The Brex Factor: UKIP lovers make a total hashtag of it

As the Gomez and Morticia of Brexit tour the chat show circuit, Henry has revealed what first attracted him was Jo’s ‘sagacity’ – never heard it called that before – while his lover has given their relationship the hashtag #Jolton.

She added that, as Bolton has admitted ‘fibbing’ that they had split, ‘maybe the public shouldn’t trust him but I certainly do.’ Words to remember once #Jolton goes the way of #Bennifer, #Brangelina and #TomKat.

9. BORIS JOHNSON

After EU sources claimed he had called Brexit negotiations ‘a mess’, friends of the foreign secretary told the Telegraph it was all ‘a smear and a hatchet job’.

Of course, few know more about EU smears, hatchet jobs and the Daily Telegraph than Boris Johnson. He was the paper’s Brussels correspondent between 1989 and 1994, when, said successor Martin Fletcher, ‘he seized every chance to mock or denigrate the EU, filing stories that were undoubtedly colourful but also grotesquely exaggerated or completely untrue.’

8. JAMES DYSON

Questions are being asked about Johnson’s closeness to the Brexity businessman after the foreign secretary secretary interrupted a discussion of the car industry at Chequers to rant about EU bans on some of Dyson’s vacuum cleaners. A colleague told The Sunday Times ‘he must be seeing James Dyson all the time. He quotes him the whole time.’

Dyson had to redesign much of his upright range, with the offending cleaners either too energy-hungry or too noisy to conform to new regulations. The EU estimates the changes will save energy equal to the annual residential electricity consumption of Belgium, while consumers will get lower bills. But what does all that matter to Boris when James Dyson is being inconvenienced?

7. LIAM HALLIGAN

The economist told Telegraph readers new immigration figures had been met with ‘claims that previously contented EU nationals are so upset by the intolerant racist nation we have become that they’re quitting Britain in their droves. The stop-Brexit crowd are whipping up as much angst as possible’.

In fact, since the figures showed not much more than a slowing down of net EU immigration, the only paper to get really excited by the story was the rabidly pro-Brexit Express, whose February 22 front page hailed an ‘Exodus Of The EU Migrants’.

Halligan also claimed that the drop in arrivals was partly down to potential EU migrants ‘reading the UK’s international business press, which has been extremely negative about Brexit’.

Yep, there’s no reading matter the famous Polish plumbers like better than the Financial Times and The Economist!

6. BEN BRADLEY

In December 2017, the Mansfield MP and self-confessed ‘reluctant Remainer turned strident Brexiteer’ wrote an article for hard-right website Brexit Central titled ‘Hold your nerve and don’t believe everything you read in the papers about Brexit’.

Presumably a much poorer Bradley is now working on the follow-up, to be called ‘Hold your nose and don’t believe everything you read on my Twitter feed about Jeremy Corbyn’.

5. LEO McKINSTRY

The Dalek of Brexit – so-called because his hysterical Daily Express columns can be read in the voice of Dr Who’s enemies and seem like a plausible BBC script – is becoming the Groundhog of Brexit.

McKinstry’s latest Express column, filed on February 26 attacks ‘the metropolitan elite’ – the fifth time he’s used that phrase in the last two months and the 85th overall.

But what’s striking is that it’s a column about how fond the metropolitan elite are of ‘immigration and diversity’, which he believes are ‘are at the heart of the destruction’ of British society.

In late February 2016 the writer warned that the ‘metropolitan elitists want to destroy… our national identity through mass immigration’ and in late February 2015 McKinstry wrote that the ‘metropolitan elite might like to prattle about the benefits of mass immigration but… (it) has been a catastrophe for our country.’

Leo, mate… maybe just have a nice holiday in late February next year?

4. KATE HOEY

Tweeted on February 23 that Tony Blair ‘should stop trying to use Northern Ireland’s special situation to stop Brexit. No-one has suggested sacrificing Belfast agreement’.

Well, no-one apart from the MP who said on February 19, ‘I think there is a need for a cold rational look at the Belfast agreement… Mandatory coalition is not sustainable in the long term… we need to face reality.’

That MP was, of course, Kate Hoey.

3. NIGEL FARAGE

‘I’ve never taken money from Russia,’ the Nicotine-Stained Man-Frog told an adoring audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Which suggests Nigel should get himself a better agent. He made 17 appearances on the Kremlin-funded Russia Today TV channel between December 2010 and March 2014 and recently told German newspaper Die Zeit that he continues to appear on the channel ‘two or three times a year’.

Indeed, RT claimed in 2013 that he ‘has been known far longer to the RT audience than most of the British electorate.’ And all without a single rouble in payment! No wonder he’s skint!

2. MICHAEL GOVE

Told a Telegraph podcast ‘as with soft boiled eggs, the division between hard and soft can be overstated. What we want is a perfectly timed Brexit to ensure that it is neither too hard nor too soft. In that sense a perfectly timed Brexit, if I can move from eggs to porridge, is a ‘Goldilocks Brexit.”

Surely Gove, so keen on British pupils reading British authors, should know that in Robert Southey’s original, Goldilocks was a vagrant thief who broke her neck while escaping. But then a ‘Broken-Neck Brexit’ doesn’t have quite the same ring about it…

1. frank field

The Labour Brexiteer was predictably quick to slate Jeremy Corbyn’s partial U-turn on the customs union, writing that the party were betraying their core constituency, who would ‘feel that yet again the political class has stuck two fingers up at them’.

With a breathtaking lack of awareness, Birkenhead MP Field issued this dire warning in The Sun, still the subject of a boycott on Merseyside because of its Hillsborough lies. How many of Field’s constituents will now feel that he betrayed and stuck two fingers up at them?