doing it then’.

Brexit makes for strange bedfellows. For several reasons, their leader’s epic pomposity high among them, I belong to the camp which regards Bono’s mob as sixth-rate chancers inexplicably elevated to the demigod status deservedly earned by the likes of The Who. Yet place the singer’s statements on Brexit next to those made recently by Roger Daltrey and you have to admit that this is a rare occasion on which U2 actually are even better than the real thing. Or, indeed, even better than the Real Thing, the 1970s Liverpool soul band whose Can’t Get By Without You outshines With Or Without You any day of the week.

On stage in Belfast the other night, Bono told the audience it was ‘still a great European city… always and forever. Whatever happens, whether there’s a hard or soft or no border at all, more than ever, we need to trust each other on this small island in the North Atlantic Ocean. It looks like some rough weather ahead but it’ll be a lot less rough if we navigate it together.’

Characteristically hokey, but far more impressive than Daltrey’s recent assertion that the EU is a ‘gravy train soaking us dry’. This was possibly the most ridiculous thing to come out of his mouth since the opening lines of the title track on his 1977 solo album One Of The Boys: ‘He speaks with a terrible stammer, so he don’t have much to say/ But he can spit further than any punk, so nobody gets in his way.’

I am no great fan of Queen either, but read Brian May’s quotes from this week (‘I get up every day and put my head in my hands about Brexit; I think it is the stupidest thing we ever tried to do’) and the whole being ‘caught in a landslide, no escape from reality’ thing begins to make some kind of sense.

Of course, coming out as a Brexiteer cannot and should not diminish the importance of your past work. No-one will delete Baba O’Riley or Won’t Get Fooled Again from their Spotify playlists simply because Roger Daltrey believes that all Brexit will mean for musicians is ‘a bit more paperwork on this side of the Channel’. The greatness of Ringo Starr’s drumming on Rain and Something is undimmed by his belief that leaving the EU is ‘a great move… I think, you know, to be in control of your country is a good move’. The shivers still induced by John Lydon’s voice on God Save The Queen and Poptones have survived his Country Life adverts, and will survive his calls for ‘a truly brilliant British exit’.

Turning to the crowning achievements of people from my hometown of Manchester, Mark E Smith of The Fall’s decades of magnificent output will outlive his thoughts on Brexit (‘I thought it was great, still do’), while How Soon Is Now? will still be danced to long after Morrissey’s hatefulness is forgotten. And when our memories of Noel Gallagher telling Remainers to ‘fucking get on with it’ have finally gone to that champagne supernova in the sky, people will look back fondly on how well he once kept the Inspiral Carpets’ guitars in tune.

When musicians we admire turn out to support Brexit we can be disappointed but we shouldn’t really be surprised. Starr is 78, Daltrey 74, Lydon 62, Morrissey 59, Gallagher 51 and Smith was 60 when he died in January; placing all in age demographics which went for Leave. All hail from the white working class, another happy hunting ground for Leave (‘the working class have voted and I support them,’ said Lydon last year). All, in varying degrees, see themselves as the champion of the ordinary guy against The Man, a persuasive Leave message. All are self-made, living lives involving little compromise or negotiation. All began as equal parts of groups before going solo or assuming control.

And all have almost certainly spent the last few decades surrounded by people who are unlikely to ever tell them that they are talking complete and utter bollocks.

Though perhaps something else entirely led Daltrey to Brexit. It may have been that, curious about the subject and eager to research it, he innocently entered a website containing disturbing pro-Brexit material.

But then who would ever believe an excuse like that?

When the Daily Mail wanted Green to negotiate Brexit

The veteran Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn recently took a six-week break. On returning, he explained to readers, ‘I’d had enough of trying to find something original to say… I didn’t want to read, let alone write, another word about Brexit.’

Since then Littlejohn has proved his own point by writing several thousand unoriginal and unreadable words about Brexit, including this week’s dismal take on the Budget (‘Spread Fear Phil is still here and determined as ever to keep us under the yoke of the EU’).

Yet for some reason, Littlejohn has not returned to one of his more original ideas. ‘We’re told we haven’t got enough trained Brexit negotiators,’ he wrote in September 2016. ‘How many do we need? Why not let Philip Green rehabilitate his reputation by sending him to negotiate with Brussels? If he wants to keep his knighthood, let him earn it.

‘Give him a week and he’d do them up like a hareng fumé (that’s French for kipper). They’d end up paying us to leave.’

Littlejohn continued: ‘We don’t have to grovel. We’ve got a winning hand. The Europeans have got more to lose than we have when it comes to trade. We import more from them than they do from us. Are they really going to turn their backs on one of their biggest export markets?’ Like the rest of that column, these thoughts have not aged well.

Brexiteers of the Week

JACOB REES-MOGG

Crackers Jacob’s failing Moggmentum – remember that? – took another blow after he praised economist Patrick Minford with the words ‘although he still does not represent the mainstream view he deserves to be listened to’.

Footage soon emerged of Minford telling a Westminster committee in 2012 that UK car manufacturing would end if Britain left the EU. He said: ‘You are going to have to run it down. It will be in your interests to do it, just as in the same way we ran down the coal and steel industries.’

Previous Minford greatest hits include telling The Sun in 2016 that Brexit ‘would mostly eliminate manufacturing’ in the UK and his 1990 verdict that ‘the Community Charge has much to commend it… opponents underestimate the political maturity of the electorate’.

NADINE DORRIES

After calling for David Davis to replace Theresa May, the normally fearless Nadine Dorries went into last week’s 1922 Committee showdown with the PM in fighting mood.

‘The PM writing today that the deal is 95% done is pure spin. A cynical attempt by Number 10 to hoodwink the public,’ she tweeted two days before the meeting. Even as May arrived to address backbenchers, Dorries told her Twitter followers that everything had been ‘rigged by the whips… It’s a PR farce’.

But since then, Dorries has gone oddly quiet on the subject of the PM’s removal. Why? The only clue is her tweet after May left the meeting: ‘The prime minister calls me ‘Naydeen’. The only other person I know who does that is my mum. She put on a sterling performance last night. Impressive and you could only be filled with respect for someone who in the face of adversity, did that.’ Just think – if David Cameron had said ‘Naydeen’ rather than ‘calm down, dear’, all this unpleasantness might have been avoided.

DANIEL HANNAN

In a cunning plan worthy of Baldrick, the ‘Brain of Brexit’ declared he would not take part in a People’s Vote and encouraged other Leavers to do the same. The Tory MEP told Al Jazeera’s UpFront programme: ‘I would not vote in it, because we’ve just had a referendum… we should not play that game.

‘We should just say, ‘no, we’ve already voted, we’re not having any more to do with it’.’

Cracking idea, Dan – how about our lot all turn up at the polling stations instead and let you know how it turns out?