Brexfactor: the 10 biggest loser Leavers this week

UKIP’s heritage and tourism spokesperson took to Twitter to expose a left-wing plot to outlaw people from eating bacon. ‘Bet the metropolitan museli munchers will try to ban such pleasures,’ she wrote – a bet The New European is willing to take – before adding ‘if the elite decide it is ‘insensitive’ Govt will make up shortfall by taxing the rest of us’.

Victoria’s previous claim to fame was a 2013 video in which she called for immigrants to be repatriated, saying, ‘I just want to send the lot back but I can’t say that.’

9) Iain Duncan Smith (RE-ENTRY)

Unless he’s cutting benefit down to the last penny, numerical detail is not IDS’ strong suit and so it proved when he popped up on the BBC’s Brexit: Britain’s Biggest Deal to ask: ‘What happens when those million car workers in Bavaria, whose jobs rely on British exports – that’s one million people who are in work because they sell a large number of cars to the UK – what happens when they start saying ‘hang on a second, are you saying that my job will go because you will refuse to have an arrangement with the United Kingdom because you think for political purposes that’s best?’

The answer is that a) they will probably be OK since 86% of the cars Germany makes aren’t sold in Britain and b) the actual number of car workers in Bavaria, according to the district’s own Invest In Bavaria website is 197,000 – over 80% less than IDS thinks it is.

8) Godfrey Bloom (DOWN THREE)

The former UKIP MEP and Nigel Farage flatmate has gone full Nuttall by blaming a press officer for the 2013 incident in which he said that British foreign aid was going to ‘Bongo Bongo Land’. Godders told his Twitter followers: ‘Gawain Towler UKIP press officer told me if I wanted to get national coverage of the aid scam I should use the Bongo word. I did, it did.’

Indeed it did, working so successfully for Bloom that it set in train a series of events which saw him suspended by the party a month later. He seems to have learned his lesson though, tweeting this week that we should only pay our EU contributions ‘if Jonny Foreigner behaves himself’ and telling another correspondent who talked about singing Camptown Races, ‘Lordy Lordy massa don you go do dat’.

7) Charles Moore (NEW ENTRY)

‘You often hear of people being ‘trapped in poverty’, but it is also possible to be trapped in wealth. This is David Cameron’s fate,’ wrote the former Telegraph editor last April. And, amazingly, it turns out not be the most ludicrous piece he’s turned in during the last 12 months.

That honour goes to an op-ed for the paper headlined ‘The Lord of the Rings is our Brexit guide – people need a home to come back to’, but which might as well have been titled Tolkein Bollocks. Comparing Leave voters with wee Hobbits yearning to return to the shire, Moore seemed to have missed one of the trilogy’s central themes – that squabbling groups of disparate races can only succeed if they band together.

6) Victoria Newton (RE-ENTRY)

Say what you like about the Sun On Sunday, but no-one can doubt that they’ve always had the economic viability of Poland’s third-largest city close to their hearts. And so it was again last Sunday, when editor Newton dispatched hacks Graeme Culliford and Jakub Krupa to Lodz, apparently ‘deserted’ when the SoS last visited in 2013 but now seemingly ‘bustling’ post-Brexit as the locals return from the UK.

As conclusive proof, the paper helpfully tweeted two photos taken then and now, one showing a 28 Days Later-style wasteland, the other a teeming ant farm of industrious Poles. Sure, the photos could easily have been taken at completely different times of the day/week to make a specific point if you were that way inclined, but who cares because Lodzit means Lodzit and Lodz is going to make the best of it!

The only sticky moment came when the paper asked three returnees why they’d left the UK. Rather than prejudice-confirming stuff about getting sick of rattling around in a dusty mansion given to them free by a Loony Left council, it turned out that two of them had been scared off by attacks on fellow Poles since the referendum. Maciej Bednarek told the SoS: ‘Britain had always been considered a sanctuary of normality and reason but over the summer I heard almost every day about a Polish man beaten up, assaulted or verbally abused, even for such things as speaking Polish in public. I thought that it was not a place where I would want to live.’

5) Lawrence Tomlinson (NEW ENTRY)

The Brexiteer owner of Ginetta Cars lit up Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC documentary Brexit: Britain’s Biggest Deal when he called the notion of Britain’s exit from the EU taking a 10 years ‘utter bollocks… World War II took just over five years’.

Yeah, why dilly-dally for a decade over delicate but peaceful negotiations when you can have a lethal and costly conflict in just half the time?

See also: Tim Martin, Brexiteer boss of Wetherspoons, the daytime drinking chain for people who dress like Mark E Smith. Having campaigned for Leave, Tim is calling for a special arrangement for Europeans to come into Britain to staff his pubs – if only there was some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement for workers…

4) Nigel Farage (RE-ENTRY)

Obsessed with sexual crime in Sweden… until the moment he entered the Ecuadoran embassy to talk to a man accused of a sexual crime in Sweden.

3) Robert Jackson (NEW ENTRY)

A steelworker with no sense of irony, the 50-year-old appeared in an Observer feature about online commenters, explaining that Britain will ‘fall apart’ under the weight of refugees and adding, ‘I really don’t care where they are from or which war they are fleeing’. Robert went on: ‘I had to pay thousands to get my wife here from Thailand. Her visa only lasts for six months and then she has to go back. And then we have to do the same thing all over again.’

See also: Michael Wrench, leader of Wyre Forest UKIP, who railed against uncontrolled immigration in his election address and is now stepping down from his role as a Kidderminster town councillor to emigrate to Thailand ‘for family reasons’.

2) Katie Hopkins (RE-ENTRY)

2:45pm last Friday: Katie Hopkins loses her libel case against The New European writer Jack Monroe and faces a legal bill of nearly £130,000 as a result.

3pm last Friday: MailOnline posts a Katie Hopkins column including the lines ‘I’d argue the tensions around Jo Cox’s death were not of the making of Islamic extremists, but by liberal extremists… I am not sure (Jo’s widower Brendan) is driven by grief alone. I think he is still a man with a political mission, determined to own hope and make white Brexiteers the custodians of hate.’

3.15pm last Friday: The realisation strikes you that £130,000 doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

1) David Davis (RE-ENTRY)

Boris Johnson might have called for belt-tightening Britain to spend £100m on a new royal yacht, Liam Fox might have appeared on TV denying he sent a Tweet while sitting under a giant screen grab of the Tweet in question, but there’s no doubt about which one of the Three Brexiteers had the worst week

The man they call DD made a giant tit of himself with a display of tetchy arrogance and incompetence in front of the Brexit select committee, including the memorable phrase: ‘You don’t need a piece of paper with numbers on it to have an economic assessment.’